A year ago, the nation was tantalizingly close to making college tuition-free for millions of students. The Biden administration’s ambitious domestic policy agenda included a free community college plan that bore a more-than-passing resemblance to ideas first proposed right here in the Washington Monthly. America’s fragmented and increasingly unaffordable higher education system would finally offer a zero-price public option to all. 

Sadly, it was not to be. Fifty Republicans and two Democrats in the U.S. Senate decided to stand athwart progress and reject the opportunity to improve child care, education, paid leave, and much more. The community college plan was among the first items to be jettisoned, in no small part because the wealthy private universities that dominate the D.C. higher education lobby conspicuously failed to endorse it, while also conducting a behind-the-scenes whisper campaign in Congress letting influential members know they’d be happy to see it fail. 

Not coincidentally, many of those legislative assassins routinely top the college rankings published annually by a last-century former newsmagazine that shall remain unnamed. When your status depends on rejecting as many applicants as possible while sitting on an enormous pile of money that accumulates earnings nearly tax-free, you tend to look down on efforts to redirect attention and public funding toward colleges that enroll and teach all kinds of people at a reasonable price. 

The resulting harm has been enormous, particularly as community college students struggle to reengage with their course work in the wake of devastating pandemic disruptions. As Jodie Kirshner writes in this issue (“The Memphis Post-COVID Community College Blues”), the combination of special interest pleading and ideological obstructionism that doomed the Biden plan came just as two-year colleges were bleeding enrollment, almost surely widening the income and educational attainment gaps that are increasingly pushing society apart. 

America needs a different definition of higher education excellence, one that empowers public institutions at the expense of elites, instead of the other way around. One that measures what colleges do for their country, instead of for themselves. That’s the philosophy behind the Washington Monthly’s annual college rankings. Instead of rating colleges by wealth, fame, and exclusivity, we prize social mobility, public service, and research. 

The other rankings elevate colleges for keeping low-income students out. Ours reward them for letting those students in, and then helping them graduate with degrees that lead to good jobs, without unmanageable debt. Instead of reputational surveys that mostly measure the vague and long-ago, we focus on hard numbers: research expenditures, faculty awards, and producing graduates who go on to earn PhDs. Instead of giving colleges credit for how often their alumni give back to their alma mater, we measure how often students give to their communities by volunteering, starting public service careers, and enrolling in the Peace Corps and ROTC. 

The result is a very different hierarchy of the great, the good, and the not-very-good-at-all. Because we value public purpose, our rankings are much more likely to recognize public universities—there are six state schools in our top 20, but just one in theirs. Florida International University, for example, ranks number 162 on the other list, mostly because it doesn’t limit enrollment to rich valedictorians, and it was founded in the second half of the 20th century, not the first half of the 17th. We rank FIU at number 32 because, in addition to solid contributions in service and research, it is very affordable and helps a large number of students eligible for Pell Grants start their lives and careers with a high-quality degree. Columbia University is number 2 on the other rankings—or was, before it was de-ranked after being caught in the kind of massive data fraud scandal our rankings are much less vulnerable to because we rely on official government data, not self-reported metrics that invite abuse. We already ranked Columbia significantly lower
because we see little to no evidence of its commitment to public service. 

There are also multiple University of California and California State campuses in the upper echelons of our rankings, the mark of a system that, despite financial ups and downs in recent decades, was built on a foundation of research excellence and affordability in a state that has long been a magnet for immigration and innovation. Rutgers University’s Newark campus stands out for enrolling an economically diverse undergraduate class that goes on to earn unusually high salaries in the labor market, and—probably not coincidentally—has an unusually high rate of paying back student loans. 

There are also some familiar names at the bottom of our national rankings. Hofstra University enjoys a solid reputation on the Eastern Seaboard—why, we’re not exactly sure. More than a third of its students fail to graduate within six years, and the net price of attendance for families earning below $75,000 is absurdly high. Hofstra has little to show in terms of research expenditures, science PhDs, or faculty awards. Service commitments are scant. We rank it number 434 out of 442 nationwide, down among a bevy of for-profit colleges and struggling schools. 

Berea College in Kentucky is a consistent standout on our list of best liberal arts colleges, showing that excellence and access for first-generation students can go hand in hand. Lafayette College in Pennsylvania gets a boost over more traditional elite schools by staying particularly attentive to how much it charges lower-income students and how successful its graduates are at managing their debt after earning degrees. The College of Saint Benedict in Minnesota has unusual graduation rate success, given the number of Pell-eligible students it enrolls, and sends many graduates into the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps as well as education and other public service careers. Unlike some elite colleges, it’s not a finishing school for future financial industry profiteers. 

We also rank nearly 900 master’s– and bachelor’s-granting institutions—many of them regional public universities that serve an enormous number of students and get little or no recognition from big-city newspapers that obsess over dinner parties in the Ivy League. Along with whatever the collective noun is for California State campuses (a grizzly of high performers are in our top 10), research-rich universities like Truman State in Missouri and SUNY Geneseo sit atop our master’s list. For-profit Academy of Art University in San Francisco, on the other hand, ranks number 601 (out of 603) because it charges low- to moderate-income students $32,000 per year and has been embroiled in so many scandals, fraud accusations, and government investigations that space limitations do not permit their full accounting here. 

