Tag: Top

  • Students, schools race to save clean energy projects in face of Trump deadline

    Students, schools race to save clean energy projects in face of Trump deadline

    Tanish Doshi was in high school when he pushed the Tucson Unified School District to take on an ambitious plan to reduce its climate footprint. In Oct. 2024, the availability of federal tax credits encouraged the district to adopt the $900 million plan, which involves goals of achieving net-zero emissions and zero waste by 2040, along with adding a climate curriculum to schools.

    Now, access to those funds is disappearing, leaving Tucson and other school systems across the country scrambling to find ways to cover the costs of clean energy projects.

    The Arizona school district, which did not want to impose an economic burden on its low-income population by increasing bonds or taxes, had expected to rely in part on federal dollars provided by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, Doshi said. 

    But under HR1, or the “one big, beautiful bill,” passed on July 4, Tucson schools will not be able to receive all of the expected federal funding in time for their upcoming clean energy projects. The law discontinues many clean energy tax credits, including those used by schools for solar power and electric vehicles, created under the IRA. When schools and other tax-exempt organizations receive these credits, they come in the form of a direct cash reimbursement.

    At the same time, Tucson and thousands of districts across the country that were planning to develop solar and wind power projects are now forced to decide between accelerating them to try to meet HR1’s fast-approaching “commence construction” deadline of June 2026, finding other sources of funding or hitting pause on their plans. Tina Cook, energy project manager for Tucson schools, said the district might have to scale back some of its projects unless it could find local sources of funding. 

    “Phasing out the tax credits for wind and solar energy is going to make a huge, huge difference,” said Doshi, 18, now a first-year college student. “It ends a lot of investments in poor and minority communities. You really get rid of any notion of environmental justice that the IRA had advanced.”

    Emma Weber leads a chant at a Colorado state capitol rally in support of “The Green New Deal for Colorado Schools.” Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber

    The tax credits in the IRA, the largest legislative investment in climate projects in U.S. history, had marked a major opportunity for schools and colleges to reduce their impact on the environment. Educational institutions are significant contributors to climate change: K-12 school infrastructure, for example, releases at least 41 million metric tons of emissions per year, according to a paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. The K-12 school system’s buses — some 480,000 — and meals also produce significant emissions and waste. Clean energy projects supported by the IRA were helping schools not only to limit their climate toll but also to save money on energy costs over the long term and improve student health, advocates said.

    As a result, many students, consultants and sustainability leaders said, they have no plans to abandon clean energy projects. They said they want to keep working to cut emissions, even though that may be more difficult now.

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    Sara Ross, cofounder of UndauntedK12, which helps school districts green their operations, divided HR1’s fallout on schools into three categories: the good, the bad and the ugly. 

    On the bright side, she said, schools can still get up to 50 percent off for installing ground source heat pumps — those credits will continue — to more efficiently heat and cool schools. The network of pipes in a ground source pump cycles heat from the shallow earth into buildings.

    In the “bad” category, any electric vehicle acquired after Sept. 30 of this year will not be eligible for tax credits — drastically accelerating the IRA’s phase-out timeline by seven years. That applies to electric school buses as well as other district-owned vehicles. Electric vehicle charging stations must be installed by June 30, 2026 at an eligible location to claim a tax credit.*

    EPA’s Clean School Bus Program still exists for two more years and covers two-thirds of the funding for all electric school buses districts acquire in that time. The remaining one-third, however, was to be covered by federal and state tax credits. 

    The expiration of the federal tax credits could cost a district up to $40,000 more per vehicle, estimated Sue Gander, director of the Electric School Bus Initiative run by the nonprofit World Resources Institute. 

    Related: So much for saving the planet. Climate jobs, and many others, evaporate for 2025 grads

    Solar projects will see the most “ugly” effects of HR1, Ross said. 

    Los Angeles Unified School District is planning to build 21 solar projects on roofs, carports and other structures, plus 13 electric vehicle charging sites, as part of an effort to reduce energy costs and achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. The district anticipated receiving around $25 million in federal tax credits to help pay for the $90 million contract, said Christos Chrysiliou, chief eco-sustainability officer for the district. With the tight deadlines imposed by HR1, the district can no longer count on receiving that money. 

    “It’s disappointing,” Chrysiliou said. “It’s nice to be able to have that funding in place to meet the goals and objectives that we have.”

    Emma Weber, at left, trains student leaders at Sunrise Movement’s “summer intensive” in Illinois this year. Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber

    LAUSD is looking at a small portion of a $9 billion bond measure passed last year, as well as utility rebates, third-party financing and grants from the California Energy Commission, to help make up for some of the gaps in funding.

    Many California State University campuses are in a similar position as they work to install solar to meet the system’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, said Lindsey Rowell, CSU’s chief energy, sustainability and transportation officer. 

    Tariffs on solar panel materials from overseas and the early sunsetting of tax credits mean that “the cost of these projects are becoming prohibitive for campuses,” Rowell said. 

    Sweeps of undocumented immigrants in California may also lead to labor shortages that could slow the pace of construction, Rowell added. “Limiting the labor force in any way is only going to result in an increased cost, so those changes are frightening as well,” she said. 

    New Treasury Department guidance, issued Aug. 15, made it much harder for projects to meet  the threshold needed to qualify for the tax credits. Renewable energy projects previously qualified for credits once a developer spent 5 percent of a project’s cost. But the guidelines have been tightened — now, larger projects must pass a “physical work test,” meaning “significant physical labor has begun on a site,” before they can qualify for credits. With the construction commencement deadline looming next June, these will likely leave many projects ineligible for credits.

    “The rules are new, complex [and] not widely understood,” Ross said. “We’re really concerned about schools’ ability to continue to do solar projects and be able to effectively navigate these new rules.” 

    Schools without “fancy legal teams” may struggle to understand how the new tax credit changes in HR1 will affect their finances and future projects, she added.

    Some universities were just starting to understand how the IRA tax credits could help them fund projects. Lily Strehlow, campus sustainability coordinator at the University of Wisconsin, Eau-Claire, said the planning cycle for clean energy projects at the school can take ten years. The university is in the process of adding solar to the roof of a large science building, and depending on the date of completion, the project “might or might not” qualify for the credits, she said. 

    “At this point, everybody’s holding their breath,” said Rick Brown, founder of California-based TerraVerde Energy, a clean energy consultant to schools and agencies. 

    Brown said that none of his company’s projects are in a position where they’re not going to get done, but the company may end up seeing fewer new projects due to a higher cost of equipment. 

    Tim Carter, president of Second Nature, which supports climate work in education, added that colleges and universities are in a broader period of uncertainty, due to larger attacks from the Trump administration, and are not likely to make additional investments at this time: “We’re definitely in a wait and see.”

    Related: A government website teachers rely on is in peril 

    For youth activists, the fallout from HR1 is “disheartening,” Doshi said. 

    Emma and Molly Weber, climate activists since eighth grade, said they are frustrated. The Colorado-based twins, who will start college this fall, helped secure the first “Green New Deal for Schools” resolution in the nation in the Boulder Valley School District. Its goals include working toward a goal of Zero Net Energy by 2050, making school buildings greener, creating pathways to green jobs and expanding climate change education. 

    Emma, far left, and Molly Weber, far right, work with climate leaders from the Boulder Valley School District’s Sunrise Movement to prepare for Colorado’s legislative session. Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber

    “It feels very demoralizing to see something you’ve been working so hard at get slashed back, especially since I’ve spoken to so many students from all over the country about these clean energy tax credits, being like, ‘These are the things that are available to you, and this is how you can help convince your school board to work on this,’” Emma Weber said.

    The Webers started thinking about other creative ways to pay for the clean energy transition and have settled on advocating for state-level legislation in the form of a climate superfund, where major polluters in a community would be responsible for contributing dollars to sustainability initiatives. 

    Consultants and sustainability coordinators said that they don’t see the demand for renewable energy going away. “Solar is the cheapest form of energy. It makes sense to put it on every rooftop that we can. And that’s true with or without tax credits,” Strehlow said. 

    *Correction: This version of the story includes updated information on the timeline for the expiration of tax credits for electric vehicle charging stations.

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected]. 

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

    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.

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  • A researcher’s view on using AI to become a better writer

    A researcher’s view on using AI to become a better writer

    Writing can be hard, equal parts heavy lifting and drudgery. No wonder so many students are turning to the time-saving allure of ChatGPT, which can crank out entire papers in seconds. It rescues them from procrastination jams and dreaded all-nighters, magically freeing up more time for other pursuits, like, say … doomscrolling.

    Of course, no one learns to be a better writer when someone else (or some AI bot) is doing the work for them. The question is whether chatbots can morph into decent writing teachers or coaches that students actually want to consult to improve their writing, and not just use for shortcuts.

    Maybe.

    Jennifer Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, has been studying how AI bots can be used to improve student writing for several years. In an interview, she explained why she is cautious about the ability of AI to make us better writers and is still testing how to use the new technology effectively.

    All in the timing 

    Meyer says that just because ChatGPT is available 24/7 doesn’t mean students should consult it at the start of the writing process. Instead, Meyer believes that students would generally learn more if they wrote a first draft on their own. 

