First-year students often experience isolation, uncertainty, and identity formation. Groypers prey on this transitional moment by offering belonging, brotherhood, and contrarian confidence.
2. Political Vacuum As universities retreat from serious civic education and as student affairs offices shrink under austerity, space opens for fringe networks to fill the ideological void.
3. Online Radicalization Pipelines Groypers thrive in places like:
Campus life becomes an extension of these networks, where online provocations evolve into real-world harassment or orchestrated spectacle.
4. Conservative Student Groups as Entry Points Mainstream Republican or “free speech” groups are often targeted for infiltration. Groypers show up: to push Q&A sessions into racist or antisemitic talking points, to pressure student Republicans to shift further right, to create rifts between libertarian, traditional conservative, and MAGA factions.
The strategy is division, not dialogue.
Common Groyper Tactics on Campus 1. Ambush Questioning At public lectures or campus Republican events, Groypers coordinate to dominate Q&A sessions, posing racially charged or conspiratorial questions designed to go viral.
2. Online Harassment and Dogpiling Students—often women, LGBTQ+ students, or activists—find themselves targeted with:
brigade attacks, doxxing attempts, edited clips taken out of context, swarm-like intimidation.
3. Misery Farming Groypers intentionally provoke negative reactions to harvest “proof” that campuses are hostile to conservatives. This content is then fed into national media pipelines.
4. Grooming and Recruitment They seek out students who feel: lonely unsupported resentful ideologically adrift economically anxious
A mix of dark humor, contrarian bravado, and “insider knowledge” becomes the grooming pathway.
The Institutional Problem: Campuses Are Not Prepared Universities often misread these actors as: “just trolls,” “rowdy conservatives,” “free speech activists.”
They’re not.
Groypers are engaged in ideological recruitment and targeted harassment that can escalate into threats, coordinated disruption, and offline violence. Yet institutions remain slow to respond because: they lack digital literacy, they fear backlash from right-wing media, they outsource security and student affairs to PR firms, administrators underestimate decentralized extremist networks.
Faculty—especially contingent or early-career academics—often feel unsupported or intimidated.
How Groypers Fit into the Larger Campus Crisis The Groypers’ rise exposes deeper fractures: neoliberal hollowing of the university growing distrust in democratic institutions political polarization fueled by billionaire-backed media the decline of genuine civic education surveillance capitalism and algorithmic radicalization
Campuses have become battlegrounds—not by accident, but because they sit at the intersection of youth, identity, technology, and national politics.
What Higher Education Must Do Now Universities need to respond with clarity, not panic, and with structural solutions, not symbolic statements.
1. Treat Digital Extremism as Part of Student Safety This means training staff, hiring specialists, and supporting targets of online harassment.
2. Reinvest in Human Infrastructure Student Affairs, counseling centers, and campus journalism must be strengthened—not cut or replaced with outsourcing contracts.
3. Support Independent Investigative Student Journalism Student reporters are often the first to detect radicalization trends—but only if their newsrooms are funded and protected.
4. Protect Academic Freedom Without Ceding Ground to Harassment “Free speech” cannot be a shield for sustained intimidation campaigns.
5. Strengthen Civic Education Rooted in Truth and Inclusion The real antidote to extremism is not censorship—it’s meaningful democratic literacy.
Seeing the Threat Clearly Groypers are not the dominant force on campus. Most students reject their worldview. But they are a growing presence within a broader crisis where U.S. higher education lacks the stability, funding, and courage to defend its mission.
The real danger is not the meme or the mascot—it’s the vacuum that allows extremist networks to flourish.
The Higher Education Inquirer will continue monitoring this issue as the 2026 and 2028 election cycles approach, when radical groups often intensify campus recruitment and provocation.
School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here.
Larry Bushart Jr. was just freed from a Tennessee jail cell after spending more than a month behind bars — for a Facebook post.
The high-profile arrest of the 61-year-old retiree and former cop — which made waves in free speech circles — has all the hallmarks of a bingeworthy culture war clash in 2025:
A chronically online progressive turns to Facebook to troll his MAGA neighbors about President Donald Trump’s seemingly lopsided response to school shootings compared to the murder of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk
An elected, overzealous county sheriff intent on shutting him up
A debate over the limits of the First Amendment — and the president’s broader efforts to silence his critics
Eamonn Fitzmaurice / T74
The controversy, I report this morning, also calls attention to a series of recent Tennessee laws that carry harsh punishments for making school shooting threats and place police officers on campus threat assessment teams working to ferret out students with violent plans before anyone gets hurt.
In Bushart’s case, the sheriff maintained that his post referring to the president’s reaction to a 2024 school shooting in Perry, Iowa, constituted a threat “of mass violence at a school,” apparently the local Perry County High School. The rules that ensnared Bushart have also led to a wave of student arrests and several free speech lawsuits. His is likely to be next, Bushart’s lawyer told The Washington Post.
In the news
Updates in Trump’s immigration crackdown: Federal immigration officers chased a Chicago teacher into the lobby of a private preschool Wednesday and dragged her out as parents watched her cry “tengo papeles!” or “I have papers.” The incident is perhaps the most significant immigration enforcement act in a school to date. | The 74
Proposed federal rules would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to collect iris scans, fingerprints and other biometric data on all immigrants — including, for the first time, children under 14 years old — and store it for the duration of each individual person’s “lifecycle.” | Ars Technica
On the same day Cornell University notified an international student that his immigration status had been revoked, Google alerted him that federal authorities had subpoenaed his personal emails. Now, the institution won’t say whether federal authorities had tapped into university “emails to track [students] as well.” | The Cornell Daily Sun
In California, federal immigration officers shot a U.S. citizen from behind as he warned the agents that students would soon gather in the area to catch a school bus. The government says the shots were “defensive.” | Los Angeles Times
‘Deportation isn’t a costume’: A Maine middle school principal is facing pushback for a federal immigration officer Halloween costume, complete with a bulletproof vest that read “ICE.” | Boston.com
In Chicago communities that have seen the most significant increase in immigration enforcement, school enrollment has plunged. | Chalkbeat
Also in Chicago, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to hand over use-of-force records and body camera footage after trick-or-treaters were “tear-gassed on their way to celebrate Halloween.” | USA Today
A bipartisan bill seeks to bar minors from using AI chatbots as petrified parents testified their children used the tools with dire consequences — including suicide. Some warn the change could stifle the potential of chatbots for career or mental health counseling services. | Education Week
A Kentucky mom filed a federal lawsuit against online gaming communities Discord and Roblox alleging the companies jeopardized children’s safety in the name of profit. After her 13-year-old daughter died by suicide last year, the mom said, she found the girl had a second life online that idolized school shooters. | 404 Media
Character.AI announced it will bar minors from its chatbots, acknowledging safety concerns about how “teens do, and should, interact with this new technology.” | BBC
Getty Images
A jury awarded $10 million to former Virginia teacher Abby Zwerner on Thursday, two years after she was shot by her 6-year-old student. Zwerner accused her former assistant principal of ignoring repeated warnings that the first grader had a gun. The student’s mother was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for felony child neglect and federal weapons charges. | The New York Times
‘Creepy, unsettling’: This family spent a week with Grem, a stuffed animal with artificial intelligence designed to “learn” children’ s personalities and hold educational conversations. | The Guardian
A judge ordered the Trump administration to release federal funds to California school districts after it sought to revoke nearly $165 million in mental health grants as part of a broader crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion. The grants funded hundreds of school social workers and counselors. | EdSource
In 95% of schools, active-shooter drills are now a routine part of campus life. Here’s how states are trying to make them less traumatic. | The Trace
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A lawsuit against a Pennsylvania school district alleges educators failed to keep students safe after a 12-year-old girl was attacked by a classmate with a metal Stanley drinking cup. | NBC10
‘Inviting government overreach and abuse’: The Education Department was slapped with two lawsuits over new Public Service Loan Forgiveness rules that could bar student borrowers from the program who end up working for the president’s political opponents, including organizations that serve immigrant students and LGBTQ+ youth. | The Washington Post
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1939 redlined maps of Los Angeles showing neighborhoods deemed eligible and ineligible for economic aid
New York City’s troubled yellow school bus system is in the spotlight once again, with threats of a service disruption and looming mass layoffs due to a contract dispute with the city.
