Social media has connected kids like never before, but what they get in likes and shares, they lose in real, meaningful engagement with their peers and classmates. Lunch hours are spent hunched over smartphones, and after-school time means less sports and more Snapchat.
The adverse effects of this excessive screen time have significantly impacted students’ social- emotional health. Forty-one percent of teens with the highest social media usage struggle with mental health issues, and between 2010 and 2020, anxiety among adolescents skyrocketed by 106 percent.
At Spokane Public Schools (SPS), educators and administrators are reversing the side effects of social media by re-connecting with students through school-based extracurricular activities. Through its transformative Engage IRL (Engage in Real Life) initiative, the district is encouraging kids to get off their devices and onto the pickleball court, into the swimming pool, and outside in the fresh air. With more than 300 clubs and sports to choose from, SPS students are happier, healthier, and less likely to reach for their smartphones.
An innovative approach to student engagement
Even before the pandemic, SPS saw levels of engagement plummet among the student population, especially in school attendance rates, due in part to an increase in mental health issues caused by social media. Rebuilding classroom connections in the era of phone-based childhoods would require district leaders to think big.
“The question was not ‘How do we get kids off their phones?’ but ‘How do we get them engaged with each other more often?’” said Ryan Lancaster, executive director of communications for SPS. “Our intent was to get every kid, every day, involved in something positive outside the school day and extend that community learning past the classroom.”
To meet the district’s goal of creating a caring and connected community, in 2022, school leaders formed a workgroup of parents, community members, coaches, and teachers to take inventory of current extracurriculars at all district schools and identify gaps in meeting students’ diverse interests and hobbies.
Engaging with students was a top priority for workgroup members. “The students were excited to be heard,” explained Nikki Otero Lockwood, SPS board president. “A lot of them wanted an art club. They wanted to play board games and learn to knit. No matter their interests, what they really wanted was to be at school and be connected to others.”
Working with community partners and LaunchNW, an Innovia Foundation initiative focused on helping every child feel a sense of belonging, SPS launched Engage IRL–an ambitious push to turn students’ ideas for fun and fulfillment into real-life, engaging activities.
Over the past two years, Engage IRL has been the catalyst for increasing access and opportunities for K-12 students to participate in clubs, sports, arts activities, and other community events. From the Math is Cool Club and creative writing classes to wrestling and advanced martial arts, kids can find a full range of activities to join through the Elite IRL website. In addition, five engagement navigators in the district help connect families and students to engagement opportunities through individual IRL Plans and work with local organizations to expand programming.
“All day, every day, our navigators are working to break down barriers and tackle challenges to make sure nothing gets in the way of what kids want to be involved in and engaged in,” said Stephanie Splater, executive director of athletics and activities for SPS. “For example, when we didn’t have a coach for one of the schools in our middle school football program, our navigators mobilized for really good candidates in a short amount of time just from their personal outreach.”
In only two years, student engagement in extracurriculars has nearly doubled. Furthermore, according to Lancaster, since the Engage IRL launch, SPS hasn’t experienced a day where it dipped below 90 percent attendance.
“That’s an outlier in the past few years for us, for sure, and we think it’s because kids want to be at school. They want to be engaged and be part of all the cool things we’re doing. We’ve had a really great start to the 2024-2025 school year, and Engage IRL has played a huge role.”
Engage IRL also helped SPS weather student blowback when the district launched a new cell phone policy this year. The policy prohibits cell phone use in elementary and middle school and limits it to lunch and periods between classes for high school students. Because students were already building personal connections with classmates and teachers through Engage IRL, many easily handled social media withdrawal.
Creating opportunities for all kids
Key to Engage IRL’s success was ensuring partnerships and programs were centered in equity, allowing every child to participate regardless of ability, financial or transportation constraints, or language barriers.
Establishing a no-cut policy in athletics by creating additional JV and C teams ensured kids with a passion for sports, but not college-level skills, continued to compete on the court or field. Partnering with Special Olympics also helped SPS build new unified sports programs that gave children with disabilities a chance to play. And engagement navigators are assisting English language learners and their families in finding activities that help them connect with kids in their new country.