    That’s when AI could be most helpful, she thinks. With some prompting, a chatbot could provide immediate writing feedback targeted to each students’ needs. One student might need to practice writing shorter sentences. Another might be struggling with story structure and outlining. AI could theoretically meet an entire classroom’s individual needs faster than a human teacher. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    In Meyer’s experiments, she inserted AI only after the first draft was done as part of the revision process. In a study published in 2024, she randomly assigned 200 German high school students to receive AI feedback after writing a draft of an essay in English. Their revised essays were stronger than those of 250 students who were also told to revise, but didn’t get help from AI. 

    In surveys, those with AI feedback also said they felt more motivated to rewrite than those who didn’t get feedback. That motivation is critical. Often students aren’t in the mood to rewrite, and without revisions, students can’t become better writers.

    Meyer doesn’t consider her experiment proof that AI is a great writing teacher. She didn’t compare it with how student writing improved after human feedback. Her experiment compared only AI feedback with no feedback. 

    Most importantly, one dose of AI writing feedback wasn’t enough to elevate students’ writing skills. On a second, fresh essay topic, the students who had previously received AI feedback didn’t write any better than the students who hadn’t been helped by AI.

    Related: AI writing feedback ‘better than I thought,’ top researcher says

    It’s unclear how many rounds of AI feedback it would take to boost a student’s writing skills more permanently, not just help revise the essay at hand. 

    And Meyer doesn’t know whether a student would want to keep discussing writing with an AI bot over and over again. Maybe students were willing to engage with it in this experiment because it was a novelty, but could soon tire of it. That’s next on Meyer’s research agenda.

    A viral MIT study

    A much smaller MIT study published earlier this year echoes Meyer’s theory. “Your Brain on ChatGPT” went viral because it seemed to say that using ChatGPT to help write an essay made students’ brains less engaged. Researchers found that students who wrote an essay without any online tools had stronger brain connectivity and activity than students who used AI or consulted Google to search for source materials. (Using Google while writing wasn’t nearly as bad for the brain as AI.) 

    Although those results made headlines, there was more to the experiment. The students who initially wrote an essay on their own were later given ChatGPT to help improve their essays. That switch to ChatGPT boosted brain activity, in contrast to what the neuroscientists found during the initial writing process. 

    Related: University students offload critical thinking, other hard work to AI

    These studies add to the evidence that delaying AI a bit, after some initial thinking and drafting, could be a sweet spot in learning. That’s something researchers need to test more. 

    Still, Meyer remains concerned about giving AI tools to very weak writers and to young children who haven’t developed basic writing skills. “This could be a real problem,” said Meyer. “It could be detrimental to use these tools too early.”

    Cheating your way to learning?

    Meyer doesn’t think it’s always a bad idea for students to ask ChatGPT to do the writing for them. 

    Just as young artists learn to paint by copying masterpieces in museums, students might learn to write better by copying good writing. (The late great New Yorker editor John Bennet taught Jill to write this way. He called it “copy work” and he encouraged his journalism students to do it every week by copying longhand the words of legendary writers, not AI.)

    Meyer suggests that students ask ChatGPT to write a sample essay that meets their teacher’s assignment and grading criteria. The next step is key. If students pretend it’s their own piece and submit it, that’s cheating. They’ve also offloaded cognitive work to technology and haven’t learned anything.

    Related: AI essay grading is already as ‘good as an overburdened’ teacher, but researchers say it needs more work

    But the AI essay can be an effective teaching tool, in theory, if students study the arguments, organizational structure, sentence construction and vocabulary before writing a new draft in their own words. Ideally, the next assignment should be better if students have learned through that analysis and internalized the style and techniques of the model essay, Meyer said. 

    “My hypothesis would be as long as there’s cognitive effort with it, as long as there’s a lot of time on task and like critical thinking about the output, then it should be fine,” said Meyer.

    Reconsidering praise

    Everyone likes a compliment. But too much praise can drown learning just as too much water can keep flowers from blooming.  

    ChatGPT has a tendency to pour the praise on thick and often begins with banal flattery, like “Great job!” even when a student’s writing needs a lot of work. In Meyer’s test of whether AI feedback can improve students’ writing, she intentionally told ChatGPT not to start with praise and instead go straight to constructive criticism.

    Her parsimonious approach to praise was inspired by a 2023 writing study about what motivates students to revise. The study found that when teachers started off with general praise, students were left with the false impression that their work was already good enough so they didn’t put in the extra effort to rewrite.

    Related: Asian American students lose more points in an AI essay grading study — but researchers don’t know why

    In Meyer’s experiment, the praise-free feedback was effective in getting students to revise and improve their essays. But she didn’t set up a direct competition between the two approaches — praise-free vs. praise-full — so we don’t know for sure which is more effective when students are interacting with AI.

    Being stingy with praise rubs real teachers the wrong way. After Meyer removed praise from the feedback, teachers told her they wanted to restore it. “They wondered about why the feedback was so negative,” Meyer said. “That’s not how they would do it.”

    Meyer and other researchers may one day solve the puzzle of how to turn AI chatbots into great writing coaches. But whether students will have the willpower or desire to forgo an instantly written essay is another matter. As long as ChatGPT continues to allow students to take the easy way out, it’s human nature to do so. 

    Shirley Liu is a graduate student in education at Northwestern University. Liu reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about using AI to become a better writer was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • UK still top choice for pathway students despite policy changes

    UK still top choice for pathway students despite policy changes

    International students are placing getting a quality education over policy developments – with the UK keeping its spot as the preferred desitnation for 80% of nearly 1,000 pathway students surveyed by NCUK.

    A new report covering the survey’s findings analyses data from 921 students across 88 countries studying an international foundation year or Master’s preparatino programs, looking at their motivations for studying in top destinations, as well as other preferences.

    It found that Australia was the second most popular choice, with 4% of students surveyed marking it as their preference, followed by Canada, the US, New Zealand and Ireland at 3%. Meanwhile, the most coveted programs are business and computer science, as the preferred subjects for just under a third (31%) of respondents.

    Students’ continued preference for the UK comes in spite of a slew of policy changes affecting international students. In May, the government unveiled its long-awaited immigration white paper, setting out the way Keir Starmer’s Labour party intends to tackle migration over the coming years.

    It included plans to reduce the Graduate Route by six months to a total of 18 months, as well as new compliance metrics that higher education institutions must in order to continue recrutiing international students. Tougher Basic Compliance Assessment (BCA) requirements are set to take effect this month, meaning that universities will face penalties if more than 5% of their students’ visas are rejected, down from 10%.

    And last September, the UK increased international student maintenance requirements for the first time since 2020. Under the new rules, students coming to London must show evidence of having £1,483 per month, while studying outside of London need proof that they have at least £1,136 per month.  

    But NCUK’s chief marketing officer Andy Howells pointed out that students are looking beyond arbitrary political decision when choosing their preferred study destination, thinking instead about their long-term prospects.

    “This research demonstrates that international students are sophisticated decision-makers who look beyond political headlines to focus on educational quality and career outcomes,” he said. “While policy changes generate significant discussion in our sector, students are primarily motivated by the academic excellence and opportunities that institutions can provide.”

    The survey found that, of a sample size of 646 students, just 12% who said they were considering studying in the UK said that financial requiremwnr increases would stop them from applying to UK instiutuons.

    However, the popularity of other major study destinations were ore impacted by political headwinds, the survey found.

    Over a third (36%) interested in applying the Australian institutions said that proposed international enrolment caps would affect their decision, while 26% of those looking to study in Canada said they would no longer apply to Canadian institutions over policy changes – particularly changes to the country’s postgraduate work permit scheme.

    And almost four in 10 (38%) considering the US said Donald Trump’s second presidency would negatively impact their choice to study in America.

    For the majority of students surveyed (69.9%), education quality is the primary driver leading them to seek study abroad opportunities, closely followed by enhanced career development opportunities (56.4%) and gaining new knowledge (55.2%).

    The survey also shone a light on students’ post-graduation plans. Half of respondents said they wanted to stay in their study destination, with 31% planning to work and 19% looking at further studies.

    This research demonstrates that international students are sophisticated decision-makers who look beyond political headlines to focus on educational quality and career outcomes
    Andy Howells, NCUK

    But a growing number of students plan to return to their hoe country immediately after graduating, with 23% saying they want to do this – up from 18% in last year’s survey.

    Immigration has continued to be a hot topic in the UK as the anti-immigration Reform party grows in popularity.

    Just earlier this week, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper drew ire from the international education sector after announcing that the government will be tougher on overseas students who make asylum claims that “lack merit” as a means to stay in the country after their visa expires.

    Some 10,000 students have already been texted and emailed warning them that they will not be allowed to stay in the UK if they have no legal right to remain and explicitly warning them against making bogus asylum claims.

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  • Top UK unis partner on career initiatives for India and China

    Top UK unis partner on career initiatives for India and China

    The University of Birmingham, home to over 2,000 Indian students, has partnered with the University of Glasgow to create a new in-country role in India employability relationship manager – who will be responsible for building links with employers, career services, and alumni networks to help graduates succeed in the local job market.

    According to a joint statement issued by the institutions, graduates will be offered practical support through pre-entry briefings, skills development programs, and post-graduation engagement.

    The two universities have also launched an exclusive partnership with the Chinese graduate career support organisation, JOBShaigui.

    The career portal, well regarded in China for its links to top employers, will offer a range of bespoke services, including online seminars with the latest job market insights, guidance on recruitment processes, access to an extensive employer network, and in-country networking events with alumni and employers.