The city’s largest school bus companies notified the state Department of Labor that they are preparing to shut down operations and lay off employees on Nov. 1 if they don’t receive a contract extension, the New York Post first reported Monday.
Lawmakers, advocates, and city officials immediately condemned the bus companies’ threat, with schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos calling the move “deeply upsetting and an act of bad faith.”
The timing of the bus company’s push, just before November’s mayoral election, for a five-year extension that would outlast the incoming mayor’s first term, “effectively bypassed the oversight of voters and elected officials who manage these vital services,” Aviles-Ramos said.
Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani agreed, telling reporters at an unrelated Tuesday press conference that the oversight panel in charge of approving the contract “is right to not give in to the threats.”
The bus companies argue they have no choice because their temporary contract is expiring and they can no longer operate without a longer-term agreement.
The episode is the latest in a long history of conflicts over how to manage the sprawling yellow bus system, which relies on a patchwork of largely for-profit companies to ferry some 150,000 students across nearly 19,000 routes each day. All told, the city spent nearly $2 billion on school busing last year.
“There’s this tug of war over the money,” said Sara Catalinotto, the executive director of the advocacy group Parents for Improving School Transportation. “But this is a service, and without it these kids are discriminated against.”
What’s the history behind these bus contracts?
The current dispute springs from a disagreement over how to handle the city’s “legacy” school bus contracts, which date back to the 1970s and are typically renewed every five years. They most recently expired in June.
In the months before the contracts expired, city Education Department officials signaled they were interested in rebidding the contracts, or soliciting offers from a new set of companies to more efficiently modernize buses, increase service, and strengthen sanctions for contract violations.
Simply renewing the existing contracts gives the city “far less negotiating ability … because we have to continue with this same set of vendors,” Emma Vadehra, the Education Department’s former deputy chancellor, told the City Council in May.
But city officials say they can’t move forward with rebidding without the option to offer something called the “Employee Protection Provision,” or EPP.
That protection — built into the legacy contracts for decades — ensures unionized bus workers laid off by one company are prioritized for hiring by other companies, at their existing wages. Drivers and union officials consider the provision a dealbreaker — and would almost certainly strike without it.
But city officials say a 2011 state court decision prohibits them from inserting EPP into new contracts if they rebid — and only allows them to keep EPP if they extend existing contracts. The only fix, city officials say, is changing state law — an effort that has so far stalled in Albany.
Without that state legislation, city officials faced a choice: inking another five-year extension or pushing for a shorter-term contract in the hopes state lawmakers quickly clear the way for a rebid.
Who is opposed to a five-year contract renewal?
While the city moved ahead with negotiations for a five-year extension, a growing number of advocates, parents, and lawmakers flooded meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP — the body that approves Education Department contracts — to push for a shorter-term contract.
“Do not vote yes to extend for some long period of time,” said Christi Angel, a parent leader in District 75, which serves students with significant disabilities who disproportionately rely on busing, at the September PEP meeting. Roughly 43% of students who ride school buses have disabilities. “Don’t reward bad behavior,” Angel said. “This is a broken system.”
Their arguments quickly gained traction in the PEP, where multiple members expressed their opposition to a five-year extension at September’s meeting.
The panel is expected to vote on the five-year extension next month, after the mayoral election, said PEP Chair Greg Faulkner, though he would prefer to wait until the new mayor takes office in January.
“Shouldn’t the mayor-elect have some say in a billion dollar contract?” said Faulkner. “I just think that’s sound governance.”
Why are the city and bus companies at odds right now?
Over the summer, the city and bus companies agreed to two emergency extensions to keep service running, the second of which expires on Oct. 31.
Without a guarantee of an active contract after that date — since the PEP is not voting this month — the bus companies claim they have no choice but to consider layoffs.
The city, however, had “long planned” to offer an emergency extension for November and December, and officials delivered the agreement to the bus companies on Monday, Aviles-Ramos said.
The PEP only votes on those extensions after they’ve already taken effect, Faulkner noted.
The bus companies, he said, are attempting to “create confusion in order to hold us hostage for a longer term agreement.”
The bus companies reject that assertion and say they simply cannot survive any longer on emergency extensions, which don’t allow them the kind of long-term certainty they need to operate their businesses.
“Banks will not finance 30-day extensions, buses can’t be bought, payroll cannot be paid,” said Sean Crowley, a lawyer representing several companies. “Enough is enough!”
The companies claim that they have already worked out the contours of a new five-year contract extension with the city and are just awaiting the PEP’s approval, though Faulkner said the Education Department hasn’t yet presented the PEP with the contract.
What happens from here?
A spokesperson confirmed that several bus companies had received the city’s offer for another emergency contract extension and were reviewing the documents.
Aviles-Ramos said the city is working to get “alternative transportation services” in place if that falls through.
But even if the bus companies and city do manage to avoid a service shutdown Nov. 1, the episode raises larger questions about how to make lasting improvements in the troubled system. Ongoing driver shortages make that task even harder.
The bus companies argue that the five-year contract agreement they sketched out with the city would achieve many of those goals, including stricter accountability to ensure drivers use GPS tracking, more staffing to field parent complaints, and monetary penalties for companies that underperform, according to testimony submitted to the PEP in September.