For Otero Lockwood, getting her daughter with autism connected to clubs after years of struggling to find school activities has been life-changing.
“There are barriers to finding community for some kids,” she shared. “We know kids with disabilities are more likely to be underemployed as adults and not as connected to the community. This is something we have the power to do that will have a lasting impact on the children we serve.”
Through Engage IRL, SPS has redefined student engagement by expanding access and opportunity to 6,000 students across 58 schools. In just two short years, the district has seen attendance increase, student wellness improve, and dependence on smartphones diminish. By continuing to listen to the needs of students and rallying the community to partner on out-of-school activities, Spokane Public Schools is successfully fostering the face-to-face connections every child needs to thrive.
Sean Duke, Washington State School Directors’ Association
Sean Duke is the communications officer for the Washington State School Directors’ Association, where he has served for over six years.
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Earlier this month, my institution, Southern Methodist University, made headlines by hiring President Jay Hartzell away from the University of Texas at Austin, one of the country’s largest and most prestigious public universities. The move surprised many on both campuses and sent shock waves through higher education.
While I can’t presume to know all the motivations behind President Hartzell’s decision and I don’t speak for SMU, as a faculty member who studies higher education, I believe this moment demands our attention. Many public universities are under serious threat, and private universities need to realize that their future is closely tied to the success of their public counterparts.
For more than a decade, SMU has been my academic home. The campus boasts smart and curious students, dedicated faculty who care about teaching and research, and strong leadership from the administration and Board of Trustees. We’re in the middle of a successful capital campaign and enjoying both athletic success after our move to the Atlantic Coast Conference and a growing research profile.
Yet, even as I anticipate the leadership that President Hartzell will bring to SMU, I can’t ignore the broader context that has made such a move more common and deeply troubling.
Being a public university president in a red state is the toughest job in higher education today.
Public universities in these politically charged environments are under siege. They face relentless ideological attacks from state legislators and are constantly forced to navigate resource challenges from years of underfunding.
Politicians attacking public higher education are not simply questioning the budgets or management—they are attempting to dismantle these institutions. Efforts to reduce tenure protections, anti-DEI legislation and restrictions on what can be taught are all part of a broader effort to strip public universities of their autonomy.
The goal of these attacks is clear: to reduce the influence and authority of public universities and their leaders and undermine the critical role they play in shaping a well-informed and educated workforce and citizenry.
The cumulative effect of these efforts is to make public universities and their leaders less effective in advocating for their missions, students and faculty.
The Short-Term Advantages for Private Higher Ed
In the short term, these challenges facing public universities have opened opportunities for private institutions. With public universities bogged down in political and financial crises, private universities can poach top faculty and administrators, offering them better resources and less political interference.
I don’t fault private universities for capitalizing on these opportunities—they are acting in their own self-interest and in the interests of their own missions, students and faculty.
But I fear that this approach is shortsighted and ultimately damaging to the broader higher education community. At a time when trust in higher education is declining, when the value of a college degree is being questioned and when the public is increasingly disillusioned with the academy, it is vital that we don’t allow attacks on public institutions to further erode public faith in all of higher education.
Why Private Universities Must Stand Up for Public Higher Ed
Private universities are uniquely positioned to advocate for the broader value of higher education and the critical role public institutions play.
First, private universities can use their platforms to champion the ideals of higher education. With public universities under attack from state legislatures and special interest groups, private institutions can and should speak out against the politicization of higher education. Whether through research, advocacy or public statements, private universities can be powerful allies in the fight to protect the autonomy of public institutions.
Second, private universities can advocate for increased public investments in higher education. They can use their influence to urge policymakers to restore funding for public universities and reject anti–higher education policies. At a time of declining public support, private universities can push for policies that ensure all students, regardless of background, have access to high-quality postsecondary education to develop the skills to succeed in today’s economy.