    Both Birmingham and Glasgow, ranked among the QS global top 100, see China and India, with their combined 400,000 alumni worldwide, as priority markets.

    Offering enhanced career support is seen as crucial, as recent trends show a majority of students from these countries are choosing to return home after their study abroad journey.

    “More and more students, quite reasonably, are saying: I want to know what my employment prospects are after getting a degree. We do a lot to prepare students for their future careers while they study with us, but it has become increasingly clear that we must also support them after they graduate,” Robin Mason, pro-vice-chancellor (international) at the University of Birmingham, told The PIE News.

    “Our two largest cohorts of international students are from China and India, so we said: for these two really important countries, we’re going to create in-country support for careers and employability career fairs, interview preparation, CV workshops, all those sorts of things.”

    Increasingly, after that period of work in the UK, Indian graduates are looking to come back home to India
    Robin Mason, University of Birmingham

    While both Birmingham and Glasgow already collaborate on joint research, particularly in the medical field, the career support initiative made sense as the cost could be shared between the two universities, according to Mason.

    Moreover, the universities expect the initiative to be particularly successful in India, from where students make up the largest cohort of graduate visa holders.

    “Particularly Indian students, more than Chinese students, want to stay in the UK after graduation. But increasingly, after that period of work in the UK, Indian graduates are looking to come back home to India,” stated Mason.

    According to Mason, while most Indian students prefer fields such as computer science, data science, engineering, business management, finance, economics, and health-related subjects, in principle students of any discipline, “even classics, English, or history”, will be supported equally in their careers back in India.

    The initiatives also come at a time when international students in the UK are being urged to “sharpen their skills” for both the UK and global job markets, as employers increasingly look beyond “textbook skills” to focus on a candidate’s ability to bring innovation to the table.

    Further plans in India for University of Birmingham

    Although the University of Birmingham operates an overseas campus in Dubai, an attractive option for Indian students given its proximity to the UK and large Indian community, the institution has no plans to establish a campus in India anytime soon.

    Instead, it is focusing on initiatives such as the in-country employability role and partnerships with local institutions.

    While the University of Birmingham offers dual degrees with Jinan University in China in fields such as maths, economics, statistics, and computing, it is now exploring a partnership with IIT Bombay in India in areas such as quantum technology, energy systems, AI, and healthcare, building on its successful venture with IIT Madras.

    “If you do it properly, campuses are very expensive things. I don’t think you do these things lightly. You have to make the investment and be there for the long term,” said Mason. “Birmingham is 125 years old this year, and you need to be thinking in terms of decades if you’re going to build a campus. It’s a really long-term commitment because it takes so much time and investment to build a high-quality university.”

    As part of its 125-year celebrations, the institution also announced scholarships for Indian students, offering funding of £4,000 to £5,000 for a wide range of postgraduate taught master’s degrees starting in September 2025.

    “As part of our 125th anniversary celebrations, we introduced a special scholarship, offering up to 40% funding for students joining our Dubai campus,” stated Devesh Anand, regional director, South Asia and Middle East, University of Birmingham.

    “This was combined with academic and merit-based scholarships, giving students the opportunity to access multiple forms of support. The response has been fantastic, as students saw it as a real achievement and recognition of their efforts.”

    The number of Indian students studying in the UK remains high, with the Home Office data showing 98,014 study visas granted in the year ending June 2025.

    However, not everything is rosy, as students are increasingly concerned about their future in light of the immigration white paper, which proposes reducing the Graduate Route by six months and imposing a levy on international student fees.

    In such a situation, the aim for institutions like the University of Birmingham is to remain attractive to graduates seeking employment opportunities.

    “What we have to ensure is that University of Birmingham graduates are career-ready and can get the sorts of jobs that allow them to continue working in the UK if they want to, so they can be sponsored by an employer at the required graduate-level salary,” said Mason.

    “To put it delicately, I think the universities that will struggle with the immigration changes are those not paying enough attention to employability. If your graduates are employable, it’s not an issue.”

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  • A largely invisible role of international students: Fueling the innovation economy

    A largely invisible role of international students: Fueling the innovation economy

    PITTSBURGH — Saisri Akondi had already started a company in her native India when she came to Carnegie Mellon University to get a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, business and design.

    Before she graduated, she had co-founded another: D.Sole, for which Akondi, who is 28, used the skills she’d learned to create a high-tech insole that can help detect foot complications from diabetes, which results in 6.8 million amputations a year.

    D.Sole is among technology companies in Pittsburgh that collectively employ a quarter of the local workforce at wages much higher than those in the city’s traditional steel and other metals industries. That’s according to the business development nonprofit the Pittsburgh Technology Council, which says these companies pay out an annual $27.5 billion in salaries alone.

    A “significant portion” of Pittsburgh’s transformation into a tech hub has been driven by international students like Akondi, said Sean Luther, head of InnovatePGH, a coalition of civic groups and government agencies promoting innovation businesses.

    The Pittsburgh Innovation District along Forbes Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, near the campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report

    “Next Happens Here,” reads the sign above the entrance to the co-working space where Luther works and technology companies are incubated, in an area near Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh dubbed the Pittsburgh Innovation District. The neighborhood is filled with people of various ethnicities speaking a variety of languages over lunch and coffee.

    What might happen next to the international students and graduates who have helped fuel this tech economy has become an anxiety-inducing subject of those conversations, as the second presidential administration of Donald Trump brings visa crackdowns, funding cuts and other attacks on higher education — including here, in a state that voted for Trump.

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    Inside the bubble of the universities and the tech sector, “there’s so much support you get,” Akondi observed, in a gleaming conference room at Carnegie Mellon. “But there still is a part of the population that asks, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”

    Much of the ongoing conversation about international students has focused on undergraduates and their importance to university revenues and enrollment. Many of these students — especially in graduate schools — fill a less visible role in the economy, however. They conduct research that can lead to commercial applications, have skills employers need and start a surprising number of their own companies in the United States.

    Sean Luther, head of InnovatePGH, at one of the organization’s co-working spaces. One reason tech companies have come to Pittsburgh “is because of those non-native-born workers,” Luther says. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report

    “The high-tech engineering and computer science activities that are central to regional economic development today are hugely dependent on these students,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies technology and innovation. “If you go into a lab, it will be full of non-American people doing the crucial research work that leads to intellectual property, technology partnerships and startups.”

    Some 143 U.S. companies valued at $1 billion or more were started by people who came to the country as international students, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit that conducts research on immigration and trade. These companies have an average of 860 employees each and include SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.

    Whether or not they invent new products or found businesses of their own, international graduates are “a vital source” of workers for U.S.-based tech companies, the National Science Foundation reported last year in an annual survey on the state of American science and engineering. 

    Dave Mawhinney, founding executive director of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University, with Saisri Akondi, an international graduate and co-founder of the startup D.Sole. “There still is a part of the population that asks, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” says Akondi. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report

    It’s supply and demand, said Dave Mawhinney, a professor of entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon and founding executive director of its Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, which helps many of that school’s students do research that can lead to products and startups. “And the demand for people with those skills exceeds the supply.”

    States with the most international students

    California: 140,858

    New York: 135,813

    Texas: 89,546

    Massachusetts: 82,306

    Illinois: 62,299

    Pennsylvania: 50,514

    Florida: 44,767

    Source: NAFSA: Association of International Educators. Figures are from the 2023-24 academic year, the most recent available.

    Related: So much for saving the planet. Climate careers, and many others, evaporate for class of 2025

    That’s in part because comparatively few Americans are going into fields including science, technology, engineering and math. Even before the pandemic disrupted their educations, only 20 percent of college-bound American high school students were prepared for college-level courses in these subjects. U.S. students scored lower in math than their counterparts in 21 of the 37 participating nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on an international assessment test in 2022, the most recent year for which the outcomes are available.

    One result is that international students make up more than a third of master’s and doctoral degree recipients in science and engineering at American universities. Two-thirds of U.S. university graduate students and more than half of workers in AI and AI-related fields are foreign born, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. 

    “A real point of strength, and a reason our robotics companies especially have been able to grow their head counts, is because of those non-native-born workers,” said Luther, in Pittsburgh. “Those companies are here specifically because of that talent.”

    International students are more than just contributors to this city’s success in tech. “They have been drivers” of it, Mawhinney said, in his workspace overlooking the studio where the iconic children’s television program “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was taped. 

    Jake Mohin, director of solution engineering at a company that uses AI to predict how chemicals will synthesize, uses a co-working space at InnovatePGH in Pittsburgh’s Innovation District. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report

    “Every year, 3,000 of the smartest people in the world come here, and a large proportion of those are international,” he said of Carnegie Mellon’s graduate students. “Some of them go into the research laboratories and work on new ideas, and some come having ideas already. You have fantastic students who are here to help you build your company or to be entrepreneurs themselves.”

    Boosters of the city’s tech-driven turnaround say what’s been happening in Pittsburgh is largely unappreciated elsewhere. It followed the effective collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s, when unemployment hit 18 percent.

    In 2006, Google opened a small office at Carnegie Mellon to take advantage of the faculty and student expertise in computer science and other fields there and at neighboring higher education institutions; the company later moved to a nearby former Nabisco factory and expanded its Pittsburgh workforce to 800 employees. Apple, software and AI giant SAP and other tech firms followed.

    “It was the talent that brought them here, and so much of that talent is international,” said Audrey Russo, CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council. 