But critics continue to push for a shorter-term extension to give the state legislature time to pass EPP legislation, and clear the way for a rebid.
Mamdani has not offered specifics about how he would manage the school bus system, but said Tuesday that given the many concerns about yellow bus service, any contract extension deserves a “hard look.”
Matt Berlin, the CEO of that nonprofit, called NYCSBUS, and former director of the city’s Office of Pupil Transportation, believes the nonprofit model has “a lot to offer the city” and could expand.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
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In 1867, the Supreme Court ruled in Cummings v. Missouri that the state could not use loyalty oaths to bar ex-Confederates from teaching, preaching, or practicing law. The oaths themselves were (at the time) lawful, but Missouri was using them to unlawfully punish past conduct — and that was the problem.
“What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly,” Justice Stephen Johnson Field wrote for the majority. “The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows.”
Over 150 years later, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel hours after FCC Chair Brendan Carr suggested they could face consequences for remarks Kimmel made in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder.
Unlike the formal government pressure in Cummings, this was informal government pressure to influence private action, otherwise known as jawboning. But the age-old principle is the same. It was echoed in last year’s landmark jawboning case NRA v. Vullo“a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.”
Carr’s defenders try to deny any connection between Carr’s threats and Kimmel’s ouster.
This has one big problem. Courts have said it doesn’t matter whether a threat produces results. In Backpage.com v. Dart, the Seventh Circuit held that the constitutionality of government conduct turns on what the threat tries to accomplish, not whether it accomplishes it.
Given that, Carr’s threat still runs headlong into the First Amendment.
The bar was laid out clearly in last year’s Vullo:“to state a claim that the government violated the First Amendment through coercion of a third party, a plaintiff must plausibly allege conduct that, viewed in context, could be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff ’s speech.”
Let’s see how that squares with the timeline.
July 22 – Days after CBS cancels the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, with the question of FCC approval for parent Paramount Global’s merger with Skydance looming large over it, Trump posts:
August 6 – Trump tells the press pool regarding Kimmel and Late Night host Jimmy Fallon, “They’re next, they’re going to be going — I hear they’re going to be going.”
August 11 – Sinclair Broadcast Group shares surge 27% after it announces efforts to explore merger-and-acquisition opportunities in broadcast TV. Any transfer of broadcast licenses requires FCC approval, which FIRE has written extensively about regarding Carr using the government as a “point of leverage.”
August 19 – Nexstar Media Group, the nation’s largest TV station owner, announces plans to buy rival media giant Tegna in a deal that will require FCC approval and FCC willingness to lift their 39% cap on how many households one company can reach through TV station ownership. Nexstar now has 38.9% of stations covered by the FCC.
September 4 – The Center for American Rights files a complaint with the FCC over Jimmy Kimmel’s alleged bias and conflict of interest towards Democrats. CAR’s 60 Minutes complaint launched the now infamous FCC probe into CBS, which informed Trump lawsuit, and their complaints against ABC and NBC were revived by Carr early this year.
September 10 – Charlie Kirk is murdered while giving a talk at Utah Valley University.
September 15 – Kimmel says in his opening monologue:
We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
It’s worth noting the accuracy of his statement hinges on whether the “MAGA gang” was trying to avoid association with Kirk’s killer, not on whether the killer was part of the “MAGA gang.” It’s an important distinction when official actions are being considered.
September 17 – Carr appears on The Benny Johnson Show, with Johnson posting a summary at 1:01 pm, Carr addressing ABC parent Disney says:
This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.
Carr also addresses the station owners:
Disney needs to see some change here, but the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say this, you know, garbage, to the extent that that’s what comes down the pipe in the future, isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities.
6:18 pm – Later that day, it’s reported that Nexstar has said it will suspend Kimmel’s show “indefinitely beginning tonight.”
6:24 pm – Minutes later, it’s reported that Disney’s ABC says it is pulling the show.
8:38 pm – Sinclair says its ABC stations will air a special remembrance of Charlie Kirk this Friday during Jimmy Kimmel Live’s timeslot, adding: “Sinclair also calls upon Mr. Kimmel to issue a direct apology to the Kirk family. Furthermore, we ask Mr. Kimmel to make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA.”
11:43 pm – Carr responds to a post on X saying, “This was all in Project 2025, btw”:
September 18 – Carr replies to a post from British commentator Piers Morgan, attributing Kimmel’s suspension to “outrage all across America.” It’s difficulttofind evidence of “outrage all across America” before September 17.
That’s the timeline, so let’s break it down.
Carr tells ABC that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way” and that “there’s going to be additional work ahead for the FCC” if they don’t “take action.” There’s the threat and the adverse action — possibly in the form of an FCC probe into Carr’s complaint — if they don’t accede to the threat.
We also see Carr prompt affiliate station owners like Nexstar and Sinclair — seeking regulatory favor in pressing business before the government — to dial up the pressure on Disney in the lead up to Kimmel’s ouster. The specter of disfavorable treatment from the government poisons the chain from top to bottom. Finally, Trump and Carr celebrate after ABC suspends Kimmel indefinitely.
Asked to respond to those condemning him for “bullying ABC” on The Scott Jennings Show, Carr says “we’re reinvigorating the public interest standard for broadcasters. If people don’t like that … If you’re a broadcaster and you don’t like being held accountable for the first time, in a long time, to your public interest standard, you can turn your broadcast license in to the FCC.”
The public-interest standard is the nearly century-old mandate that broadcasters use the spectrum medium in service of the public. But the FCC’s public-interest standard has never made it okay to censor people. Even the FCC clearly states in no uncertain terms that “the public interest is best served by permitting free expression of views.”
That’s because the public interest standard is a creature of statute, subordinate to the Constitution and the First Amendment. The FCC’s governing rules accordingly deny the FCC “the power of censorship” as well as the ability to promulgate any “regulation or condition” that interferes with freedom of speech.
And Carr has long understood this. As he wrote in 2019, “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’”
He’s not alone either.
Republican members of Congress leading telecommunications regulation share his familiarity with the limits on the FCC’s power to regulate speech, as demonstrated by their cold reception to his recent threats. Brett Guthrie, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said: “We have to be extremely cautious to try to use the government to influence what people say.”
Senator Ted Cruz, chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, was more explicit. “That’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it’” he said, referring to Carr’s threats.
He went on to make an important point, recognizing that Carr’s “dangerous as hell” action was setting a troubling precedent because his Republican Party won’t always hold the keys to the FCC.
Three years ago, Carr wrote: “The government does not evade the First Amendment’s restraints on censoring political speech by jawboning a company into suppressing it—rather, that conduct runs headlong into those constitutional restrictions, as Supreme Court law makes clear.”
That’s exactly right, and if anyone knows what Brendan Carr is doing right now is unconstitutional jawboning — it’s Brendan Carr, as the record clearly shows.