Brigham Young University’s innovative Idaho campus cracks the top 10 on our bachelor’s campus ranking, scoring high on the number of undergraduates who go on to earn PhDs. Seventh-ranked Boricua College, which was founded by Puerto Ricans to provide a liberal arts education to Hispanic students in New York City, is an across-the-board standout on our measures of social mobility. It stands in contrast to DeVry University Fort Washington (number 250) or DeVry Columbus (253) or DeVry Iselin (255) in that respect.

There are scores of additional examples. Take some time to read James and Deborah Fallows’s reporting—“When Gown Embraces Town”, and “The (Student) Paper of Record,” respectively—about the new president of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, a public research university that is stepping forward to run the local K–12 school system in a first-of-its-kind initiative at the same time that its student newspaper increasingly provides the kind of local journalism that is vanishing from midsized cities and towns. Or Laura Colarusso’s story (“Breaking the Cycle of Privilege”) about how Bunker Hill Community College in Massachusetts is helping students move into the kind of solid well-earning jobs that once formed the backbone of our eroding middle class. Bunker Hill is succeeding despite that the fact that, as Anne Kim demonstrates (“Train in Vain“), the federal government’s system for certifying job training programs is an antiquated, broken-down disaster, leaving unsuspecting students and the taxpayers who support them vulnerable to programs that are obsolete, inadequate, fraudulent, or all of the above. 

The need in communities, particularly those with many Black and Latino students, is acute. Jamaal Abdul-Alim documents (“A Job and a College Degree Before You Graduate High School”) how the P-TECH program is helping high school students bank college credits toward associate’s degrees while earning competitive wages in local technology industries. College debt is an especially acute problem among Black borrowers. These programs help economically diverse students move into high-demand careers while making money instead of borrowing it. The obstacles in their way are many. Rob Wolfe exposes (“The Invisible College Barrier“) one of the hidden pitfalls preventing many first-generation students and students of color from entering high-paying jobs in business and tech: a second, secret set of admissions criteria that many universities impose after students have enrolled in school. 

Nowhere is the abuse of poor and working-class students more acute, and the potential to help them get ahead greater, than in vocational certificate programs—the kind provided by community colleges and for-profit trade schools. The Washington Monthly was the first to rank these programs, in 2018, and we do so again this year. Our hope is that highlighting the good ones and exposing the predatory ones will spur policy makers to better support the former and crack down on the latter, while helping students more safely navigate their futures.

All of these colleges, the best and the worst, are virtually absent from the complex of popular culture and elite media that mostly defines the way people understand higher education. That matters, because people won’t care about institutions they literally don’t know exist—or only perceive through the lens of socially acceptable class bigotry that continually structures our sense of deservedness in higher learning. So when the rare time comes to possibly advance the cause of social justice through new federal investment, the political weight needed to make it across the finish line simply isn’t there. 

The good news is that the essential logic of building a more egalitarian and student-focused higher education system remains strong. That’s why there was a free community college plan in the first place. The students and educators represented by the Washington Monthly college rankings are legion. It’s our privilege to open a window into their lives
every year.

The post Introduction: A Different Kind of College Ranking appeared first on Washington Monthly.

1) “Let’s do it.”

An hour before dawn on May 7, Geoffrey Mearns stepped out of his house in Muncie, Indiana, and started to run with his dog, Cadi.

That made it a normal morning for Mearns. Decades ago, in high school in Cleveland, he had been a distance-running star, and at Yale he set records in track and cross-country. His marathon times qualified him for the 1984 U.S. Olympic trials, which he missed because of a foot injury. Now in his early 60s, Mearns has the look of a man who could still outrun everyone around him and has never fallen out of shape.

The stakes on that morning’s run were unusually high. For the past five years, Mearns had been the president of Ball State University in Muncie, a large-enrollment public research institution. Why the name? A little more than 100 years ago, the five Ball brothers of Muncie, who became rich and famous through the iconic glass jars with a Ball signature and Ball home canning equipment, bought the land and buildings of a bankrupt private college and gave it to the state as a public university. Ball State’s student body now numbers more than 20,000.

Before the sun came up that Saturday morning, Mearns had to make a choice with short-term consequences for the university and at least symbolic connections to larger choices, and gambles, the institution had made during his tenure.

The immediate choice involved the weather, which was terrible. For the past few days, heavy rain had moved over the Midwest—and refused to budge. On Friday, Mearns had chaired trustee meetings and gala receptions on campus. Attendees had scuttled under umbrellas to avoid getting drenched. 

One of the soggiest parts of campus was the sweeping grass sward of the elegant outdoor quadrangle, now a flooded turf with several thousand folding chairs, carefully laid out for Ball State’s first commencement ceremony on the traditional quadrangle since the pandemic began. The choice Geoffrey Mearns said he would make by sunrise was whether to move the ceremony inside, to the basketball arena. 

Mearns ran around the quadrangle and looked at the sky, checking and rechecking the weather radar on his phone. Around 6 a.m., he called his staff associates and his wife, Jennifer, to say, as I heard him put it later that morning, “Let’s do it.” The commencement would be outside. It was still drizzling as he made the call. 

At 10 a.m., in a bright red academic robe, Mearns welcomed the graduates, who were seated on 10,000 chairs that had just been wiped and blown dry, to a providential beginning of the next stage of their lives.