    Sixty-one percent of the master’s and doctoral students at Carnegie Mellon come from abroad, according to the university. So do 23 percent of those at Pitt, an analysis of federal data shows.

    Related: International students are rethinking coming to the US. That’s a problem for colleges

    The city has become a world center for self-driving car technology. Uber opened an advanced research center here. The autonomous vehicle company Motional — a joint venture between Hyundai and the auto parts supplier Aptiv — moved in. So did the Ford- and Volkswagen-backed Argo AI, which eventually dissolved, but whose founders went on to create the Pittsburgh-based self-driving truck developer Stack AV. The Ford subsidiary Latitude AI and the autonomous flight company Near Earth Autonomy also are headquartered in Pittsburgh.

    Among other tech firms with homes here: Duolingo, which has 830 employees and is worth an estimated $22 billion. It was co-founded by a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a graduate of the university who both came to the United States as international students, from Guatemala and Switzerland, respectively.

    InnovatePGH tracks 654 startups that are smaller than those big conglomerates but together employ an estimated 25,000 workers. Unemployment in Pittsburgh (3.5 percent in April) is below the national average (3.9 percent). Now Pitt and others are developing Hazelwood Green, which includes a former steel mill that closed in 1999, into a new district housing life sciences, robotics and other technology companies. 

    In a series of webinars about starting businesses, offered jointly to students at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, the most popular installment is about how to found a startup on a student visa, said Rhonda Schuldt, director of Pitt’s Big Idea Center, in a storefront on Forbes Avenue in the Innovation District.

    One of the co-working spaces operated by InnovatePHG in the Pittsburgh Innovation District. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report

    Some international undergraduates continue into graduate school or take jobs with companies that sponsor them so they can keep working on their ideas, Schuldt said.

    “They want to stay in Pittsburgh and build businesses here,” she said.

    There are clear worries that this momentum could come to a halt if the supply of international students continues a slowdown that began even before the new Trump term, thanks to visa processing delays and competition from other countries. 

    The number of international graduate students dropped in the fall by 2 percent, before the presidential election, according to the Institute of International Education. Further declines are expected following the government’s pause on student visa interviews, publicity surrounding visa revocations and arrests and cuts to federal research funding.

    Rhonda Schuldt, director of the Big Idea Center at the University of Pittsburgh. International students “want to stay in Pittsburgh and build businesses here,” Schuldt says. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report

    It’s too early to know what will happen this fall. But D. Sole co-founder Saisri Akondi has heard from friends who planned to come to the United States that they can’t get visas. “Most of these students wanted to start companies,” she said. 

    “I would be lying if I said nothing has changed,” said Akondi, who has been accepted into a master’s degree program in business administration at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business under her existing student visa, though she said her company will stay in Pittsburgh. “The fear has increased.”

    Related: Colleges partnered with an EV battery factory to train students and ignite the economy. Trump’s clean energy war complicates their plans

    This could affect whether tech companies continue to come to Pittsburgh, said Russo, at least unless and until more Americans are better prepared for and recruited into tech-related graduate programs. That’s something universities have not yet begun to do, since the unanticipated threat to their international students erupted only in March, and that would likely take years.

    Audrey Russo, CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council. If the number of international students declines, “Who’s going to do the research? Who’s going to be in these teams?” she asks. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report

    “Who’s going to do the research? Who’s going to be in these teams?” asked Russo. “We’re hurting ourselves deeply.”

    The impact could transcend the research and development ecosystem. “I think we’ll see almost immediate ramifications in Pittsburgh in terms of higher-skilled, higher-wage companies hiring here,” said Sean Luther, at InnovatePGH. “And that affects the grocery shops, the barbershops, the real estate.”

    There are other, more nuanced impacts. 

    Mike Madden, left, vice president of InnovatePGH and director of the Pittsburgh Innovation District, talks with University of Pittsburgh graduate student Jayden Serenari in one of InnovatePGH’s co-working spaces. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report

    “Whether we like it or not, it’s a global world. It’s a global economy. The problems that these students want to solve are global problems,” Schuldt said. “And one of the things that is really important in solving the world’s problems is to have a robust mix of countries, of cultures — that opportunity to learn how others see the world. That is one of the most valuable things students tell us they get here.”

    Pittsburgh is a prime example of a place whose economy is vulnerable to a decline in the number of international students, said Brookings’ Muro. But it’s not unique.

    “These scholars become entrepreneurs. They’re adding to the U.S. economy new ideas and new companies,” he said. Without them, “the economy would be smaller. Research wouldn’t get done. Journal articles wouldn’t be written. Patents wouldn’t be filed. Fewer startups would occur.”

    The United States, said Muro, “has cleaned up by being the absolute central place for this. The system has been incredibly beneficial to the United States. The hottest technologies are inordinately reliant on these excellent minds from around the world. And their being here is critical to American leadership.”

    Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

    This story about international students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

    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.

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  • 2025 Top Tools for Learning Votes – Teaching in Higher Ed

    2025 Top Tools for Learning Votes – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Drat. I missed getting to officially contribute to the votes for this year’s Top 100 Tools for Learning, collected and analyzed by Jane Hart. I’m still going to write mine up, as I do like to reflect on the tools I’m relying on for my own and others’ learning, but I’ll need to wait until 2026 to get back into the mix of having my votes reflected in the grand total.

    I used to be more regular with my votes, but did miss a few along the way. Here are my past Top 100 Tools for Learning: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2024. I avoid looking at the prior year’s lists until I have identified my votes for current year.

    This year, given that I missed the deadline for submitting my top ten list, I’m using a longer format than normal and structuring this reflection on Harold Jarche’s personal knowledge (PKM) framework, since so much of my learning is centered on it:

    Seek > Sense > Share

    Throughout all of my days, I’m plugged into intentional ways of seeking knowledge, wisdom, and sources of curiosity. In a way, sense-making is a part of my way of being, especially on those days when I allow myself to slow down enough for the deeper insights. Finally, I’m someone who delights in fueling my curiosity and imagination even further by sharing what I’m learning and inviting others to do the same.

    Curious to learn more about personal knowledge mastery? My absolute favorite source for more than a decade now is Harold Jarche, who defines PKM as:

    Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. PKM keeps us afloat in a sea of information — guided by professional communities and buoyed by social networks. – Harold Jarche

    Those who want to dig even deeper should consider joining Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery cohort, starting in October 2025. Me: Going to look at my schedule and seeing if I’ve got the time to dive in at that time this year. Good stuff.

    Seek

    Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources. Good curators are valued members of knowledge networks. – Harold Jarche

    Overcast

    Not a day goes by that I don’t use Overcast, my preferred podcast catcher. On my iPhone, it is always my most used app on any given week.

    Get ready to celebrate International Podcast Day on September 30. I’ve already got an episode queued up featuring Dominic Conroy & Warren Kidd to commemorate the event. Get your ears on and subscribe to Teaching in Higher Ed, if you haven’t already, using your favorite podcast app (search for Teaching in Higher Ed and hit subscribe/follow), YouTube, or Spotify.

    While my backlog of episodes yet to be listened to is ridiculously long, Overcast’s playlists feature means I can tailor my audio consumption according to genre (news, technology, teaching, etc.), to my incoming priority/preferred podcasts, or to the queue list I have saved for the good stuff I want to get to when I have long drives or alone time.

    Unread

    While Overcast is for the spoken word, Unread is primarily for written pieces. Powered by real simple syndication (RSS), Unread presents me headlines of unread stories across all sorts of categories, which I can tap (on my iPad) to read, or scroll past to automatically mark as read. I use Unread in conjunction with Inoreader, which is a robust RSS aggregator that can either be used as an RSS reader, as well, or can be used in conjunction with an RSS reader, such as Unread. – From my 2024 Top 10 blog post (note: I only copied this text over after identifying what tools would be on this year’s list, as in I didn’t “cheat”).

    One of the things I love about Unread is that I an perform the entire reading process with two thumbs (insert that joke/about “who has two thumbs and can…” and then add “operate Unread” at the end of it). I can browse the different folders/collections I have set up to skim headlines. When I want to read one of the stories associated with a given headline, I can go into it and read with just a tap. To get back out to the headlines, again, I just swipe right.

    One big update that Unread 4.5 gave us is support for reading paywalled articles within the app. As of me writing this, I haven’t had a chance to experiment with that feature, but am excited to do so over this long, holiday weekend in the U.S. Anything I can do to reduce friction in my PKM system helps me be able to expand my possibilities for deeper learning.

    YouTube

    Once I found out that I could subscribe to new YouTube videos on my RSS reader, Inoreader, it changed how often I watch YouTube videos. That, plus subscribing to YouTube Premium, which means we get ad-free viewing as a family, makes me spending a lot more time with YouTube. I even have my own YouTube channel, which I occasionally post videos on. – From 2024 Top ten post

    YouTube Premium continues to be a way of life for our entire family. If you watch a lot of YouTube and don’t have a means for watching ad-free, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

    This past year, we added a Teaching in Higher Ed YouTube Channel. Each time an audio podcast episode gets posted on our hosting platform, Blubrry, it automatically gets shared on the channel. They used to not allow audio-only podcasts on the platform but made changes their rules such that now it is encouraged. In addition to listening to Teaching in Higher Ed, or watching an episode with Dr. Stephenie Cawthon accompanied by two ASL interpreters, you can also see other videos I’ve made this past year, such as:

    Kindle App

    I primarily read digitally and find the Kindle iPad app to be the easiest route for reading. I read more, in total, when I am disciplined about using the Kindle hardware, but wind up grabbing my iPad most nights. – 2024 Top 10 Post

    Audible

    New on the list for this year is Audible. I was attempting for a few months to better balance my daily news reading with sources that would give me a longer-term view of the world. As I write these words, I feel like I’m back to failing at this, but it was a good pursuit there for a while. Part of this attempt at balancing was made possible through listening to audio books in addition to podcast episodes.