The Trump administration has frozen more than $500 million in federal funding to UCLA.
A coalition of California education unions and faculty associations is suing the Trump administration to challenge what they say is “the illegal and coercive use of civil rights laws to attack the University of California system and the rights of their members,” the American Association of University Professors announced Tuesday.
The coalition comprises 19 groups—including the AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers and 10 University of California campus faculty associations—and is represented by the legal organization Democracy Forward.
“We will not stand by as the Trump administration destroys one of the largest public university higher education systems in the country and bludgeons academic freedom at the University of California, the heart of the revered free speech movement,” AAUP president Todd Wolfson said in a statement. “We stand hand in hand to protect not only our individual rights to free expression, debate, and association, but also to safeguard the health, safety, and economic mobility of our communities—all of which is at risk.”
The Trump administration has issued a litany of demands to the University of California in exchange for restored federal funding, including unfettered government access to faculty, student and staff data; cooperation with immigration enforcement; a ban on gender-inclusive restrooms and locker rooms; an official statement that the UC does not recognize transgender identity; and over a billion dollars in penalties. So far, the University of California, Los Angeles, has borne the brunt of the demands, but university system officials fear that funding freezes could extend to the system’s other campuses.
On Sept. 4, University of California, Berkeley, officials notified 160 faculty, staff and students that their names appeared in documents given to the Trump administration as part of the administration’s investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus.
“UCLA [faculty association] is honored to stand with this coalition, which presents as an important reminder of what the UC really is—the people who day in and day out do the work on UC campuses,” Anna Markowitz, president of the UCLA faculty association executive board, said in a statement Tuesday. “Today, we join the people of the UC in standing up against federal extortion, job loss, bans on speech and expression—against any effort to dismantle core public values that have made the UC great.”
At least seven historically Black colleges and universities across the country went into lockdown on Thursday after institutions received threats, which they did not elaborate on.
Southern University and A&M College in Louisiana asked those on campus to shelter in place in response to a “potential threat to campus safety.”
The lockdown applied to the “entire Baton Rouge landmass,” including the Southern University Law Center, the Agricultural Research and Extension Center, and the university’s Laboratory School, according to a statement from the institution.
The lockdown lifted in the afternoon, but all classes and campus activities were canceled through the weekend.
Alabama State University also received a “terroristic threat,” university officials told local media outlets, and shut down campus as law enforcement officials checked buildings. The university sent an all-clear notice later in the day, noting that “the immediate threat has been resolved,” but told students to continue to shelter in place.
Two HBCUs in Virginia were also targeted.
Virginia State University went into lockdown while local, state and federal law enforcement agencies investigated the credibility of a threat received earlier that day, according to a message from the Virginia State University Office of Communications and University Relations. University officials assured students, “No injuries or incidents have been reported in connection with the threat” and said they would be provided with meals in university housing during the lockdown.
Hampton University canceled all activities and classes for both Thursday and Friday in response to a potential threat. Students were discouraged from moving across campus unless absolutely necessary, and all nonessential employees were told to “evacuate immediately” in a notice on the university’s website.
A threat at Bethune-Cookman University in Florida also forced the university to cancel classes and go into lockdown. A notice from the university told students to go to their dorms and faculty and staff members to leave campus.
Spelman College in Atlanta didn’t receive a threat but issued a shelter-in-place order because of its proximity to Clark-Atlanta University, which did. The order was lifted around 2 p.m.
Howard University, in Washington, D.C., assured students the institution hadn’t received any threats but would maintain “heightened security.”
“At Howard, we denounce all acts of hate designed to foster fear in our communities,” an update from the university read. “Howard stands in solidarity with our fellow HBCUs.”
A predominantly white institution, the University of Central Florida, also reported receiving a threat Thursday. The Orlando Sentinel, which obtained a copy via an anonymous tipster, reported that the expletive-laden message threatened Black students and referenced the killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed on a train in North Carolina.
A message from the UCF Police Department Thursday afternoon said, “Similar messages have been reported at other universities around the country.” The police department added it was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assess the threat but does not consider it “to be credible.”
In what appears to be an unrelated incident, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., went on lockdown Thursday evening after suspicious activity was reported on campus, The Baltimore Banner reported. One person was injured as Naval Security Forces cleared a building.
Florida A&M University, an HBCU, did not receive any threats but put out a statement of solidarity with institutions on lockdown.
Rep. Troy A. Carter, a Democrat from Louisiana, posted on X that he was “outraged and deeply disturbed” by the threats to HBCUs.
“These reprehensible acts are not only an attack on institutions of higher learning—they are an attack on our history, our culture, and the promise of opportunity that HBCUs represent for generations of students,” Carter wrote. In a statement, he called on the federal government “to utilize every available resource to identify, apprehend, and prosecute those responsible.”
The Congressional Black Caucus also put out a statement calling for action from the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI. Caucus members described the threats as a “chilling reminder of the relentless racism and extremism that continues to target and terrorize Black communities in this country.”
The rash of violent threats is reminiscent of a wave of bomb threats that targeted HBCUs in 2022 and prompted the FBI to get involved. The HBCU campus lockdowns also come on the heels of a series of false calls to colleges and universities about active shooters last month; an online extremist group claimed responsibility for the hoaxes.
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Several historically Black colleges and universities locked down and canceled classes Thursday after receiving threats to campus safety, according to notices from campus officials and media reports.
The affected institutions include Alabama State, Bethune-Cookman, Clark Atlanta, Hampton, Southern and Virginia State universities.
Alabama State canceled all campus activities Thursday after receiving a “terroristic threat,” according to media reports. Although university and law enforcement officials issued an all-clear notice in the afternoon, the institution said it remained closed to the public and asked on-campus students to keep sheltering in place.
At least four of Georgia’s HBCUs likewise locked down after Clark Atlanta University received a threat, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Each institution — which included Spelman and Morehouse colleges — lifted their lockdown orders by early afternoon.
In Virginia, at least two institutions also received threats.
Hampton said it would halt all nonessential activities through Friday after getting “notice of a potential threat,” according to a social media post from the institution.
Virginia State likewise went into lockdown as law enforcement investigated “the credibility of the threat” it received Thursday, the university said on social media.Later that day, Virginia State President Makola Abdullah said the lockdown had been lifted.
“To those who seek to silence or scare us: we will not be intimidated,” Abdullah said. “For over a century, Virginia State University and other HBCUs have stood as a beacon of knowledge, excellence, and resilience. Today’s events only reaffirm our commitment to providing a safe and empowering environment for our students, faculty, and staff.”
Southern University, in Louisiana, Thursday afternoon lifted the lockdown order imposed following a “campus safety threat,” it said in a social media post. However, the university canceled all classes and campus activities through the weekend.