Of course, it wouldn’t really have mattered if the call had been wrong—if the rain hadn’t cleared, if the sun hadn’t broken through until midday. I’ve sat through wet commencements before. They can make for rueful but proud reminiscences years afterward. (“Well, things started out tough …”) In this case, my wife, Deb, and I would have been among the rained-on at Ball State, with stories to tell; we had come to give commencement addresses and accept honorary degrees. But the rain had stopped, and we were in the procession, walking carefully over the slippery grass behind Mearns. 

The reason we were there, and had come to know the Ball State community over the previous three years, was our belief that the “Let’s do it” spirit of Mearns’s bet about the weather, while of minor consequence on its own, was connected to larger gambles and commitments Ball State has made. (The university’s motto, “We Fly,” is just a more elegant version of “Let’s do it.”)

Over the past five years, the most dramatic step Ball State has taken might also be the most consequential for Muncie. In 2018, the city turned the management of its entire K–12 public school system over to the public university, something with no clear precedent in American higher education history.

This takeover, unlike the weather forecast, is genuinely important, and Deb and I think what we have seen in central Indiana matters. It and developments like it have attracted little or no attention from the national press. But we think they are an introduction to an important new era of colleges, college leaders, and “college towns.” 

2) The story of college towns … 

Let’s start at the end, with “college towns.” The term is a reminder that having a nearby college has different implications for a community than having a factory or an office park. Small liberal arts colleges, big research universities, ambitious community colleges, HBCUs, tech schools, specialized academies, religious institutions—these and other kinds of schools have always given college towns special advantages. 

There are small towns closely identified with small liberal arts colleges. In Massachusetts, Amherst the college—and the town. In Ohio, Oberlin. In Kentucky, Berea. In Tennessee, the University of the South, at Sewanee. In eastern Washington, Whitman.

There are elite universities that have transformed the economies and possibilities of their regions. The Harvard/MIT cluster in Cambridge and greater Boston. Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCSF in the Bay Area of California. Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh. UCSD in San Diego. Caltech as a center of the aerospace industry in Southern California. The University of Utah and Brigham Young, in the Salt Lake City/Provo area. The North Carolina universities that give the “research triangle” its name. Any study of the growth of these areas has chapters on these colleges’ roles.

There are big land grant and state institutions that have become the technology-and-culture centers of entire regions. Ohio State University in Columbus. Wichita State in central Kansas. Penn State in central Pennsylvania. The University of Texas in Austin. A full list could take the rest of this article.

And there are particular institutions that have become thin reeds, barely propping up the economies of their surrounding areas. To enumerate them would be cruel. I’ll just say that some rural communities have tied their economic fate to jobs in the prison-industrial complex. Those tied instead to the small-college economy have struck a better bargain. A draw of professional talent into the community. A better chance that young people who come for “institutional” reasons will want to stay and build. 

… and of college leaders

The ramifications of being a college town are familiar—as are the gaps between colleges and the communities in which they are located, which is why we say “town and gown.” What is new is how an under-noticed generation of college leaders is deciding to use their institutions as deliberate instruments of community, civic, and regional advancement.

What a seaport was to growing communities in the 1600s, what waterfalls for producing power were in the 1700s, what railroad connections were in the 1800s, and on through the years, ambitious colleges can be to communities of our era. The Washington Monthly has rightly focused on colleges as engines of individual mobility, social responsibility, and national cohesion. In this and upcoming stories we will be publishing in the Monthly, Deb and I will report on colleges we’ve seen, from Oregon to South Dakota, Mississippi to Maine, that have invented new ways of creating community and regional opportunity. 

It’s a trend that could become a movement. And it depends on “Let’s do it” leadership, even in an era of college leaders generally trying to keep their heads down.

This is a walking-on-eggshells moment for many college presidents. Quick: How many current presidents of Ivy League schools can you name? Of other major research universities? Of famous small colleges? My own list runs out quickly. It’s a time in which many leaders survive by not being noticed.

They worry about money. They worry about politics and legislatures. They worry about pressure from students, parents, faculty, and trustees—not to mention journalists and community members. And again: They worry about money. 

They’re fearful of a misstep—literally, on the soggy turf of a possibly rained-out commencement; symbolically, in myriad other ways. Robert Maynard Hutchins was famous as a 30-year-old president of the University of Chicago; Edward Levi and Hannah Holborn Gray, as two of his successors; Kingman Brewster Jr. at Yale; Drew Gilpin Faust at Harvard. Father Theodore Hesburgh at Notre Dame; Freeman Hrabowski III at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Their counterparts and successors operate in more perilous terrain. Today, the best-known exception illustrating the rule is Michael Crow, who, as president of Arizona State University, has innovated in countless ways, from partnerships with businesses to radically expanded access for students from noncollege backgrounds. As has often been argued in these pages, the U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings are a net loss to both educational progress and human well-being. (For the record: I once was editor of that magazine.) But they’ve done one thing right: Since U.S. News first established a “most innovative” category in 2016, Crow’s Arizona State has always been at the top of the list.

We’d like to introduce you to less-well-known exceptions, which we hope and believe will amount to a trend. The theme of the stories beginning in this issue and followed up in coming months will be a one-two punch. The first is leaders’ decision to take risks in the public interest. The second is their imagining their colleges’ interest as extending beyond the campus to the community and region. 

This brings us back to Muncie.