Third, private universities can help bridge the divide between public and private higher education by forming partnerships with public two- and four-year institutions. These partnerships could include joint research initiatives, transfer and reciprocal enrollment programs, or shared resources to expand access and opportunity.
The Time for Action Is Now
In this critical moment for higher education, private universities need to demonstrate leadership—not just for their own interest, but for the interests of the entire industry. If we want to safeguard the unique contributions of both public and private higher education, we need to work together to ensure both sectors thrive.
Now is the time for all those who believe in the transformational power of higher education to stand up and take action. The future of higher education depends on it.
Michael S. Harris is a professor of higher education in the Simmons School of Education and Human Development at Southern Methodist University.
When 85,000 Cornhuskers all wear red on game day, it’s easy to think of college as something larger than students and professors, classes, research and extracurriculars. Berkeley, Penn State and Michigan each have hundreds of thousands of online followers. Tar Heel nation is, after all, a nation.
But wearing “college” on our chests does not a polity make. Higher education is not a public good and Americans know it.
In the plainest sense, public goods aren’t excludable. Think of the air we breathe, interstate freeways and national defense. Everyone is affected by carbon dioxide levels, can travel by open roads and is protected, equally, from foreign threats.
But when it comes to higher ed, exclusion is the name of the game.
Admissions offices reject most applicants from selective colleges and create barriers at others. Tuition, even when subsidized, deters those shocked by sticker prices or unable to pay. Courses are controlled by departments, yet some intellectual climates drive students away. Governance, when behind closed doors, excludes parents, students, employers and other stakeholders.
All told, the labyrinth of exclusionary practices makes higher ed more of a private than public good. We can interpret low public confidence in higher education as reflecting a belief that college is for someone else. Of those who matriculate, two-thirds of new community college students form the same opinion and drop out or enter a broken transfer system. One-third of new B.A. students will drop out or take more than six years to graduate. Once they’re gone, it’s often for good: Only 2.6 percent of stop-outs re-enrolled in the 2022–23 academic year. All told, this has led to a societal “diploma divide”: More people without a college degree voted for Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024 than in 2020.
Colleges and universities do need to reclaim a place of pride in American society. But instead of ambiguous calls “reaffirming higher education’s public purpose,” why not simply be more public? And deliver an education that is, well, more good?
My new book, Publicization: How Public and Private Interests Can Reinvent Education for the Common Good (Teachers College Press), argues that educational institutions of any sort—private nonprofit, state-controlled or proprietary—can be more publicly purposed when they meet two criteria. First, they must prepare each generation to sustain the common goods on which American life rests: a vibrant democracy, a productive economy, a civil society and a healthy planet. These are three long-standing aims and one new existential goal, around which colleges and universities can better organize the student experience.
Second, institutions must themselves operate in ways that are more public than private. To do so, Publicization offers an “Exclusion Test” applicable to six domains—funding, governance, goals, accountability, equity and an institution’s underlying educational philosophy. Colleges and universities can apply the test to these areas and identify where operations can be less exclusionary and therefore more public.
For example, do policies assume that some students aren’t “college ready,” or do we meet everyone—particularly those impacted by COVID-19—where they are? To what extent do applications create formal and informal hurdles, or do we offer more streamlined direct admission? Are inequitable proxies like Advanced Placement Calculus blocking talented students from admission, or does coursework in more widely relevant areas like statistics matter equally? Are free college plans riddled with eligibility fine print or open to anyone?
Are courses gated by size, section, time of day and instructor approval, or are they more accessible? Are we mostly catering to young adults or presenting real options for the almost 37 million Americans with some college but no degree? Is federal funding considered a necessary evil, or is Washington engaged as a key stakeholder? Do boards focus narrowly on institutional issues or see themselves as hinges between school and society, mediating higher ed’s role in a democracy? Do we tolerate every private belief or hold ourselves to an epistemology premised on shared evidence and public scrutiny, what Jonathan Rauch calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”?
As for an experience that’s good, higher ed’s 15-year-old success agenda focuses on access, affordability and student support. These aren’t enough. Quality must join the list, with a particular focus on our technical core: teaching and learning.