In Florida, Bethune-Cookman officials canceled classes due to a “potential threat to campus safety,” it said in a social media post. The university ordered employees on campus to head home and others to work remotely. It also advised students to shelter in place in their dorms.
On the other side of the state, Florida A&M University had not received a threat but was monitoring the situation, it said in a social media post. “We stand in solidarity with institutions currently under lockdown or threat and extend our support during this time,” it added.
In early 2022, HBCUs received waves of bomb threats that forced them to lock down their campuses and cancel classes. Later that year, the U.S. Department of Justice said it identified a juvenile it believed to be behind what it called racially motivated threats.
Thursday’s threats came just one day after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot in the neck on Utah Valley University’s campus during an event that drew some 3,000 attendees.
Federal agencies say that research at American universities contributes to the country’s national security and colleges need to guard against foreign threats.
Warning American colleges and universities about increasing foreign threats to research, a group of federal intelligence agencies and the Education Department released new guidance this week outlining how the institutions can better protect themselves.
For example, the 40-page “Safeguarding Academia” bulletin in part encourages colleges and researchers to be transparent about who else is involved in a research project, noting that failing to disclose foreign collaborations could lead to sanctions. The agencies urged researchers to do their due diligence on any potential collaborators and outlined other cybersecurity best practices.
“Protecting the integrity of U.S. research—while fostering international collaboration—is critical to maintaining a robust and secure research ecosystem,” the bulletin states. “Striking this balance is essential to preserving academic freedom, safeguarding researchers’ lifework, and ensuring that innovation continues to thrive in a secure and principled manner.”
James Cangialosi, the acting director at the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, added in a statement that while American colleges conduct research key to the country’s global competitiveness and national security, “foreign adversaries are increasingly exploiting the open and collaborative environment of U.S. academic institutions for their own gain.”
“Today’s bulletin highlights this evolving security threat and provides mitigation strategies that academic institutions can implement to better protect their research, their institutions, as well as their staff and students,” Cangialosi said. “With the new school year starting, it’s critical to get these materials in the hands of academic institutions now.”
An estimated one in five college students has dependents, and research shows that parenting students are more likely to experience basic needs insecurity in their pursuit of a degree. A 2024 survey by Trellis Strategies found that 6 percent of student parents self-identified as unhoused and 17 percent indicated some level of housing insecurity since they started college or during the 12 months leading up to the survey.
A recent brief from New America and Princeton Eviction Lab tied the threat of eviction to negative student outcomes; student parents who face eviction are 23 percent less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree compared to their housing secure peers, and more likely to have lower quality of life, including higher mortality rates and lower earnings years later.
In the most recent episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Edward Conroy, senior policy manager on higher education policy at New America, and Nick Graetz, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota in the department of sociology and the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation, about how threats of eviction uniquely impact parents and the implications for generational education goals.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Inside Higher Ed: Just to get us started, can we get the 30,000-foot view? What is this brief? What were some of your findings? What did you all learn?
Eddy Conroy, New America’s senior policy manager in the education policy program.
Conroy: The overall goal here was to be able to look at parenting students—of which we know there are about 3 million in the country; it’s one in five undergrad students and another million grad students—if they’re threatened with an eviction, we thought it was pretty likely that’s going to have harmful effects on their chances of completing college. So wanted to see, what does that look like? How does that impact whether they graduate, whether they stay in college? What does it do to their income afterwards? What does it do to a bunch of different things that are pretty important when it comes to success in higher education? We’ll get more into detail, but we learned it was worse than perhaps either Nick or I thought the findings were going to be—and we didn’t think they were going to be great: The threat of eviction has just devastating consequences for parenting students’ chance of success in higher ed.
Nick Graetz, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota in the department of sociology and the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation.
Graetz: Just a little background on how we got here from the data perspective. This is part of a larger collaboration that began with the U.S. Census Bureau maybe four years ago, with the goal of linking eviction records to other census administrative data to really understand who’s affected by eviction, because the records themselves only include names and addresses, not even things like age, race, sex, in terms of the actual data collected in court.
One of our first big findings from that linkage was just the extent to which households with kids are at higher risk of eviction. Across the board, we find [eviction] filing rates are twice as high for groups that have kids. This work with Eddy and New America was a partnership to try to dig into different groups that have children—so, specifically, parenting students—and see what’s going on there.
Inside Higher Ed: Something that I thought was interesting about this research—and I know this has to do with how evictions are filed, and the actual application of the eviction as well—but even the threat of an eviction had such a detrimental effect on completion rates.
We talk a lot in higher ed about housing insecurity and students’ basic needs, and how, if they don’t have $500, they might not be able to persist, or they are at higher risk of stopping out. I wonder if we can talk about that dynamic of, maybe the student isn’t experiencing literal homelessness, but even the threat of eviction can totally jeopardize or derail their educational pursuit.
Graetz: Part of it is a data consideration; we’re able to assess with a really high degree of accuracy the point at which we see someone in housing court across the country. It really varies how well we think we can capture the actual judgment rendered in housing court, but we use the threat of eviction, because that itself, based on prior work, has all these huge impacts, even if you’re ultimately able to stay in your home.
Starting at the highest level, the constant stress of making rent or facing eviction is traumatic, especially for parents. There’s this expression, “the rent eats first,” and we know that tenants tend to sacrifice on issues like food and health care when they see budgets tighten. We know that rent-burdened households with children spend 57 percent less on health care, 17 percent less on food, and that’s driven by the threat of eviction; if you fall behind on rent, you need to prioritize that above everything else. It’s really easy to snowball into an eviction filing.
The threat of eviction also compounds all sorts of other problems, especially material financial problems in lots of ways. Landlords file against the same tenants over and over again as a means of coercive rent collection, and we know that those fines and fees associated with just the filings can increase monthly housing costs up to 20 percent, and then also just having the mark of an eviction filing on your record, landlords use all sorts of tools to screen for those. It makes it harder to access new stable housing if you move—which can all have downstream impacts on things like finding a new job, finding new childcare, and so these things all kind of compound and accumulate over time.
Inside Higher Ed: I think navigating that system must also be especially challenging for college students because of that time constraint, and again, student parents, even more so, because we know that there’s such a time poverty when it comes to raising children and having dependents.
But we talk a lot about the hidden curriculum in higher education, and how it’s so hard to navigate even your institution and find everything you need. I can only imagine when you’re dealing with your landlord or housing court or all these other bureaucratic systems that are not always designed to be easy and user-friendly, that definitely compounds the stress and puts added pressure on this population.