    Sometimes audio is better because it allows us to get more reading into our days. Other times, audio does something that the written word could never do. In the list below of some favorite audio boos from this past year, I’ll indicate with (best via audio book) at the end of the line if the audio book was particularly geared toward the audio medium.

    Sense

    Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing. – Harold Jarche

    StoryGraph

    I decided to move off of Amazon’s Goodreads for my reading tracking this year and have been loving StoryGraph so far. I just wish more people were there to be friends with and share reading ideas. What I mostly use StoryGraph for is setting an annual reading goal and tracking my progress toward that. I also have quite a large queue of books I would like to read someday.

    I understand that some people have a hard time finding something to read. This is not my problem. Trust me. I’ve got the what to possibly read thing down pat. But for those who are looking for suggestions, StoryGraph has that feature nailed, too. If anyone is on StoryGraph and wants to connect, my StoryGraph username is Bonni208 (as it is across most social networks that I’m on). Those curious about why the number 208 is significant to me, check out Teaching in Higher Ed Episode 208, where Dave helps me tell the 208 origin story.

    Obsidian

    Dave has been using Obsidian for years now and long-heralded the way that these types of note apps don’t lock you in, long-term. Using plain text (Markdown) documents that are stored where you want to keep them (not locked within the note service/subscription/app) means that Obsidian gets used as a way of viewing and adding to your plain text documents. That’s an oversimplification and one that meant I took longer than others to get to the party that is Obsidian.

    One thing to know about Obsidian is that there is a learning curve. I would suggest not trying to go your own way on it, but instead to invest in some tools to help with your onboarding. I have three recommendations:

    • The MacSparky Obsidian Field Guide – This course takes you through how to get started with Obsidian and set up systems to use this note-taking powerhouse to fuel your capacity for learning and teaching.
    • Obsidian Starter Vault from Mike Schmitz – It can be hard starting from an entirely blank slate in Obsidian, so this starter vault can give you some content to work from and some tips for how to: “get more out of your notes and ideas effortlessly.”
    • LifeHQ from Mike Schmitz – If you want to go even further with a system built by someone else, you can check out this extensive, customizable vault. I purchased it and over time have found ways to combine how Mike uses Obsidian to something that works better for me, most notably to incorporate my own custom version of Johnny Decimal (which I call Bonni Decimal; Let’s just say it has some emojis in the mix, in addition to the decimals/numbers, which I find quite satisfying) and doesn’t attempt to incorporate task management the way Mike has, instead relying on my beloved OmniFocus Pro.

    ChatGPT

    Ok. Here goes. I use artificial intelligence, despite knowing that there are plenty of ethical reasons that people may choose not to use AI. I encourage anyone thinking about shaming me or others who use it to read Maha Bali’s post suggesting that we not jump straight to that binary way of thinking about peoples’ use of these technologies. I don’t use it without continually refining my knowledge of what it is and isn’t capable of… but I do find that to be effective in my job, I am required to use it. Additionally, to enable us to cost-effectively offer transcripts for our podcasts and otherwise make our materials more accessible, AI is a must there, too.

    I list ChatGPT here, since that is my most frequently-used AI tool, as it relates to learning. I pay for the $20/month paid service and occasionally find myself needing to use the separate pay-as-you-go API key for nichè use-cases. I asked ChatGPT to use what it knows about me to list off the ways that I use it in my learning (seeking, sensing, and sharing), and here is an edited version of it’s bulleted output:

    • Seeking: exploring big questions about teaching, learning, and AI; summarizing complex articles or reports.
    • Sensing: refining my “messy”/“chicken scratch” notes into themes, comparing frameworks, and generating questions that deepen reflection and conversation (with colleagues, students, or even my own family).
    • Sharing: drafting polished communications – everything from faculty emails and strategic planning documents to podcast show notes and library fundraising blurbs.
    • Iterating: co-creating interactive materials (like Twine games, PollEverywhere prompts, or Canva copy) where I can ask ChatGPT to generate multiple versions until it “clicks.”
    • Blending Personal + Professional Contexts: whether it’s planning a weekly meal prep strategy, crafting conference questions, or designing playful activities for faculty, ChatGPT helps me weave learning into both my work and life.

    It didn’t mention this, but I have been closely following Mike Caulfield‘s experimentation and research on what it can do using argumentation theory to come alongside us in our fact checking with his Deep Background GPT. There’s so much more I could say here, but I’ll save it for future posts.

    Readwise

    It is so easy to highlight sections of what I’m reading on the Kindle app and have those highlights sync over to a service called Readwise. The service “makes it easy to revisit and learn from your ebook and article highlights. – 2024 Top 10 post

    I saw a video the other night which made mention of the ability to sync Readwise highlights with Obsidian (note taking tool) and that got me excited about that possibility. For now, I’ll be disciplined about placing that idea on my someday/maybe list and not going down the rabbit hole at this exact moment. Another thing on my someday/maybe list to look into more is Lance Eaton’s AI Practice: Building My Quote Collection.

    Share

    Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues. – Harold Jarche

    Raindrop

    Much of my digital life revolves around digital bookmarking. I could have easily placed Raindrop in with sense making, as on an almost hourly basis, I find myself saving links and placing them in all the various collections (which are like folders) I have on Raindrop and applying tags. Whether I’m reading on my web browser, or via my smartphone or tablet, I can easily save bookmarks and have them accessible to me anytime in the future.

    Just the other day, I was talking with a friend who is doing a lot of reflection and reading about loneliness and I asked if he had ever watched Andrea Dorfman’s How To Be Alone. He hadn’t and it was such a delight to be able to resurface that masterpiece and share it with him. I had an insight while watching it this time that since I have been spending more time working in our library lately that it seems like it may be the one place students feel more comfortable being alone than in other spots.

    Another fun discovery, found within the deep crevasses of Raindrop was The Gap, by Ira Glass. “Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you… Most everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, went through this phase for a few years…” Ira normalizes this gap of knowing what you’re doing could be better and being able to “fight your way through the gap.”

    While most of my saved bookmarks (tags and collections) are private, I did decide recently to make an RSS feed and page with my saved links within an AI collection from Raindrop. This means that each time I save something related to AI on Raindrop, that anyone subscribed to that feed will have it show up in their RSS aggregator. Additionally, anyone who visits the page will see everything I’ve saved about AI within Raindrop. Candidly, as public as I am with the podcast and many other things, sharing this feed makes me a bit nervous, as I wouldn’t want people to think that I’m necessarily endorsing everything I’m saving. I’m pretty sure people would know that but given how polarizing the topic of AI can be, I still feel a bit nervous about this aspect of my sharing.

    Your Turn

    Would you like to submit a vote with your Top Tools for Learning? Unfortunately, you’re in the same boat as me and will need to wait until 2026. In the meantime, watch out for the 2025 Top Tools for Learning results to be posted by Monday, September 1, 2025.

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  • TRIO helps low-income students get to and through college. Trump wants to end it

    TRIO helps low-income students get to and through college. Trump wants to end it

    MOREHEAD, Ky. — The summer after ninth grade, Zoey Griffith found herself in an unfamiliar setting: a dorm on the Morehead State University campus.

    There, she’d spend the months before her sophomore year taking classes in core subjects including math and biology and electives like oil painting. 

    For Griffith, it was an opportunity, but a scary one. “It was a big deal for me to live on campus at the age of 14,” she said. Morehead State is about an hour from her hometown of Maysville. “I was nervous, and I remember that I cried the first time that my dad left me on move-in day.”

    Her mother became a parent as a teenager and urged her daughter to avoid the same experience. Griffith’s father works as a mechanic, and he frowns upon the idea of higher education, she said. 

    And so college back then seemed a distant and unlikely idea.

    But Griffith’s stepsister had introduced her to a federal program called Upward Bound. It places high school students in college dorms during the summer, where they can take classes and participate in workshops on preparing for the SAT and financial literacy. During the school year, students get tutoring and work on what are called individual success plans.

    Upward Bound students test the robots they built in their robotics class – evaluating for programming and mechanical issues. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Upward Bound Programs

    It’s part of a group of federal programs, known as TRIO, aimed at helping low-income and first-generation students earn a college degree, often becoming the first in their families to do so. 

    So, thanks to that advice from her stepsister, Kirsty Beckett, who’s now 27 and pursuing a doctorate in psychology, Griffith signed up and found herself in that summer program at Morehead State. Now, Griffith is enrolled at Maysville Community and Technical College, with plans to become an ultrasound technician.

    Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    TRIO, once a group of three programs — giving it a name that stuck — is now the umbrella over eight some dating back to 1965. Together, they serve roughly 870,000 students nationwide a year.

    It has worked with millions of students and has bipartisan support in Congress. Some in this part of the Appalachian region of Kentucky, and across the country, worry about students who won’t get the same assistance if President Donald Trump ends federal spending on the program. 