Ask any of the nation’s 1.5 million professors and most will tell you they were not taught how to teach. They are world-class scholars. They serve their institutions. They are committed to students. But hardly any received comprehensive training in effective instruction. This persists despite the fact that most Americans believe the best colleges have the best teaching and evidence that effective instruction leads to more positive mindsets about one’s academic abilities, deeper learning, stronger retention and life readiness.
But change is afoot. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine soon plan to publish STEM teaching standards, a first. Groups like the Equity-Based Teaching Collective have identified policies and practices to promote effective teaching campuswide. Over the past 10 years, the Association of College and University Educators, which I co-founded, has credentialed 42,000 professors in effective teaching at 500 institutions nationwide with proof of positive student impact. Last June’s second National Higher Education Teaching Conference gathered hundreds of higher education leaders and professors to accelerate the teaching excellence movement.
College as a “public good”? Let’s give the public what it wants and deserves: a good education. In which the “best” colleges aren’t, by definition, the most exclusive. So that at family gatherings, our students tell their voting, poll-taking relatives how much they are learning, how great their professors are and how college is for them.
Jonathan Gyurko teaches politics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His new book, Publicization: How Public and Private Interests Can Reinvent Education for the Common Good, was published by Teachers College Press last March.
RANDOLPH, Vt. — The thermostat was turned low in the admissions office at Vermont State University on a cold winter morning.
It’s “one of our efficiencies,” quipped David Bergh, the institution’s president, who works in the same building.
Bergh was joking. But he was referring to something decidedly serious: the public university system’s struggle to reduce a deficit so deep, it threatened to permanently shutter several campuses after dramatic drop-offs in enrollment and revenue.
While much attention has been focused on how enrollment declines are putting private, nonprofit colleges out of business at an accelerating rate — at least 17 of them in 2024 — public universities and colleges are facing their own existential crises.
State institutions nationwide are being merged and campuses shut down, many of them in places where there is already comparatively little access to higher education.
David Bergh, president of the newly consolidated Vermont State University, in the building where he works at the VTSU campus in Randolph. “Public institutions are not exempt from the challenges” facing higher education, Bergh says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
“Public institutions are not exempt from the challenges” facing higher education, Bergh said. “We are already seeing it, and we’re going to see more of it, and it’s particularly acute in some more rural states, where there’s a real need to balance limited resources but maintain access for students.”
Vermont is a case study for this, and an example of how political and other realities make it so hard for public universities and colleges to adapt to the problems confronting them.
“The demographics of fewer traditional-age college students, the over-building of these campuses, the change in the demand for what we need for our workforce in terms of programs — this is something that’s happening everywhere,” said Vermont State Rep. Lynn Dickinson, who chairs the Vermont State Colleges System Board of Trustees.
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Public university and college mergers have already happened in Pennsylvania, Georgia, California and Minnesota, and public campuses have closed in Ohio and Wisconsin. A merger of public universities and community colleges in New Hampshire is under study.
When state university and college campuses close, the repercussions for communities around them can be dire.
Until this month, local students had a college “in their backyard,” said Thomas Nelson, county executive in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, where the two-year Fox Cities outpost of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh this spring will become the sixth public campus in that state to be shuttered since 2023, after a long enrollment slide. “We’ve had this institution for 60 years in our community, and now it’s gone.”
Not only students are affected. In many rural counties, “there really isn’t a lot beyond the university,” Nelson said. “So that’s going to be devastating for the economy. It’s going to kill jobs. It’s going to be one more strike against them when they are competing with other communities with more amenities.”
Attempts to close these campuses attract the intervention of politicians, who have more control over whether public than private nonprofit colleges in their districts close. After all, “they own the place,” said Dan Greenstein, former chancellor of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, who — after that state’s enrollment fell by nearly one-fifth — led a reconfiguration that resulted in six previously separate public universities there being merged into two systems.