Conroy: About 90 percent of people who get taken to eviction court end up losing their case. Regardless of whether you can navigate [the system], your chances of winning are pretty low and there’s all kinds of stuff underlying that. Very few people in eviction court end up with representation. You’re generally talking about folks who are lower income, have less social and cultural capital … if you’re in that situation in the first place, the chances that you have a friend or family member you can call up and say, “Hey, who knows a good lawyer?” or even have the money to pay that person, are really low.
Exactly to your point about time poverty, these things are a challenge for all students. But we know from lots of different pieces of research that parenting students’ pressures on their time are enormous. A vast majority are working full-time. They then have childcare and parenting responsibilities on top of that.
That is a lot—as somebody who is a stepparent—that’s a lot to do, to have a full-time job and take care of your kids and occasionally have a little bit of a life yourself. Then, add in going to college at the same time. Everything that we see from other pieces of research on parenting students’ time constraints, they don’t have enough hours in the day when everything’s going reasonably well. You add in the stress of eviction or housing insecurity, and it is really easy to see how that is incredibly destabilizing immediately and very difficult to fight that kind of thing, because it takes a lot of time to deal with all those things. And you have to show up in court; there are all of these knock-on effects too. You’re showing up for court, that means that you have to take the day off work. You’re in a job that you don’t get days off, so you’ve lost a day of income. Like Nick was saying, these things snowball really quickly.
Graetz: On the point about legal counsel and how tenants aren’t guaranteed representation in housing court. I think that’s one really important intervention at the university level: There are a lot of folks doing really incredible work offering free legal services to students. Those programs were one reason I was thinking, when I was trying to think of how big are these disparities we’re going to find, I was thinking of those programs as a place where tenants with kids in the general rental market don’t have access to that kind of thing, and virtually all of them are unrepresented. That’s another interesting intervention point that we could dig into more. It seems like it’s not a protective enough effect to really stop us from seeing such huge disparities here. But if universities could think about funding and investing in those programs more as a parenting student policy, as a retention policy, I think it could possibly have some really big impacts.
Inside Higher Ed: Absolutely. As we’ve been talking about time poverty, one thing that came to mind is just the things that a student has to do during the 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. time period. Housing court isn’t open until 10 p.m., very rarely are institutions providing legal services after hours. And so, I think one intervention that would be interesting to see is just how expanded resources could also benefit student parents who don’t always have that 9-to-5 hour available when they have to take class and get the kids to child care and deal with their eviction notice, and go to the grocery store, whatever else it might be.
I wonder if we can talk about some of the ways that institutions can have a role in supporting them with housing insecurity.
Conroy: This was the first piece that New America had really done, at this intersection of housing issues and higher education. So, we were deliberately a little careful about what the policy solutions discussion looked like, because there are enough people in the world who will wade into new issue areas that they don’t know and make a bunch of suggestions without really understanding whether they’ve been tried before. So, we wanted to be deliberately careful.
But I think one of the things that is really clear is these are not problems that institutions can solve on their own. So there was a big study that just came out, led by Rashida Crutchfield and a few other people in California, about work on California’s rapid rehousing investments.
California at the state level, had invested, I think, over $30 million in that effort, and it showed really good outcomes. But it helped students at a small handful of universities in California. And when you’re talking about over 2 million students just in the California Community College system alone, $31 million seems like a lot of money. But when you start dividing that by, you know, tens of thousands or potentially hundreds of thousands of students, it’s not very much, very quickly.
One of the really good quotes that came out of that was some senior administrator saying, “We simply can’t solve this at an institutional level by ourselves.” And I think it’s very clear from this data that parenting students have some unique vulnerabilities around housing insecurity and eviction—they’re having to pay more for housing, they need more housing than the average single student without kids, all of these things. Our financial aid system wasn’t designed to really support people with children. And so a big piece of this—and we’re starting to think about that now—is going to be institutions partnering and thinking through, how do we come to the table with our local housing authority? How do we come to the table with our city planning department and advocates for housing?
Because everybody in America, unless you’re pretty well off, is experiencing challenges with housing. This is not an issue that’s unique to students. But in this case, parenting students are uniquely vulnerable to some of the challenges created there, so a lot of the solutions are going to be partnerships. There’s a role to play for emergency aid, for using it strategically to avoid students getting to the point of eviction. There’s a role for improved financial aid and doing a better job of communicating with students that they have these resources. I think, like Nick said, legal services, particularly if you’re an institution with a law school, is a great way to help, if you have a Student Legal Clinic. I think that’s actually a really great piece, but it’s going to be, almost certainly, a lot of partnership work with institutions. You run a food pantry, you can connect students to SNAP, you can do those kinds of things. Housing is a much bigger challenge, and it’s going to require working across different areas, for colleges and universities.
Graetz: Ultimately, the universities investing in some of the emergency assistance stuff and legal services is, I think you can get a really big bang for your buck there, but it’s ultimately a band-aid solution to the broader housing crisis we’re all dealing with. And I think universities can be really powerful, important political actors in those conversations that have to be happening with state government and federal government to ease some of the major housing strain that families are facing.
Conroy: One thing that actually just came to mind is the current administration has said it wants to explore the idea of limiting access to public housing, and especially housing choice vouchers —what’s previously been known as Section Eight housing vouchers—to two years. This isn’t official policy yet, but it’s been floated as an idea.
One of the things we know is that, and as we see in this data, for a parenting student who was threatened with eviction five years post-enrollment, their family income was more than cut in half. If they were not threatened with eviction five years post-enrollment, [they had a] family income of $126,000 a year. That’s really good. That’s solidly middle class, like you’re doing pretty well.
If you were threatened with eviction five years later, your family income was $59,000. That is an enormous difference. But it shows that if we help protect students at this really crucial point where they’re trying to get to a place that they no longer need to rely on any kind of public support, they’re probably going to do pretty well.
Those kinds of policy proposals would make this so much worse, when we know that if you help that student get to the finish line, the chances that they ever have to rely on public housing or other public benefits again, become so much lower.
There are these really sort of backward policies that are penny-pinching to save a few cents now, but in the long run harm people and cost more money, or are just really ill-thought out approaches to public policy and housing policy.
Citing Sources
One study by the Lumina Foundation using 2012 data found that college graduates are 3.5 times less likely to be impoverished and five times less likely to be imprisoned or be in jail compared to non–college graduates. Lifetime government expenditures are 39 percent lower—$82,000 less—for college graduates than for Americans with only a high school degree.
The study also found that the average bachelor’s degree recipient contributes $381,000 more in taxes than they use in government services and programs over their lifetime.
Inside Higher Ed: We could definitely spend some time talking about the administration’s push for more children and encouraging family growth and things like that
We see that student parents are so motivated to complete a degree, and we know adult learners are intrinsically motivated. They are much more likely to have strong goals [and] positive academic outcomes compared to their younger peers, but there are all these external factors that continue to hinder their degree progress. We’ve talked about time poverty, housing insecurity, lack of finances, the need to work, caregiving responsibilities for those who are caught in the [Sandwich] Generation between older parents and younger children or siblings as well. It’s such a complex issue , I wonder if we can just talk a little bit about why it’s so essential to do more than just provide academic support and to surround student parents with basic needs, with legal aid, with some of these other essential elements of being a student parent.