3) Running toward the challenges

After his track career and a few years as a private school English teacher, Mearns decided to become a lawyer. He went to law school at the University of Virginia, clerked for a federal judge in Louisville, worked briefly for a New York law firm, and, in 1989, became a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn. He spent about nine years in that role, including advising on the Oklahoma City bombing cases. During his time as a teacher he met and, as he tells it, eventually gained the attention of Jennifer Proud, who then worked in media relations for Madison Square Garden and later had a similar role for the men’s pro tennis tour. They were married in 1988 and have five grown children.

In 2005, while in private legal practice in Cleveland, Mearns was recruited to go into academia as the dean of the law school at Cleveland State. A few years later, he and Jennifer moved to northern Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, where he was president of Northern Kentucky University. In 2016, they considered coming to Ball State. 

The job itself was a step up in scale. The question—as they both now say—was: Muncie? Seriously? The city, with a current population of around 65,000 (down from its peak of about 75,000 in the 1980s), is famous in the world of sociology as the locale for Robert and Helen Lynd’s classic Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, based on research almost 100 years ago. Muncie is also well known in the world of economics as one more case study of the damaging effects of corporate disruption and relocation. Much of the Ball family’s wealth still makes a difference in Muncie, but they no longer control the company, which is not based there anymore. Ball State as an institution remained strong. The city did not. That is what the Mearnses realized when they came to town for a final interview. 

“If you drive from northern Kentucky to Muncie, the fastest way takes you through the south side of the city,” Mearns told me recently. “If you’ve driven or walked through the south side of Muncie, you see a very different community than the one that exists here on the north side, near our campus.” That different Muncie was more boarded up, poorer, and racially less white. “Frankly, after we took that drive and on the ride back to Kentucky, we thought long and hard about whether this is a place we wanted to live.”

They decided that it was—because of its struggles, not in spite of them. (“Let’s do it.”) 

“The next conversation I had with the board, I said if you want a president whose plans are confined to the four corners of campus, I’m not the right person,” Mearns recalled. “If you want somebody who is going to use the assets and innovative thinking of a large public research university for change in Muncie, I’m interested, too.” 

This may sound like boilerplate. I will tell you that talks with people in Muncie over the three-plus years since our first visit—Black and white, academics and journalists, within the Ball State community and outside, students and alumni—reinforced our sense that the university has not just talked the talk. It has walked the walk. 

4) A public college running public schools 

What does this mean in practice? Ball State has long been connected with the community. Back in the 1880s, the Ball brothers moved their company to the area from Buffalo because its natural gas supplies helped in glassmaking. In modern times, the area has great geothermal potential. More than a decade ago, Ball State began building one of the largest geothermal heating and electricity projects of any university in the country. Under an earlier president, Jo Ann Gora, Ball State launched a program of “Immersive Learning,” an American version of apprentice training.

The university also has had a tradition of charitable giving, and in 2019 it launched One Ball State Day, a fund-raising effort for local causes that this year brought in more than $1 million.

Mearns’s contribution to this tradition has been spearheading the university’s extraordinary involvement in the city’s public K–12 system. The story of the Muncie Community Schools (MCS) since the 1980s is a familiar one in urban America: attendance declined; the tax base shrank; teachers left; the downward cycle intensified. Almost five years ago, about the time the Mearns family decided to move to Muncie, the Indiana legislature took the drastic step of putting two of the state’s public school systems, those in Gary and Muncie, into state-run emergency receivership.

That is where Ball State stepped in, with a wholly unfamiliar approach. A few months after taking office, in a move that had been coordinated within the university but took many legislators by surprise, Mearns proposed that Ball State—which had started in the 1800s as a “normal school,” training teachers, and which still has the largest teacher’s college in the state—assume responsibility for Muncie’s schools. Financing, management, labor relations, curriculum—everything. The ensuing saga was complicated and dramatic, and I wrote a whole article about it soon after it occurred. The closest parallel was Boston University (a private institution) running the schools in the Chelsea area of the city. 

In Muncie, the essence was a radically transparent and inclusive way of having a university and a whole community take responsibility for community schools. This wasn’t the gown bossing around the town. Under the emergency legislation that Mearns proposed to the legislature, he and the Ball State board would appoint members of the new community school board. The measure passed, and they solicited applications from across the town. Of the 88 applicants, they invited 20 finalists to appear at a two-hour televised event, and the seven board members who emerged from the process were a diverse sampling of Muncie. They included a special ed teacher with school-age children, the YWCA’s executive director, a lawyer and former head of the Ball State University Foundation, a local banker, a Ball State official, a pastor, and a former state court judge. They were five men, two women; five white, two Black; six of the seven had attended Muncie Community Schools. I made notes about the selection process at the time:

I met with board members for an hour last month in Muncie and asked each of them why they’d decided to apply for this post. “I couldn’t not throw my hat into the ring, because the challenge is so important,” the lawyer, Mark Ervin, told me. “If you have a chance to make a difference, you take it. You don’t have that many chances.” Brittany Bales, the special-ed teacher, had taken her young children out of the Muncie schools but brought them back. “It’s a mirage that it’s better somewhere else,” she said. “It’s more diverse and interesting within MCS.” 

The turnover happened four years ago. This year, Mearns gave the Ball State board an update on the experiment: Enrollment is stabilized. Finances are dramatically better. Teacher pay is up by nearly 40 percent. Teacher retention has improved from 67 percent to nearly 90 percent. There’s still a long way to go, as Mearns and others emphasize. But the changes have been in the right direction.