    Students Zoey Griffith, left, and Aniyah Caldwell, right, say the Upward Bound program has been life-changing for them. Upward Bound is one of eight federal programs under the TRIO umbrella. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report

    A White House budget proposal would eliminate spending on TRIO. The document says “access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means” and puts the onus on colleges to recruit and support students.

    Advocates note that the programs, which cost roughly $1.2 billion each year, have a proven track record. Students in Upward Bound, for example, are more than twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than other students from some of the nation’s poorest households, according to the Council for Opportunity in Education. COE is a nonprofit that represents TRIO programs nationwide and advocates for expanded opportunities for first-generation, low-income students.

    For the high school class of 2022, 74 percent of Upward Bound students enrolled immediately in college — compared with only 56 percent of high school graduates in the bottom income quartile. 

    Upward Bound is for high school students, like Griffith. Another TRIO program, Talent Search, helps middle and high school students, without the residential component. One called Student Support Services (SSS) provides tutoring, advising and other assistance to at-risk college students. Another program prepares students for graduate school and doctoral degrees, and yet another trains TRIO staff.

    A 2019 study found that after four years of college, students in SSS were 48 percent more likely to complete an associate’s degree or certificate, or transfer to a four-year institution, than a comparable group of students with similar backgrounds and similar levels of high school achievement who were not in the program. 

    “TRIO has been around for 60 years,” said Kimberly Jones, the president of COE. “We’ve produced millions of college graduates. We know it works.”

    Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more

    Yet Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the White House refer to the programs as a “relic of the past.” 

    Jones countered that census data shows that “students from the poorest families still earn college degrees at rates far below that of students from the highest-income families,” demonstrating continued need for TRIO.

    McMahon is challenging that and pushing for further study of those TRIO success rates. In 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that even though the Education Department collects data on TRIO participants, “the agency has gaps in its evidence on program effectiveness.” The GAO criticized the Education Department for having “outdated” studies on some TRIO programs, and no studies at all for others. Since then, the department has expanded its evaluations of TRIO. 

    East Main Street in Morehead, Kentucky, just outside of Morehead State’s campus. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report

    During a Senate subcommittee hearing in June, McMahon acknowledged “there is some effectiveness of the programs, in many circumstances.”

    Still, she said there is not enough research to justify TRIO’s total cost. “That’s a real drawback in these programs,” McMahon said. 

    Now, she is asking lawmakers to eliminate TRIO spending after this year and has already canceled some previously approved TRIO grants. 

    Related: A big reason rural students never go to college: No one recruits them 

    “What are we supposed to do, especially here in eastern Kentucky?” asked David Green, a former Upward Bound participant who is now marketing director for a pair of Kentucky hospitals.

    Green lives in a region that has some of the nation’s highest rates of unemployment, cancer and opioid addiction. “I mean, these people have big hearts, they want to grow,” he added. Cutting these programs amounts to “stifling us even more than we’re already stifled.”

    Green described his experience with TRIO at Morehead State in the mid-1980s as “one of the best things that ever happened to me.” 

    He grew up in a home without running water in Maysville, a city of about 8,000 people. It was on a TRIO trip to Washington, D.C., he recalled, that he stayed in a hotel for the first time. Green remembers bringing two suitcases so he could pack a pillow, sheets and comforter — unaware the hotel room would have its own.

    He met students from other towns and with different backgrounds. Some became lifelong friends. Green learned table manners, the kind of thing often required in business settings. After college, he was so grateful for TRIO that he became one of its tutors, working with the next generation of students. 

    TRIO’s all-encompassing nature makes it unique among college access programs, said Tom Stritikus, the president of Occidental College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles. He was previously president of Fort Lewis College, a public liberal arts school in Colorado with a large Native American student population. At both institutions, Stritikus said, he witnessed the effectiveness of TRIO’s methods, which he described as a “soup to nuts” menu of services for at-risk students trying to be the first in their families to earn degrees.

    After participating in the Upward Bound program, David Green has had a successful career, becoming a community leader in his hometown of Maysville, Kentucky. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report

    Jones, of the Council for Opportunity in Education, said she is cautiously optimistic that Congress will continue funding TRIO, despite the Trump administration’s request. The programs serve students in all 50 states. According to the COE, about 34 percent are white, 32 percent are Black, 23 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3 percent are Native American. TRIO’s guidelines require that a majority of participants come from families making less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of four living in the contiguous United States, that’s a max of $48,225 a year.

    Related: How Trump is changing higher education: The view from 4 campuses

    In May, Rep. Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican, called TRIO “one of the most effective programs in the federal government,” which, he said, is supported by “many, many members of Congress.” 

    In June, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia and a former TRIO employee, spoke about its importance to her state. TRIO helps “a student that really needs the extra push, the camaraderie, the community,” she said. “I’ve gone to their graduations, and been their speaker, and it’s really quite delightful to see how far they’ve come, in a short period of time.”

    TRIO survived, with its funding intact, when the Senate appropriations committee approved its budget last month. The House is expected to take up its version of the annual appropriations bill for education in early September. Both chambers ultimately have to agree on federal spending, a process that could drag on until December, leaving TRIO’s fate in Congress uncertain. 

    While lawmakers debate its future, the Trump administration could also delay or halt TRIO funding on its own. Earlier this year, the administration took the unprecedented step of unilaterally canceling about 20 previously approved new and continuing TRIO grants.

    At Morehead State, leaders say the university — and the region it serves — need the boost it receives from TRIO: While roughly 38 percent of American adults have earned at least a bachelor’s degree, in Kentucky, that figure is only 16 percent. And, locally, it’s 7 percent, according to Summer Fawn Bryant, the director of TRIO’s Talent Search programs at the university. 

    Summer Fawn Bryant, center, is director of TRIO’s Talent Search programs at Morehead State University in Kentucky. She stands with former TRIO students Alexandria Daniel, left, and Blake Thayer, right. Credit: Photo courtesy of Summer Fawn Bryant

    TRIO works to counter the stigma of attending college that still exists in parts of eastern Kentucky, Bryant said. A student from a humble background who is considering college, she said, might be scolded with the phrase: Don’t get above your raisin’.

    “A parent may say it,” Bryant said. “A teacher may say it.” 

    She added that she’s seen time and again how these programs can turn around the lives of young students facing adversity. 

    Students like Beth Cockrell, an Upward Bound alum from Pineville, Ky., who said her mom struggled with parenting. “Upward Bound stepped in as that kind of co-parent and helped me decide what my major was going to be.” 

    Cockrell went on to earn three degrees at Morehead State and has worked as a teacher for the past 19 years. She now works with students at her alma mater and teaches third grade at Conkwright Elementary School, about an hour away.

    In a few years, 17-year-old Upward Bound student Isaac Bocook plans to join the teaching ranks too — as a middle school social studies teacher. Bocook said he was indecisive about what to study after high school, but he finally figured it out after attending a career fair at Morehead State’s historic Button Auditorium. 

    Upward Bound students visit the Great Lake Science Center in Cleveland for the end-of-summer educational trip. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Upward Bound Programs

    Bocook lives in Lewis County, with just under 13,000 residents and a single public high school. At Morehead State’s TRIO program, Bocook met teenagers from across the entire region, which he said improved his social skills. TRIO also helped him with all kinds of paperwork on the pathway to adulthood. Filling out financial aid forms. Writing scholarship applications. Crafting a resume.

    “I’m just truly grateful to have TRIO, as sort of like a hand to hold,” Bocook said.

    His need for guidance is similar to what students at Morgan County High School in West Liberty, Kentucky, experience, said Lori Keeton, the school guidance counselor. The challenge facing these first-generation students, she said, is that “you just simply don’t know what you don’t know.”

    As the sole counselor for 550 students, Keeton doesn’t have time to help each student navigate the complex college-application process and said she worries that some of her students will apply to fewer colleges, or no colleges at all, if TRIO disappears. 

    TRIO’s Talent Search program serves about 100 students at her high school, and roughly another dozen are part of Upward Bound. Each program has a dedicated counselor who visits regularly to guide and assist students.

    Related: From gangs to college

    Sherry Adkins, an eastern Kentucky native who attended TRIO more than 50 years ago and went on to become a registered nurse, said efforts to cut TRIO spending ignore the long-term benefits. “Do you want all of these people that are disadvantaged to continue like that? Where they’re taking money from society? Or do you want to help prepare us to become successful people who pay lots of taxes?”

    As Washington considers TRIO’s future, program directors like Bryant, at Morehead State, press forward. She has preserved a text message a former student sent her two years ago to remind her of what’s at stake.

    After finishing college, the student was attending a conference on child abuse when a presenter showed a slide that included the quote: “Every child who winds up doing well has had at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive adult.”

    “Forever thankful,” the student texted Bryant, “that you were that supportive adult for me.”

    Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, securely on Signal at NirviShah.14 or via email at [email protected]. 

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

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • A ‘Great Defection’ threatens to empty universities and colleges of top teaching talent

    A ‘Great Defection’ threatens to empty universities and colleges of top teaching talent

    Paulina Cossette spent six years getting a doctoral degree with the goal of becoming a university professor. But it wasn’t long before she gave up on that path.

    With higher education under political assault, and opportunities as well as job security diminished by enrollment declines, Cossette felt burnt out and disillusioned. So she quit her hard-won job as an assistant professor of American government at a small private college in Maryland and used the skills she’d learned to go into business for herself as a freelance copy editor.