Conroy: Like you said, academic outcomes for parenting students are actually pretty good. They, on average, have similar or even slightly better GPAs than their non-parent peers. But even under the best case scenario, taking eviction and everything else out of it, their chances of completing a bachelor’s degree in six years or an associate’s degree in three years are far lower than their non-parent peers.
It is because of all of these other things that we’re talking about. Everything else being equal, if you take a parenting student and a non-parenting student and drop them in the same environment, the chances that the parenting student is going to get to the finish line are already diminished, unless you figure out other ways to support them.
Priority registration is an enormous thing. I actually was just this week having dinner with a friend whose spouse just finished law school, but was at the same time working full-time. They have a young child, and he said the only way we were able to make this work is because Texas passed requirements that parenting students got priority registration, and his wife had first pick of classes, and that’s a family that has good financial resources.
There are simple things like that; even priority registration for parenting students means they can figure out their work schedule. They can figure out childcare. That can be a big deal by itself, but if colleges figure out how to properly support the groups with the largest challenges, then that all trickles down.
Universal design tells you that that will have good impacts for everybody else, but if colleges don’t do that, given demographic change … I’m not like somebody who thinks the world is going to collapse due to changes in the number of high school graduates, but it is going to have an impact. And we have this enormous pool of people in America who have some college but no degree or want to go back to college. New America just released our Varying Degrees report that we’ve done for years, and it shows, and it has shown again and again, Americans really value higher education. Folks who don’t have higher education are thinking about wanting to come back into it. The way that colleges will be able to smooth out some of those demographic change challenges is really thinking through carefully, how do we support groups like parenting students, where there’s also huge potential upside; if you move the needle 10 percent on your graduation rates for parenting students—because there the rates are so low right now—it has a really massive positive impact on your outcomes as an institution. And that’s important for funding, it’s important for recruitment, all of these things.
Graetz: One point you brought up, Ashley, that I just wanted to build on a little bit, is the potential for really multi-generational impacts of investing in student parents.
One thing we did in this work is think about how that goes both up and down the family tree. With the data linkage we’ve done, we’ve also connected the incomes of the parents of parenting students, so we could think of those as the grandparents of the children these folks are having while they’re enrolled.
And we find that lower grandparent income at the time of parenting students enrolling is associated with much higher risk of eviction. I think the threat of eviction in college while you’re caring for your grandchild, you know that grandparent is going to be affected by that too. Because of some of the statistics you mentioned earlier, about how many parenting students can afford a $500 bill, a big part of that depends on familial wealth and where can you go to draw on that kind of emergency assistance?
We know, of course, there are massive racial disparities in family wealth. So at the point of something like an eviction, that’s going to affect both up and down the family tree. It’s going to affect everybody who might be providing emergency support to that family member, potentially their child or who’s caring for their grandchild. But then it’s also going to affect the child; evictions, especially experienced early in life, have really traumatic long-term effects for children.
Inside Higher Ed: That’s something that I wanted to talk about as well—the value of supporting student parents for the dependents’ sake. In higher education, we want all students to succeed and thrive, but we also know that being a continuing generation student, or having a parent who has a college degree or certificate, boosts your chances of completing a degree. And there’s, like you mentioned Nick, wellbeing and personal life experiences too, that are really tied to having basic needs and being supported as a young child. I wonder if we can talk a little bit about why this is important, not only for the student, but also for future generations and their education.
Graetz: It’s hard to overstate the impacts that something like an eviction can have. In our previous work, looking at who’s affected by eviction the most, the rates are extremely high when you’re zero to five. So that’s because evictions target households with kids. Some of the most likely time of your life to be affected by an eviction is when you’re an infant, basically. And there’s a lot of literature on how this affects school outcomes, how this affects sort of regular developmental milestones. And I think it’s for tons of reasons; there’s the acute, traumatic effect of that eviction and this instability it causes, but then there’s just the downstream material consequences of that experience by the family for years and years later that are going to affect that child.
Conroy: One thing to add on there is, we know that wealth and poverty in America are very sticky. Your chances of moving up in terms of income quintiles and things like that are not great, but higher education is one of the things that really makes it more likely that, if you came from a relatively low-income family, that you’re able to move into a higher income bracket and be more economically secure, all of those things and all of that for lots of reasons.
We don’t have to get into every detail of it, but it has really good consequences for kids. It means that they’re more likely to go to a better-resourced school, they’re more likely to have good food on the table every day, all of these things.
Also, Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that 70 percent of jobs being created will require some kind of post–high school education moving forward. [It] doesn’t have to be a four-year degree, but there is an ever-decreasing number of jobs that don’t require training of some kind beyond high school. We help parenting students complete college, we know that once you get into a second-generation, third-generation college-going group, you’re not first-gen anymore, your chances of going to and succeeding in college go up because you have a parent to turn to to say, “Hey, you navigated this. How do I do that?”
I see this with people in my family who are one of the only people in their community who went to college and they’re the community resource. It’s mom, dad, uncle, aunt, cousin. “Hey, talk to that person. They went to college; they succeeded. They’ll tell you what to do.” Those are very hard to measure, but the community network effects that happen over time and happen for kids in those families can be enormous.
Inside Higher Ed: We talked a little bit about the lack of policy or practice implications directly named in the research brief that you both wrote. But I wonder if we can talk about the future of this work, or where you hope that the conversation continues to go as we think about supporting student parents in higher education who may be facing eviction or dealing with housing insecurity?
Conroy: A couple of things that we’re working on that I can talk about. Nick and I have also, just in the past two weeks, been sort of figuring out, what can we do now to expand on this?
One is we’re in the middle of trying to develop some work in conjunction with Nick and Eviction Lab, and then New America’s future of Land and Housing Program, to work in a small number of cities, to do some of the things I was talking about earlier in terms of partnerships and what could we do to think really carefully of bringing higher ed experts, institutions, housing advocates, the local public housing authority all together to the table to say, “Housing affordability is a general problem. It’s also a very specific problem for these groups of students. How could we work in collaboration to change some of those things?”
That requires funding and all of those things. But we’re hoping to be able to do that as the “on the ground” piece at the same time as we build greater research evidence. We had seven states in this study, and, I can, Nick can talk better about, what were some of the ideas that we’re now starting to think about for what next stages, in terms of the evidence base, could look like?
Graetz: We’re hoping to expand the coverage across the country of this linkage between all the census administrative records, this and the student records. I think that could give us more scope and general ability to generalize across student parents living in very different housing contexts.