Even trying to rename a public university can have political consequences. When Augusta State University in Georgia was combined with Georgia Health Sciences University to become Georgia Regents University, there was a local outcry over the fact that “Augusta” was no longer in the name. Within two years, the merged school had yet another new name: Augusta University.
“Public institutions are complex structures,” said Ricardo Azziz, who led that consolidation, served as president of the resulting institution and now heads the Center for Higher Education Mergers and Acquisitions at the Foundation for Research and Education Excellence. “They’re influenced by politics. They’re influenced by elected officials.”
When the proposal to close campuses in Vermont was met with public and political resistance, state planners backed down and decided instead to merge them, laying off staff and cutting programs. That did not go well, either, and resulted in raucous public meetings, votes of “no confidence,” plans that were announced and then rescinded and a revolving door of presidents and chancellors. Only now, in its second year, has the process gotten smoother.
Alarm bells started sounding about problems in Vermont’s state universities before the Covid-19 pandemic. With the nation’s third-oldest median age, after Maine and New Hampshire, according to the Census Bureau, the state had already seen its number of young people graduating from high school fall by 25 percent over the previous decade.
Enrollment at the public four-year and community college campuses — not including the flagship University of Vermont, which is separate — was down by more than 11 percent. A fifth of the rooms in the dorms were empty. And with the birthrate in the state lower than it was before the Civil War, there was no rebound in sight.
These trends have contributed to the closings of six of Vermont’s in-person undergraduate private, nonprofit colleges and universities since 2016.
“We’d be keeping our head in the sand if we didn’t think that those same forces were going to affect our public higher education system,” said Jeb Spaulding, who, as chancellor at the time, merged two of Vermont’s five state colleges, in Johnson and Lyndon, in 2018.
The red ink continued to flow. Two years later, just after Covid hit, Spaulding recommended that three of the five public campuses be shut down altogether — Johnson and Lyndon, plus Vermont Technical College in Randolph.
“What we needed to do was save the Vermont State Colleges System as a whole,” which has 145 buildings for fewer than 5,000 students, Spaulding recalled. That same problem of excess capacity is affecting higher education nationwide.
“It was well known that we had too much bricks and mortar for the number of traditional-type students that were going to be available in Vermont,” Spaulding said. “We saw all that coming, and we had started a process of educating people and working on what would be a realistic public-sector consolidation plan so that we could actually put our resources into having a smaller constellation, but well financed and up to date.”
The reaction to the plan was explosive, even in the midst of a pandemic. At socially distanced drive-by protests, critics brandished signs that said: “Start Saving: Fire Jeb.” Within four days, the proposal to close campuses was withdrawn. A week after that, Spaulding resigned.
“I guess I didn’t realize that in the public realm, you can’t make the kind of difficult decisions that if you were at a private institution you would have to make,” he recounted. “When the politics got involved, then it became clear to me that there was no way that I was going to be able to get that through.”
Instead of closing the campuses, the state decided to combine them with the other two, in Castleton and Williston, all under one umbrella renamed Vermont State University, or VTSU. In exchange, the blended institutions would be required to cut spending to help reduce a deficit estimated at the time to be about $22 million.
That decision was almost as contentious. As in Georgia, even the name was controversial. Alumni petitioned in vain for the new system to be called Castleton University instead of Vermont State, to preserve the legacy of the state’s oldest and the nation’s 18th-longest-operating higher education institution, founded in 1787, instead of demoting it to “Castleton Campus.”
Beth Mauch, who as chancellor has overseen VTSU and Vermont’s community college campuses since January, said she gets this kind of sentiment. “There are community members who have had these institutions in their community. There are folks who are alumni of these institutions who remember them in a certain way,” said Mauch. “Really, they are in the fabric of a community.”
Beth Mauch, chancellor of the Vermont State University system and the state’s community college campuses. “Really, they are in the fabric of a community,” Mauch says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
That close relationship between the universities and their communities only resulted in additional friction when 23 full-time faculty positions were cut, out of the then-existing 208. So were an equal number of administrators and staff. Not only were there more beds and buildings than were needed for the number of students, there were too many faculty compared to other comparably sized universities, a planning document said.