    Now Cossette is hearing from other newly minted Ph.D.s and tenured faculty who want out — so many, she’s expanded her business to help them leave academia, as she did. 

    Seemingly relentless attacks and funding cuts since the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have been “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Cossette, who left higher education on the eve of the pandemic, in 2019. “I’m hearing from a lot more people that it’s too much.”

    An exodus appears to be under way of Ph.D.s and faculty generally, who are leaving academia in the face of political, financial and enrollment crises. It’s a trend federal data and other sources show began even before Trump returned to the White House. 

    On top of everything else affecting higher education, this is likely to reduce the quality of education for undergraduates, experts say. 

    Nearly 70 percent of people receiving doctorates were already leaving higher education for industry, government and other sectors, not including those without job offers or who opted to continue their studies, according to the most recent available figures from the National Science Foundation — up from fewer than 50 percent decades ago.

    As for faculty, more than a third of provosts reported higher-than-usual turnover last year, in a survey by Hanover Research and the industry publication Inside Higher Ed. That was before the turmoil of this late winter and spring. 

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    “People who can get out will get out,” said L. Maren Wood, director and CEO of the Center for Graduate Career Success, which works with doctoral and other graduate students at 69 colleges and universities to provide career help. 

    If the spree of general job-switching that followed Covid was dubbed “the Great Resignation,” Wood said, what she’s seeing now in higher education is “the Great Defection.”

    Getting a Ph.D. is a traditional pipeline to an academic career. Now some of the brightest candidates — who have spent years doing cutting-edge research in their fields to prepare for faculty jobs — are leaving higher education or signing on with universities abroad, Wood said. 

    “It’s going to affect the quality of a student’s experience if they don’t get to study with those leading minds, who are going into private industry or to other countries,” she said.

    “What’s the joke about those who can’t do, teach? You don’t want to be in a situation where the only people left in your classrooms are the ones who can’t do anything else.”

    Related: So much for saving the planet. Climate careers, and many others, evaporate for class of 2025

    Parents sending children to college in the fall should know that they’ll be taking classes “with a faculty member who is worried about his or her research funding and who doesn’t have the help of graduate student teaching assistants. And that’s really going to impact the quality of your student’s experience,” said Julia Kent, a vice president at the Council of Graduate Schools, who conducts research about Ph.D. career pathways. 

    “The quality of undergraduate education is at stake here,” Kent said.

    Even Ph.D.s who want to work in academia are being thwarted. 

    During the Great Recession and the pandemic — two recent periods when there were few available faculty jobs — doctoral candidates could continue their studies until things got better, Wood said. This time, the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding have stripped many of that option.

    “This is way worse” than those earlier crises, she said. “Doctoral students are in panic mode.”

    Related: How Trump is changing higher education: The view from 4 campuses 

    The same deep federal cuts mean doctoral candidates in science, technology, engineering, math and other fields can’t complete the research they need to be eligible for what few academic jobs do become available.

    “You’re basically knee-capping that younger generation, which undermines the intergenerational dynamism that takes place in higher education. And that trickles down into the classroom,” said Isaac Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College and head of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.

    Doctoral candidates early in their programs are questioning whether they should stay, said Wood. That could reduce the supply of future faculty. So will the fact that some universities have reduced the number of new Ph.D. candidates they will accept or have rescinded admission offers, citing federal budget cuts. Fewer prospective candidates are likely to apply, said Timothy Burke, a professor of history at Swarthmore College who has written about this topic.

    “Our graduating students right now are thinking differently about what it means to start a doctorate,” Burke said.

    Meanwhile, he said, “all the things that were dismaying to many faculty of long standing just feel worse. People who would have been totally content to stay put, whose prospects were good, who had good positions, who were more or less happy — now they’re thinking hard about whether there’s a future in this.”

    That means undergraduates could experience fewer available classroom professors and teaching and graduate assistants or the “only tenuous presence of faculty who are thinking hard about going somewhere else,” he said. “There are going to be programs that are going to be shut. There are going to be departments running on fumes.”

    The route to a university faculty job has always been hard. Finishing a doctoral degree takes a median of nearly six years, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — nearly seven in the arts and humanities. 

    Doctoral students who manage to finish their programs have always had to fight for faculty positions, even before institutions announced cutbacks and hiring freezes. 

    Universities enroll far more doctoral candidates, to provide cheap labor as teaching and research assistants, than they will ever hire. The number of doctoral degrees awarded rose from 163,827 in 2010 to an estimated 207,000 this year, the National Center for Education Statistics says — a 26 percent increase, during a period in which the number of full-time faculty positions went up at less than half that rate. 

    Related: These federal programs help low-income students get to an through college. Trump wants to pull the funding

    With colleges and universities under stress, still more doctoral candidates now face the prospect of spending years “training for a career that isn’t actually available,” said Ashley Ruba, a Ph.D. who left higher education to work at Meta, where she builds virtual reality systems. 

    “If you told someone going to law school that they couldn’t get a job as a lawyer, I don’t think they’d do it,” said Ruba, who is also the founder of a career-coaching service for fellow Ph.D.s called After Academia.

    People already in faculty jobs appear equally on edge. More than 1 in 3 said in a recent survey that they have less academic freedom than in the past; half said they worry about online harassment. And faculty salaries have been stagnant. Pay declined for the three years starting with the pandemic, when adjusted for inflation, the AAUP reports, and has still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. 

    People with Ph.D.s can earn more outside academia — an average of 37 percent more, one study found. Employers value skills including active learning, critical thinking, problem-solving and resilience, which is “everything you learn in a doctoral program,” Ruba said.

    The proportion of faculty considering leaving their jobs who are looking for work outside of academia has spiked. Before the pandemic, it was between 1 and 8 percent each year. Since then, it has been between 11 and 16 percent, according to R. Todd Benson, executive director and principal investigator at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, or COACHE. The figure comes from surveys conducted at 54 major universities and colleges.

    Related: More women are landing construction jobs. Trump’s war on DEI could change that

    A Facebook group of dissatisfied academics, called The Professor Is Out, has swelled to nearly 35,000 members. It was started by Karen Kelsky, a former anthropology professor who previously helped people get jobs in academia and now coaches them on how to leave it.

    “It’s difficult to overcome the stereotype of a university professor, which is that they’re coddled, they’re overprivileged, they’re arrogant and just enjoying total job security that nobody else has,” said Kelsky, who also wrote “The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job,” a second edition of which is due out this fall. 

    Today, “they are overworked. They’re grossly underpaid. They are being called the enemy. And they’re bailing on academia,” she said.

    “Every time I talk to a tenured professor, they tell me how miserable they are and how desperate they are to get out,” said Kelsky. “And there’s no way this isn’t having real-life, tangible impacts on the quality of education students are getting.”

    Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

    This story about faculty and doctoral recipients leaving academia was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

    Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

    President Donald Trump wants to collect more admissions data from colleges and universities to make sure they’re complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action. And he wants that data now. 

    But data experts and higher education scholars warn that any new admissions data is likely to be inaccurate, impossible to interpret and ultimately misused by policymakers. That’s because Trump’s own policies have left the statistics agency inside the Education Department with a skeleton staff and not enough money, expertise or time to create this new dataset. 

    The department already collects data on enrollment from every institution of higher education that participates in the federal student loan program. The results are reported through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). But in an Aug. 7 memorandum, Trump directed the Education Department, which he sought to close in March, to expand that task and provide “transparency” into how some 1,700 colleges that do not admit everyone are making their admissions decisions. And he gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon just 120 days to get it done. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    Expanding data collection on applicants is not a new idea. The Biden administration had already ordered colleges to start reporting race and ethnicity data to the department this fall in order to track changes in diversity in postsecondary education. But in a separate memorandum to the head of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), McMahon asked for even more information, including high school grades and college entrance exam scores, all broken down by race and gender.  

    Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the 120-day timeline “preposterous” because of the enormous technical challenges. For example, IPEDS has never collected high school GPAs. Some schools use a weighted 5.0 scale, giving extra points for advanced classes, and others use an unweighted 4.0 scale, which makes comparisons messy. Other issues are equally thorny. Many schools no longer require applicants to report standardized test scores and some no longer ask them about race so the data that Trump wants doesn’t exist for those colleges. 

    “You’ve got this effort to add these elements without a mechanism with which to vet the new variables, as well as a system for ensuring their proper implementation,” said Cook. “You would almost think that whoever implemented this didn’t know what they were doing.” 

    Cook has helped advise the Education Department on the IPEDS data collection for 20 years and served on technical review panels, which are normally convened first to recommend changes to the data collection. Those panels were disbanded earlier this year, and there isn’t one set up to vet Trump’s new admissions data proposal.

    Cook and other data experts can’t figure out how a decimated education statistics agency could take on this task. All six NCES employees who were involved in IPEDS data collection were fired in March, and there are only three employees left out of 100 at NCES, which is run by an acting commissioner who also has several other jobs. 

    An Education Department official, who did not want to be named, denied that no one left inside the Education Department has IPEDS experience. The official said that staff inside the office of the chief data officer, which is separate from the statistics agency, have a “deep familiarity with IPEDS data, its collection and use.” Former Education Department employees told me that some of these employees have experience in analyzing the data, but not in collecting it.

    In the past, there were as many as a dozen employees who worked closely with RTI International, a scientific research institute, which handles most of the IPEDS data collection work. 