After Mearns’s presentation, the board approved his proposal to reappoint the community school board members whose terms were expiring. “If you look at what we’ve done here, it’s an extraordinary connection between university and city—the city council, businesses, not-for-profits, and all others,” one board member said. “I think with Ball State stepping up to take the lead in this case, it’s shown how we in Muncie can be an example of working together.”

As far as I can tell, Ball State’s commitment to Muncie schools has never been featured in the national news. The education press is the only place it seems to have been mentioned at all. A billion stories about “polarization in the heartland”; a million on the plight of public schools. Few or none about a dramatic and creative attempt at reform.

Ball State has other community projects. One is the development of a nearby struggling area called “the Village.” This follows a pattern seen in many college towns: using the economic leverage of a college to begin the process of reclaiming left-behind districts. Obviously, it could bring risks of gentrification and related ills. Those are genuine problems, but they’re better problems to deal with than those of decline. 

There is also a region-wide consciousness to Ball State’s plans. The higher ed business is going through profound economic dislocation. Some of the most vulnerable institutions are the small private colleges that do not have the brand name of Oberlin or Amherst. Many are across the Midwest, including in Indiana. Mearns believes that Ball State can extend its “college town” alliance to include the biggest research universities in the area, which means Indiana University and Purdue; the community colleges, which across Indiana are all called Ivy Tech; and a number of the endangered smaller private colleges.

“In a way, we’re competing for students,” Mearns said of these institutions. “But in a bigger sense, we can all help one another, and the state.”

5) A trend, becoming a movement

This is one story about one institution, in one community, that has plenty of work ahead. I can’t say that it yet represents a movement. There are too many wealthy colleges that try to wall themselves off from their communities. But colleges’ commitment to their communities could become one more way we assess them. And it should.

Some examples we’ve learned about firsthand, for upcoming reports:

• In Watertown, South Dakota, the Lake Area Technical Institute’s student body is mainly first-generation college students—virtually all of whom are employed after graduation at wages far above the national median.

• In Waterville, Maine, Colby College was considering moving out of town a century ago, probably to Augusta, to expand beyond its cramped location between the railroad tracks and the Kennebec River. Citizens of Waterville somehow raised $100,000—a fortune in those days—for a new plot of land for the college, where it has been based ever since. Now Waterville has struggled as mills have closed and jobs have disappeared—and the college is investing in the community’s recovery. “When the chips were down, the community really came through for the college,” Colby’s current president, David Greene, told me. “For us, this is a moral obligation and a sense of our future. You’re in partnership with your community, and you need to be there in bad times as well as good.”

• In Dayton, Ohio, one of the nation’s oldest community colleges, Sinclair, and the Catholic-run University of Dayton have pooled their efforts to create jobs in an area where factories have closed, and to revive a long-struggling downtown. “Our communities need institutions that are anchor institutions,” Eric Spina, the president of the University of Dayton, told me recently. “These colleges are some of the few institutions left standing that care about place, that care about home.” In upcoming reports we’ll hear more from him, and many others like him.

6) We fly.

America’s oldest college has the motto “Veritas,” for truth. Its second-oldest Ivy has the motto “Lux et Veritas,” light and truth. I’m in favor of both ideals.

But at this moment, I welcome colleges whose motto could be “Communitas.” Or, since some schools already have that motto, I’ll loosely mistranslate it: 

Together, we fly.  

The post When Gown Embraces Town  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In 2000, the Gannett media company purchased the local newspaper in Muncie, Indiana, The Star Press. Much of what happened next will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the long, accelerating decline of independent local news sources.

As this magazine’s editor in chief, Paul Glastris, has written, first the chains began economizing on independent local coverage. Then the chains themselves succumbed to takeovers by even more ruthlessly profit-minded “vulture capital” firms, of which the most notorious are Alden and GateHouse Media. Three years ago, GateHouse took over the Gannett chain (and rebranded itself with Gannett’s name). This has left The Star Press and countless other once-independent and -profitable local papers with smaller newsrooms, shrinking audiences, and fewer possibilities to do the kind of detailed coverage that connects citizens with the progress and challenges of their towns.

That’s the familiar part of the story. Here is the surprise: the way another local institution rose to fill part of the civic information gap. That institution is The Ball State Daily News, the student newspaper at Ball State University in Muncie. Its performance in the past four years, in response to a historic change in the city’s public schools, is an important illustration of how colleges can innovate to address community challenges.

The background to the story is a decades-long cycle of decline in the city’s public school system, Muncie Community Schools (MCS). Enrollments shrank, performance fell, and budgetary pressures rose until, in 2018, the state of Indiana officially placed the Muncie school system under state receivership (along with schools in Gary). Soon afterward, the new president of Ball State, Geoffrey Mearns, surprised the legislature with a proposal that the university assume operating responsibility for the city’s schools. (See James Fallows, “When Gown Embraces Town“).

This was a revolutionary step in U.S. educational history. We’ve found no previous case of a publicly run university managing a whole city’s K–12 schools. (The closest counterpart was in the 1980s, when Boston University, a private institution, assumed control of the Chelsea schools, near Boston.) But the legislature agreed; a new school board with new powers took office, and MCS began the slow process of recovery. 