Neighbors of the campuses, and their elected representatives, didn’t see it that way.
“The people that work at the colleges are local. Everyone knows people that work at these colleges,” said Billie Neathawk, a librarian at what was formerly Castleton University for more than 25 years, and a union officer. “They’re related to people. Especially in a small state like Vermont, everybody knows everybody.”
The layoffs went through anyway. There were also cuts to majors. Ten academic programs were eliminated, 10 others changed locations and still others were consolidated. That meant students at any campus could take the remaining courses in a format combining in-person and online instruction that the system dubbed “In-Person Plus.”
Lilly Hudson is a junior at Vermont State University, whose consolidation means some programs are being offered online. Hudson prefers learning in a classroom but liked being able to take a class online from another campus that wasn’t available on hers. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
Lilly Hudson, a junior at Castleton, said she prefers learning in a classroom. “It’s just such a difference to be able to see people and meet your professors and go in person,” said Hudson, who is majoring in early education. But she was also able to take a class online from another campus that wasn’t available on hers.
That can be an underappreciated upside to mergers, said Greenstein, now managing director of higher education practice at the consulting firm Baker Tilly. “You can only run as many programs, majors and minors as you can enroll students into,” he said. But by merging institutions and letting students take courses from other campuses online, “now they can go from 20 programs to 80 or 90.”
While that seemed a step forward, the consolidated university’s inaugural president, Parwinder Grewal, next announced that, to cut costs, its libraries would go all-digital and give away their books, the Randolph campus would no longer field intercollegiate sports teams, and athletics on the Johnson campus would move from the NCAA to the less prestigious U.S. Collegiate Athletic Association.
This proved another blunder in a state so fond of its libraries that it has the nation’s highest per-capita number of library visits, and where rural communities rally around even Division 3 athletics. Faculty and staff unions and student government associations on every campus voted “no confidence” in the university’s administration. Athletes transferred away. Grewal was loudly booed when he met with students.
“There was a hot streak there where, every email, we were, like, now what’s going on?” said Raymonda Parchment, a student who was halfway toward her bachelor’s degree at the time.
Raymonda Parchment, who just graduated from Vermont State University, is grateful that a plan to close some public campuses was reversed. “If you can’t afford to go out of state for college, and you can’t afford to pay for maybe a dorm for a couple of years, where does that leave you if there’s no school within commuting distance?” she asks. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
The library and athletics decisions were eventually reversed, too, and Grewal was out before he’d served a full year. But the damage was done. When the new university finally debuted, at the start of the 2023-24 school year, freshman enrollment was down by about 14 percent from what it had been at the separate campuses the year before.
“I know a lot of friends whose programs were consolidated and shuffled around,” said Parchment, in an otherwise empty study room on the snow-covered Johnson campus. “That was probably the biggest change for students that had direct impact on them. Some people’s programs don’t exist anymore. Some people’s programs have been moved to a different campus.”
Vermont is still working out the kinks, said Bergh, the system’s current president, who was the president of private, nonprofit Cazenovia College in New York when it closed in 2023.
Although first-year enrollment went up about 14 percent this fall, he said, “We’re still surfacing places where our systems aren’t talking to each other as well as they should be, and that we need to correct.”
Parchment likes that it’s easier now to move from one campus in the system to another, without having to go through the red tape of the transfer process. She graduated at the end of the fall semester after moving from Castleton to Johnson to be closer to an internship.
And no campuses were ultimately closed, as had been proposed — a relief to students, prospective students and community members, Parchment said. “Because if you can’t afford to go out of state for college, and you can’t afford to pay for maybe a dorm for a couple of years, where does that leave you if there’s no school within commuting distance?”
Hudson, the Castleton student, whose father is a sixth-generation farrier — a specialist in trimming, cleaning and shoeing horses’ hooves — agreed.
The campuses are “in the middle of an area where there’s a lot of rural towns,” she said. Keeping them in operation means that students nearby who want to go to college “don’t have to pick up their lives and move.”