    Technical review eliminated

    Of particular concern is that RTI’s $10 million annual contract to conduct the data collection had been slashed approximately in half by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, according to two former employees, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. Those severe budget cuts eliminated the technical review panels that vet proposed changes to IPEDS, and ended training for colleges and universities to submit data properly, which helped with data quality. RTI did not respond to my request to confirm the cuts or answer questions about the challenges it will face in expanding its work on a reduced budget and staffing.

    The Education Department did not deny that the IPEDS budget had been cut in half. “The RTI contract is focused on the most mission-critical IPEDS activities,” the Education Department official said. “The contract continues to include at least one task under which a technical review panel can be convened.”  

    Additional elements of the IPEDS data collection have also been reduced, including a contract to check data quality.

    Last week, the scope of the new task became more apparent. On Aug. 13, the administration released more details about the new admissions data it wants, describing how the Education Department is attempting to add a whole new survey to IPEDS, called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), which will disaggregate all admissions data and most student outcome and financial aid data by race and gender. College will have to report on both undergraduate and graduate school admissions. The public has 60 days to comment, and the administration wants colleges to start reporting this data this fall. 

    Complex collection

    Christine Keller, executive director of the Association for Institutional Research, a trade group of higher education officials who collect and analyze data, called the new survey “one of the most complex IPEDS collections ever attempted.” 

    Traditionally, it has taken years to make much smaller changes to IPEDS, and universities are given a year to start collecting the new data before they are required to submit it. (Roughly 6,000 colleges, universities and vocational schools are required to submit data to IPEDS as a condition for their students to take out federal student loans or receive federal Pell Grants. Failure to comply results in fines and the threat of losing access to federal student aid.)

    Normally, the Education Department would reveal screenshots of data fields, showing what colleges would need to enter into the IPEDS computer system. But the department has not done that, and several of the data descriptions are ambiguous. For example, colleges will have to report test scores and GPA by quintile, broken down by race and ethnicity and gender. One interpretation is that a college would have to say how many Black male applicants, for example, scored above the 80th percentile on the SAT or the ACT. Another interpretation is that colleges would need to report the average SAT or ACT score of the top 20 percent of Black male applicants. 

    The Association for Institutional Research used to train college administrators on how to collect and submit data correctly and sort through confusing details — until DOGE eliminated that training. “The absence of comprehensive, federally funded training will only increase institutional burden and risk to data quality,” Keller said. Keller’s organization is now dipping into its own budget to offer a small amount of free IPEDS training to universities. 

    The Education Department is also requiring colleges to report five years of historical admissions data, broken down into numerous subcategories. Institutions have never been asked to keep data on applicants who didn’t enroll. 

    “It’s incredible they’re asking for five years of prior data,” said Jordan Matsudaira, an economist at American University who worked on education policy in the Biden and Obama administrations. “That will be square in the pandemic years when no one was reporting test scores.”

    ‘Misleading results’

    Matsudaira explained that IPEDS had considered asking colleges for more academic data by race and ethnicity in the past and the Education Department ultimately rejected the proposal. One concern is that slicing and dicing the data into smaller and smaller buckets would mean that there would be too few students and the data would have to be suppressed to protect student privacy. For example, if there were two Native American men in the top 20 percent of SAT scores at one college, many people might be able to guess who they were. And a large amount of suppressed data would make the whole collection less useful.

    Also, small numbers can lead to wacky results. For example, a small college could have only two Hispanic male applicants with very high SAT scores. If both were accepted, that’s a 100 percent admittance rate. If only 200 white women out of 400 with the same test scores were accepted, that would be only a 50 percent admittance rate. On the surface, that can look like both racial and gender discrimination. But it could have been a fluke. Perhaps both of those Hispanic men were athletes and musicians. The following year, the school might reject two different Hispanic male applicants with high test scores but without such impressive extracurriculars. The admissions rate for Hispanic males with high test scores would drop to zero. “You end up with misleading results,” said Matsudaira. 

    Reporting average test scores by race is another big worry. “It feels like a trap to me,” said Matsudaira. “That is mechanically going to give the administration the pretense of claiming that there’s lower standards of admission for Black students relative to white students when you know that’s not at all a correct inference.”

    The statistical issue is that there are more Asian and white students at the very high end of the SAT score distribution, and all those perfect 1600s will pull the average up for these racial groups. (Just like a very tall person will skew the average height of a group.) Even if a college has a high test score threshold that it applies to all racial groups and no one below a 1400 is admitted, the average SAT score for Black students will still be lower than that of white students. (See graphic below.) The only way to avoid this is to purely admit by test score and take only the students with the highest scores. At some highly selective universities, there are enough applicants with a 1600 SAT to fill the entire class. But no institution fills its student body by test scores alone. That could mean overlooking applicants with the potential to be concert pianists, star soccer players or great writers.

    The Average Score Trap

    This graphic by Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, depicts the problem of measuring racial discrimination though average test scores. Even for a university that admits all students above a certain cut score, the average score of one racial group (red) will be higher than the average score of the other group (blue). Source: graphic posted on Bluesky Social by Josh Goodman

    Admissions data is a highly charged political issue. The Biden administration originally spearheaded the collection of college admissions data by race and ethnicity. Democrats wanted to collect this data to show how the nation’s colleges and universities were becoming less diverse with the end of affirmative action. This data is slated to start this fall, following a full technical and procedural review. 

    Now the Trump administration is demanding what was already in the works, and adding a host of new data requirements — without following normal processes. And instead of tracking the declining diversity in higher education, Trump wants to use admissions data to threaten colleges and universities. If the new directive produces bad data that is easy to misinterpret, he may get his wish.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about college admissions data was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • Top Tips: Take good notes

    Top Tips: Take good notes

    The key to a great news story is a great interview. But all your work getting that interview will be wasted if you don’t have great notes. 

    When I first started out as a journalist, people didn’t always record their interviews. I rarely used a recorder. I found that it did something to my brain. Part of my brain would be worried that the recording wasn’t working. 

    When I became an editor, I found that I could tell when a reporter had used a recorder. The quotes in the story were often too long or too flat — they lacked something, maybe emotion or emphasis. 

    When you interview someone without taping it, you have to listen carefully. There isn’t any backup. And because it is difficult to take down everything someone says word for word, your brain works with your ears and your hand to take down what is most important – the essential facts and details, the emotion, the surprising things someone says. 

    If you have recorded that same interview, you won’t be doing that. You know you have a backup. And when you go back and listen to the recording, something is different. The statements all flatten out and you end up putting in the story what sounds most explanatory or most impressive. In other words, you can’t tell what was most interesting when you were sitting there or on the phone. 

    A recording is not enough.

    These days it is standard practice to record interviews, if for no other reason than we need the audio for podcasts or audio clips. 

    But for a great story and to be a great storyteller you should master the art of notetaking. When doing an interview forget that the recorder is on. Imagine it isn’t working (and it might not be working!) So here are some tips for taking notes: 

    First, don’t try to take down every word. Instead, listen for what is important. 

    “Quotes can be short,” said News Decoder Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner.

    Don’t try to write everything down word for word. It’s OK to paraphrase. Put quote marks only around actual quotes. If you didn’t put quote marks around something in your notes DON’T put the quote marks in your story. 

    Master shorthand.

    Second, create your own system of shorthand.

    Shorthand is a system of writing in a code that allows you to take down words fast and accurately. There are some standard ways of doing that and courses to teach you how. It was developed for stenographers. Before recorders came along, offices employed people to take down dictation. The boss would dictate letters and reports to their secretaries who would then type them up. But you can create your own system of shorthand.

    For example, instead of writing down the person’s name every time they start talking (when you are talking to multiple people at the same time) use their initials. You can also lv out the vwls of common wrds. 

    U can write in text message 4mat b/c that also wrks. I am not a fast writer so I came up with my own system early on in my career. I put ?? when I’m not sure what the person said but I don’t want to interrupt them. I put ** when I want to go back to it to follow up. I circle words or underline them when I sense it is important.

    For something outrageous I write !!

    Take lots and lots of notes.

    Writing down words and ideas cements them in your mind.

    Finally, use a pen and paper. There are a number of reasons to do this. If you are interviewing someone in person and you try to take your notes on a laptop or tablet, your head will be down half the time and you can’t circle stuff easily. 

    Second, there is some science behind the notion that we retain information better when we write things down hand to paper. 

    As a journalist, I was a messy note taker. That piece of paper in the photo image at the top of the story is an actual page of notes I once took. If I had time before I had to submit my article I would take the effort to type my notes onto a Word or Google Doc. Later I fell in love with spreadsheeting and would type my notes into a Google Spreadsheet, which would allow me to match up information with information from other interviews and sort them. This became handy when I was doing a story that involved a lot of interviews and complicated information. 

    When going to interviews I sometimes forgot a notepad and would have to grab paper anyway I could. I’ve taken notes in the margins of flyers and brochures and on the backside of stuff I got in the mail.

    But the best practice is to always keep a notepad on you, just as photographers always keep a camera on them. 

    Finally, when you are ready to start writing, write from your notes first before going to the recording. Use the recording to make sure you got your quotes right and that you paraphrased what the person said correctly. Trust that your brain and your ears and your hand will have taken down the best information and the most engaging quotes. 

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why take notes if you are recording an interview?

    2. What is the difference between quoting someone and paraphrasing something they said?

    3. How good a notetaker are you?

     

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