But how would community members be kept informed on what was working and what wasn’t? The normal news outlets had strained to keep up with routine events. This is where The Ball State Daily News came in.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of The Ball State Daily News. In March 1922, the paper debuted as The Easterner, named for the Indiana State Normal School, Eastern Division, the institution that eventually became Ball State University. 

The front page of the very first edition, now viewable in digital archives, is formally laid out like today’s New York Times. It announced itself as “A Live Paper From a Live School,” the “adequate expression of the school life and spirit.” The college was then four years old, and its spirit was growing. The first day’s stories include growing enrollments, a geology class trip to the Pacific coast, the baseball schedule, an announcement of the Spanish Club banquet, and the addition of a trial faculty position for a “physical director” for women—name and gender unmentioned. 

Today, the Daily News publishes a daily digital edition, a Thursday print edition, and special editions throughout the year. It is housed within a big media footprint at BSU, the eight-year-old Unified Media Lab, a hub designed to encourage multimedia collaborations among the paper, two magazines, a media metrics training center, a weather broadcast station, a TV newscast, a sports media and production center, and WCRD radio. 

The paper maintains a professional culture. The director of the Unified Media Lab, Lisa Renze-Rhodes, identifies her role at the editorially independent Daily News as an adviser who is available to help students “make the best decisions they can.” But “at the end of the day, they have authority to move forward or not,” she told me. “We need seasoned reporters, who understand quality and repercussions.” The paper is financed through university support, advertising revenue, and donor dollars.

As the turnover of the Muncie schools was beginning, the Daily News leadership and Renze-Rhodes met and agreed that this was a chance to move beyond the paper’s traditional legacy of standard nuts-and-bolts reporting about the city.

The students thought hard about telling deeper stories about the community, and about the schools. They were aware that Muncie residents were used to hearing bad reports about the local schools—the collapsed budget, the dropping enrollment, the poor graduation rates. The student journalists felt they could serve the community better by going inside the classrooms to see what was happening and telling the stories of the people working to make change. Journalism exists to cover the exceptional—an emergency, a surprising event. But much of its value lies in covering the routine—what happens day to day in classrooms and communities, what is working and what is not. A student newspaper cannot pretend to be a major investigative journalism institution. But the Daily News has given Muncie’s citizens a more nuanced picture of their schools than they would otherwise have.

Brooke Kemp was the editor in chief of the Daily News when the partnership between the university and the schools was under way. In a “Letter From the Editor” in April 2019, she wrote, “We hope to provide a full picture of the commitment to progress within the district. While we know MCS faces obstacles, we want readers to see what is being done.” Kemp told me in a conversation this summer that it had been exciting to lead the paper at this historic moment: “A reporter’s dream—being young and being able to cover this felt like a big deal.” 

Taylor Smith, this year’s outgoing Daily News editor in chief and a first-year reporter in 2018–19, echoes Kemp’s sentiment. Smith says the students were motivated to tell the stories that no one else was telling and were delighted to work like “real journalists.” One of her favorites is on a history teacher telling his students about Muncie itself, and “what it means for us to be Middletown and having inspired Americans that way.” (Nearly a century ago, Muncie was the setting for Middletown, a famed book of sociology.) 

Covering the story of the university-MCS partnership was a win for student journalists. Renze-Rhodes said this chance helped the students improve their craft, and “now more than ever, there is a need for strong, smart journalism.” 

Over the past four years, the Daily News has published several dozen articles about different aspects of the collaboration between Ball State and MCS. The series is dubbed The Partnership Project and branded “One district. One university. One shared future.”

In April 2021, Natasha Leland reported from inside a first-grade Spanish-English bilingual classroom at West View Elementary. She talked with students, teachers, parents, and BSU faculty whose university students were helping at the school as part of their Spanish studies. She wrote about the history, goals, and everyday challenges of the dual-language program, and the context of bilingualism in the U.S. 

In May 2021, Dorian Ducre wrote about Indiana’s new bill, inspired by the 2020 national election, requiring middle school students to take a one-semester civics course. The article included commentary from a state legislator, a Muncie middle school principal, and BSU political science professors about the various implications of the new requirement.

Having student reporters dig into stories was a new experience for the town as well as the young reporters. “Creating the relationships, building the trust, took time,” said Kemp, describing the initial reticence among those in the schools who had grown wary of negative stories. The staff was intent on building a solid foundation to pass along, aware that the reporters’ longest tenure would be a short four years. 

Kemp told me that once they started writing, the situation “became real.” It was a big step, she said, “accepting the fact that we are a local paper and a local source of news.” Kemp grew up in Muncie, but through the Daily News reporting, she saw a new side of her hometown. “These are people who are moving our community forward,” she said. “I never knew about it before. I was being a better citizen, too.”

For the city of Muncie itself, this kind of local reporting has a number of advantages: helping it see its own story unfold, letting townspeople speak for themselves, imparting to students a rich sense of where they live, and building shared knowledge of a community and its values. 

Lee Ann Kwiatkowski is CEO and director of public education of Muncie Community Schools. Like Taylor Smith, she told me the students cover stories not done by the mainstream press in Muncie. “They do a nice job tailoring stories and going deeper,” she said. “Word about the schools is getting around. More people learn about work we’re doing because of the university paper.” Andy Klotz, MCS’s chief communications officer, told me that while it is difficult to quantify the impact of the stories on enrollment, graduation rates, and so forth with hard numbers, there is a clear soft measure. “A big factor [is] turning the tide on old perceptions of an old system that existed before the partnership,” he said.