Then there’s just a bunch of other questions opened up by this initial work. Something I’m personally really interested in is the shifting ownership structure of student housing. A lot of times, we focus on trying to learn things by studying tenants, but it’s a lot harder to study landlords and owners and how those shifts can affect those risks being passed on to tenants in terms of things like eviction risk. I think that’s really interesting, especially in the student housing space and just the parts of a city’s housing stock that are primarily serving student populations. And then, we’re also really interested in doing more linkage to understand the relationship between various federal assistance programs and eviction risk among students and parenting students. That’s all, hopefully, stuff we can look forward to over the next year or two.
Conroy: So, if anybody’s listening and have spare million dollars or two …
Inside Higher Ed: I’ll write you a check later this afternoon.
Conroy: I need to look at Inside Higher Ed jobs. I didn’t realize they paid that well.
Inside Higher Ed: Well, you know …
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When hackers hit a school district, they can expose Social Security numbers, home addresses, and even disability and disciplinary records. Now, cybersecurity advocates warn that the Trump administration’s budget and personnel cuts, along with rule changes, are stripping away key defenses that schools need.
“Cyberattacks on schools are escalating and just when we need federal support the most, it’s being pulled away,” said Keith Krueger, chief executive officer of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of technology officials in K-12 schools.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
The stakes are high. Schools are a top target in ransomware attacks, and cyber criminals have sometimes succeeded in shutting down whole school districts. The largest such incident occurred in December, when hackers stole personal student and teacher data from PowerSchool, a company that runs student information systems and stores report cards. The theft included data from more than 60 million students and almost 10 million teachers. PowerSchool paid an undisclosed ransom, but the criminals didn’t stop. Now, in a second round of extortion, the same cyber criminals are demanding ransoms from school districts.
Of chief concern is a cybersecurity service known as MS-ISAC, which stands for Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center. It warns more than 5,700 schools around the country that have signed up for the service about malware and other threats and recommends security patches. This technical service is free to schools, but is funded by an annual congressional appropriation of $27 million through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security.
On March 6, the Trump administration announced a $10 million funding cut as part of broader budget and staffing cuts throughout CISA. That was ultimately negotiated down to $8.3 million, but the service still lost more than half of its remaining $15.7 budget for the year. The non-profit organization that runs it, the Center for Internet Services, is digging into its reserves to keep it operating. But those funds are expected to run out in the coming weeks, and it is unclear how the service will continue operating without charging user fees to schools.
“Many districts don’t have the budget or resources to do this themselves, so not having access to the no cost services we offer is a big issue,” said Kelly Lynch Wyland, a spokeswoman for the Center for Internet Services.
Sharing threat information
Another concern is the effective disbanding of the Government Coordinating Council, which helps schools address ransomware attacks and other threats through policy advice, including how to respond to ransom requests, whom to inform when an attack happens and good practices for preventing attacks. This coordinating council was formed only a year ago by the Department of Education and CISA. It brings together 13 nonprofit school organizations representing superintendents, state education leaders, technology officers and others. The council met frequently after the PowerSchool data breach to share information.
Now, amid the second round of extortions, school leaders have not been able to meet because of a change in rules governing open meetings. The group was originally exempt from meeting publicly because it was discussing critical infrastructure threats. But the Department of Homeland Security, under the Trump administration, reinstated open meeting rules for certain advisory committees, including this one. That makes it difficult to speak frankly about efforts to thwart criminal activity.
Non-governmental organizations are working to resurrect the council, but it would be in a diminished form without government participation.
“The FBI really comes in when there’s been an incident to find out who did it, and they have advice on whether you should pay or not pay your ransom,” said Krueger of the school network consortium.
A federal role
A third concern is the elimination in March of the education Department’s Office of Educational Technology. This seven-person office dealt with education technology policies — including cybersecurity. It issued cybersecurity guidance to schools and held webinars and meetings to explain how schools could improve and shore up their defenses. It also ran a biweekly meeting to talk about K-12 cybersecurity across the Education Department, including offices that serve students with disabilities and English learners.
Eliminating this office has hampered efforts to decide which security controls, such as encryption or multi-factor authentication, should be in educational software and student information systems.
Many educators worry that without this federal coordination, student privacy is at risk. “My biggest concern is all the data that’s up in the cloud,” said Steve Smith, the founder of the Student Data Privacy Consortium and the former chief information officer for Cambridge Public Schools in Massachusetts. “Probably 80 to 90 percent of student data isn’t on school-district controlled services. It’s being shared with ed tech providers and hosted on their information systems.”
Security controls
“How do we ensure that those third-party providers are providing adequate security against breaches and cyber attacks?” said Smith. “The office of ed tech was trying to bring people together to move toward an agreed upon national standard. They weren’t going to mandate a data standard, but there were efforts to bring people together and start having conversations about the expected minimum controls.”
That federal effort ended, Smith said, with the new administration. But his consortium is still working on it.
In an era when policymakers are seeking to decrease the federal government’s involvement in education, arguing for a centralized, federal role may not be popular. But there’s long been a federal role for student data privacy, including making sure that school employees don’t mishandle and accidentally expose students’ personal information. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, commonly known as FERPA, protects student data. The Education Department continues to provide technical assistance to schools to comply with this law. Advocates for school cybersecurity say that the same assistance is needed to help schools prevent and defend against cyber crimes.
“We don’t expect every town to stand up their own army to protect themselves against China or Russia,” said Michael Klein, senior director for preparedness and response at the Institute for Security and Technology, a nonpartisan think tank. Klein was a senior advisor for cybersecurity in the Education Department during the previous administration. “In the same way, I don’t think we should expect every school district to stand up their own cyber-defense army to protect themselves against ransomware attacks from major criminal groups.”
And it’s not financially practical. According to the school network consortium only a third of school districts have a full-time employee or the equivalent dedicated to cybersecurity.
Budget storms ahead
Some federal programs to help schools with cybersecurity are still running. The Federal Communications Commission launched a $200 million pilot program to support cybersecurity efforts by schools and libraries. FEMA funds cybersecurity for state and local governments, which includes public schools. Through these funds, schools can obtain phishing training and malware detection. But with budget battles ahead, many educators fear these programs could also be cut.
Perhaps the biggest risk is the end to the entire E-Rate program that helps schools pay for the internet access. The Supreme Court is slated to decide this term on whether the funding structure is an unconstitutional tax.
“If that money goes away, they’re going to have to pull money from somewhere,” said Smith of the Student Data Privacy Consortium. “They’re going to try to preserve teaching and learning, as they should. Cybersecurity budgets are things that are probably more likely to get cut.
“It’s taken a long time to get to the point where we see privacy and cybersecurity as critical pieces,” Smith said. “I would hate for us to go back a few years and not be giving them the attention they should.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