But Spaulding, the former chancellor, warned that public higher education budget and enrollment problems aren’t likely to subside, in Vermont or many other states.
“I don’t think the storm is over by any stretch of the imagination.”
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The cost of college has been a hot topic for a while now, and even though some studies suggest the net cost of college has been falling post-COVID, it’s clear that sticker prices have not been.
And because the overwhelming majority of college and university students in the US attend public institutions, that’s a good place to start the discussion.
This is data from IPEDS, showing published cost about 530 public, four-year institutions that award the bachelor’s degree, excluding community colleges that have been creeping into that category over time. Each dot represents an institution, and the data are from 2009, 2016, and 2023 to show long-term trends. The dots are colored by geographic region.
The data are displayed four ways, from left to right and default to published Tuition and Fees: Resident, Nonresident, the premium nonresidents pay (in dollars), and the premium not residents pay (as a percentage of what residents pay.) You can change this to show just tuition or just fees by using the control at the top right.
You can also filter to a single state, if you wish, to get a sense of how that state things about tuition.
The green-shaded Highlight boxes at right will allow you to make either one institution, one region, or one state standout, without filtering the other data.
The data are displayed in a box-and-whisker format: The shaded boxes cover the middle 50% of the range, with the dividing line the 50th percentile. The rest of the data are mostly contained within the boundary created by the top bar and bottom bar, with outliers being shown above or below it. These are not enrollment weighted.
As always, I happy to hear what you got out of this. Leave a comment below or send me an email.
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program can offer significant financial relief to higher ed employees, but many don’t know they qualify for this benefit. PSLF is open to most full-time higher ed employees of nonprofit colleges and universities who have direct federal student loans.
HR can spread the word to current employees and use loan forgiveness as part of a retention and recruitment strategy. The average amount of individual loan forgiveness under the PSLF is $70,000, which makes the PSLF an especially attractive benefit to potential employees.
Here’s what you need to know about who qualifies for PSLF, how to offer a free webinar on PSLF to your employees, and what steps you can take to ensure eligible employees enroll.
What is PSLF?
Public Service Loan Forgiveness forgives the balance of direct federal student loans after 120 qualifying payments made by the borrower if they work for a qualifying employer (after October 1, 2007) and are under a qualifying repayment plan. It’s intended to reward and incentivize public service, like teaching, nonprofit work and work in the public sector. PSLF eligibility isn’t about what job an employee does or what their job description is; it’s about where they work.
Who qualifies for PSLF?
Full-time employees of a nonprofit organization or a federal, state, tribal, or local government are eligible. Full-time work is defined as 30 hours or more per week. That means most full-time higher ed employees are eligible for PSLF, including those who may work part time at your institution but are also employed at other qualifying jobs (as is the case with many adjuncts). But the PSLF only applies to direct federal student loans. Borrowers with other federal student loans may be able to consolidate them into a direct federal student loan.
How do I ensure my institution counts as an eligible employer?
Use the PSLF Help Tool, which will search the federal employer database. The help tool is also useful to recommend to employees since it’s a step-by-step guide through the enrollment process.
Encourage HR staff to apply for PSLF. With firsthand experience, you and your team will be able to speak knowledgeably about the process.
Publicize PSLF as a benefit to your employees, especially those who may not know they can take advantage of this program, including adjuncts and non-exempt and part-time employees.
Include information about PSLF on your benefits websites or portal.
Consider appointing a knowledgeable point person on campus, like a financial aid officer, to help answer employee questions.
Involve non-exempt, adjunct and part-time employees in outreach campaigns. Employees can meet the 30 hours per week requirement with more than one job. So if they have multiple jobs at multiple qualifying employers, employees can add those hours up. And the PSLF instructions include how to calculate hours worked by adjunct faculty. Payments do not need to be consecutive, so even adjuncts without summer appointments can still take advantage of PSLF and start to chip away at the 120 payments.
Mariana Padilla, a long-time New Mexico educator and close confidant of Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, has been named the state’s new Public Education Secretary.