Smith described to me the creative audience development strategy that her team carried out, building readership through savvy social media that connects with students via Instagram, alumni via Facebook, and colleagues via Twitter. The students also applied an old-fashioned shoe-leather approach to building awareness, providing copies to local businesses and showing up at community events in Muncie to distribute papers when stories relevant to the event-goers appeared. When Muncie’s branch of Habitat for Humanity held a fund-raiser, copies of the Daily News were available for the roughly 300 attendees to take home.

On June 23, 2022, nearly four years into its new reporting style, the Daily News ran a sports story that jumped off the virtual page in contrast to the 1922 announcement of a trial position for a “physical director” for women. The headline is “50 Years of Title IX.” Just as women’s sports have moved from the sidelines to the big arenas, so has the Daily News moved from being a college newspaper to must-read local journalism.  

The post The (Student) Paper of Record  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Savannah Gonzalez did everything right. Growing up in a poor immigrant area of Los Angeles County, she dreamed of being the first in her family to attend college. Her mother raised her alone, scrimping to pay for tuition and uniforms at Savannah’s Catholic high school, where she took AP classes and became a leader in student government. She worked single-mindedly toward her goal, achieving a 4.2 weighted GPA and, after high school, attending a “STEP” program designed to help first-generation students transition to college. In fall 2018, she enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a plan: pursue a pre-business major, graduate early, and find a well-paying job to support her family.

But her first semester was a shock. Back home, Gonzalez was surrounded by Hispanic and Asian people in a fast-paced city environment. Here, her new peers were more often white, wealthy, and accustomed to slow days on the beach. In classes, those students quickly formed cliques and shared notes, socializing with an ease she didn’t understand. She struggled—one of her required courses, statistics, relied on math that seemingly everyone but her had studied in high school. She failed that class the first time. Then she took it again, studied with all her might, and got a C. 

Halfway through Gonzalez’s freshman year, a faculty adviser told her that one grade meant she might not be accepted into her chosen major, communications. (UC Santa Barbara doesn’t have a business major, so it’s common for business-focused students to major in communications instead.) The major is so popular that the university limits enrollment to students who earn a 3.0 or better in prerequisite courses their freshman year. That C in statistics bumped Gonzalez down to a 2.77. When she received an email saying she had failed to qualify, “my heart dropped,” she says. Her carefully laid plans were ruined.

“I got in here,” she told me this summer, which she spent finishing her degree in a different major. “I did the application. I did the essays. I was accepted. But then there was another admissions process I didn’t even know about. It was like running a race with one leg.”

Gonzalez’s experience is, sadly, a common one. New research from UC Santa Barbara and Yale University indicates that major enrollment requirements like these have been systematically excluding minority and low-income students for decades. Across the country, students who grew up with fewer resources to prepare for college earn lower grades during their freshman year, which means they disproportionately run afoul of restrictions that limit popular majors by GPA. The popularity is the problem: Since college attendance began to rise nationally in the 1970s, universities—most often large, public ones—have protected their limited resources by gating off sought-after majors like economics, engineering, and computer science. The unintended consequence has been that underprivileged students are shunted to less lucrative majors in terms of post-college income, according to a December 2021 study by Aashish Mehta, a professor of global studies at UC Santa Barbara, and Zach Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Yale. 

The policy is simple—reach the threshold, or don’t get in—but it has changed many thousands of lives. Gonzalez, for instance, dropped her plans for a business career and enrolled in global studies, an interdisciplinary field that delves into the effects of globalization. (She met Mehta in a recent class.) Now 21, she’s still figuring out what career to pursue, but for now is thinking of working in nonprofit educational outreach in poor minority communities like hers—a noble path, but not as likely to provide as much financial security as a business career. People’s questions about the future scare her, she says: “A global studies major? What can you do with that? How do you market that?” Meanwhile, though the policy that landed Gonzalez here is easy to understand, any potential solution must wrestle with the fundamentals of how colleges distribute their resources—a much thornier problem.

Bleemer first encountered this phenomenon as a grad student in the economics department at the University of California, Berkeley, which has had a 3.0 GPA minimum since 1976. The grade requirement helps conserve the department’s resources, but its primary function is as a winnowing tool to make sure that the strongest students become majors and lower-performing students are directed to other majors that faculty believe they can better handle, Shachar Kariv, chair of the UC Berkeley economics department, told Undark magazine this summer. (Kariv declined to speak with the Monthly.) Over time, Bleemer noticed that many students who weren’t making it into the major were people of color from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. He wondered if he was seeing a pattern. In University of California schools, whose data on major enrollment is public information, it was possible to find out—and, moreover, to track those trends across decades. So Bleemer teamed up with Mehta, who had been noticing for years that his global studies classes tended to be filled with a disproportionate number of students rejected from majors like communications and economics.

First, the pair made a wider sweep of major American universities to see where and how these restrictions are in place. What they found was that large public schools are far more likely than private ones to limit popular majors by GPA. Among the top 25 publics in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, 75 percent of majors have these policies. Only 20 percent of the top 25 private school majors do. Then they drilled into four schools in the UC system that they believed were representative of the trend and for which they had roughly 50 years of data for 900,000 students: Berkeley, Davis, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz.