Padilla has served as the Director of the New Mexico Children’s Cabinet since the start of the Lujan Grisham administration. Before that, she served as the congresswoman Lujan Grisham’s state director for six years.
She replaces Arsenio Romero, who served as secretary for 18 months before resigning in August when he was named a finalist for the presidency of New Mexico State University.
A native of Albuqueruque’s South Valley, Padilla began her career as an elementary school teacher in Albuquerque Public Schools. She later earned dual master’s degrees in community and regional planning and water resources from the University of New Mexico.
“I am incredibly honored to be appointed by Gov. Lujan Grisham to lead the New Mexico Public Education Department,” Padilla said in a press release. “My career has been focused on serving the communities and families of our state. I am committed to working collaboratively with students, families, educators, and community partners to achieve the outcomes we all want to see. As a parent of grade school students, I share the sense of urgency to deliver for our kids.”
A while ago, I made the claim that Oregon State University has the longest streak of consecutive years of fall-over-fall enrollment growth of any public, Research 1 university in America. A few people have asked me, not exactly doubting the claim, but thinking maybe I had made a mistake, for the source of it.
This started as a curiosity: I knew from our own internal documentation that the last time OSU (the oldest OSU…not the one in Ohio or Oklahoma) had a fall-to-fall enrollment drop was 1996, and I was curious to see if any other institution could make that claim. So I went to the IPEDS Data Center and downloaded the data.
It’s below. First, a few points: My comparison group is 108 Public, four-year, Research 1 Universities as designated by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education as of Fall, 2022, the latest IPEDS data available. The R1 designation is actually called “Doctoral Institutions: Very High Research Activity” but the nickname R1 is a holdover from prior years. The category contains those institutions who produce the highest research activity and output among American universities.
What you can’t see here is that 2023 showed an increase (it’s not yet in IPEDS, but trust me), and that 2024 will also show an increase once our census is final. So OSU’s record is the 26 shown, plus last year, plus this coming year, for a total of 28 years.
There are a couple of small anomalies with the data, as there always seems to be. First, some institutions missed a year or two in their reporting. Even if those years had shown an increase, they were already nullified by other decreases. And Penn State has bounced around from being one institution to being several to being one again; this too does not seem to make a difference in the tally.
The first chart here shows all years and all institutions (you’ll have to scroll down to see them all using the bar on the right.) You’ll notice that every institution shown (other than OSU) has at least two years with a blue box after 1997, meaning a decrease. Hover over the box for details. Orange shows an increase from the prior year.
The second chart shows individual enrollment data for any institution you select, using the filter at the top. The bars are colored similarly: Orange for increase, and blue for decrease.
If I’ve missed something or you think these data points are wrong, let me know. If a university decided intentionally to shrink, for whatever reason, that’s interesting, but not the point of this visualization. If you want to look at just graduates or undergraduates or men or women or students of color or some other variable, I encourage you to read my posts here and here about how to download IPEDS data for yourself.
And as always, leave a comment below if you find something interesting.
Good news: We have new IPEDS data on average net cost. Bad news: Because IPEDS is IPEDS, it’s data from the 2021-22 Academic Year.
This is pretty straightforward: Each dot represents a public institution, colored by region, showing the average net price for first-year students entering in that year. IPEDS breaks out average net price by income bands, so you can see what a family with income of $30,000 to $48,000 pays, for instance, by using the filters at right.
You can also limit the institutions displayed by using the top three filters: Doctoral institutions in the Far West, or in Illinois, for instance. If you want to see a specific institution highlighted, use that control. Just type part of the name of the institution, like this example, and make your selection:
Average net price shows The Total Cost of Attendance (COA), which includes tuition, room, board, books, transportation, and personal expenses, minus all grant aid. It does not include loans, but of course, loans can be used to cover part of the net price, along with other family resources.
This display is a box and whisker chart, and if you’re not familiar with the format, here is a quick primer:
For the sticklers, the median shown is unweighted.
As always, let me know what you see here that you find interesting or surprising.