For each major at those schools that limits enrollment by GPA, Bleemer and Mehta compared rates of minority students attending pre-major classes to the percentage who were able to declare those majors. They found that underrepresented minority (URM) “students were over twice as likely to exit the major as a result of the restriction than non-URM students.” They also used SAT scores to track pre-college preparation, finding that those rejected students’ scores were an average of 300 points lower. As
Bleemer and Mehta followed the rejected students through the rest of college, they found that the students tended to flow to the same alternative majors—like global studies at UC Santa Barbara or, at Berkeley, from economics to alternatives such as political economy or environmental policy and economics. Finally, in an earlier study that focused just on UC Santa Cruz, they found that students rejected from the economics major earned an average of $22,000 less per year by their mid-20s. 

Bleemer and Mehta’s latest study is still going through peer review, but their earlier, published Santa Cruz study uses much the same methodology—a common econometric technique called a “regression discontinuity design.” “What they’re doing is very good. It’s very credible,” Sarah Turner, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia, who wasn’t involved in the study, told me. Turner has studied how to improve college access for high-achieving low-income students, and she hypothesized that factors beyond grade requirements might also be limiting underrepresented students’ access to popular majors. Those could include a lack of seats in overfilled prerequisite classes, the “frontloading” of technical information in introductory classes that can obscure the richness and diversity of higher-level courses, and insufficient faculty advising to help those students navigate major prerequisites. Further research will have to confirm these theories, Turner said. But she is certain that, whatever the cause of these disparities might be, it isn’t malice. “When departments introduce these kinds of constraints or requirements, particularly in response to fiscal constraints, it is not with an intent of harming a particular group,” she told me. “It is simply, how do you come up with a strategy to deal with the demand?” 

It’s even possible to estimate what Gonzalez, the would-be communications major, could have earned if not for the enrollment policy. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, the global studies major at UC Santa Barbara has median earnings three years after graduation of $44,390. Communications has $54,875. More broadly, an analysis of earnings data released in 2015 by Anthony Carnevale, a professor of economics at Georgetown, indicates that nationally, “two of the top highest paying majors, STEM and business, are also the most popular majors, accounting for 46 percent of college graduates.” As graduates’ lives go on, the gap gets bigger. In California, per Carnevale’s data, mid-career business majors earn an annual median salary of $71,000, compared to $48,000 for intercultural and international studies. Nationally, according to another, more recent Carnevale study, the median business major can expect to make $3 million over a lifetime, versus $2.4 million for humanities and liberal arts. (The lifetime earnings study used broader categories for undergraduate majors than the earlier study did.)

Though it’s possible to quantify what, on average, is lost to rejected students in terms of post-undergraduate earnings, the loss of their contribution to society is harder to lay one’s hands on. Take Maria Tinoco, who entered UC Santa Barbara in 2020 intending to major in psychological and brain sciences in preparation for medical school. Tinoco, whose family of Mexican immigrants lives in a small, poor, and rural town in Northern California, attended college virtually her freshman year because of COVID-19 restrictions. “We were left basically completely on our own,” she says. “No one explained the process or even the fact that there were requirements for majors.” She didn’t have a strong internet connection at home and was forced to either watch blurry figures jitter on her laptop screen or drive miles away to attend classes from those coffee shops that would let her sit down in the middle of a pandemic. Halfway through the year, she met with a faculty adviser who looked over her course load and grades. The major requires at least a 2.7 in five different classes, as well as a 2.0 in three others, and Tinoco was a long way from the target. The adviser didn’t suggest remedial courses or other options, she says; instead, they told her, “We wouldn’t recommend this path for you.” In other words, Tinoco says, “Don’t even try.”

Tinoco no longer plans to be a doctor. It would technically be possible for her to fulfill pre-med requirements with a global studies major—which is where she ended up—but she can’t afford to spend the extra time and money after wasting so much already. Instead, she’s graduating early with the help of credits she earned in high school. She does not have career plans lined up. Like Gonzalez, Tinoco was a high achiever in high school, doing everything she could to prepare for college as a first-generation student—in her case, by taking classes at a local community college. Yet despite her best efforts, she found herself behind at the start. “For most of us,” she says, referring to the band of first-generation friends she formed at school, “it seems like we’re in a system not built for us. And we feel it.”

Though Bleemer and Mehta’s research clearly articulates the problem, they are still grasping toward potential solutions. Major restriction policies are massively more pervasive at public universities than they are at private universities, but that doesn’t necessarily mean public schools can or will copy what private ones are doing. The scholars are now testing a few theories that could explain the disparity, all of which have to do with intrinsic properties that are hard to change: that prestigious private universities have more available resources to move around, smaller student populations to manage, and an incentive to keep students and parents paying their high tuition.

Gonzalez, the UC Santa Barbara student blocked from majoring in communications, has one idea: student outreach. Though she was behind in college preparation entering her freshman year, there were resources available to help her catch up—tutors, faculty advisers, remedial classes. But as an overwhelmed 18-year-old dumped alone into an unfamiliar environment, she didn’t know where to look. Now that she does, she wonders: What if that help had come to me? Things might have been different, Gonzalez imagines, if, rather than waiting in their offices for her to go to them, faculty and academic support staff had sought her out and told her, “Hey, you’re kind of at a disadvantage, but there are resources for you, and people who want to help you succeed.”  

Another simple and incremental change that could reduce the squeeze on minority students is to make major enrollment conditional on more holistic evaluations, rather than grades alone: faculty and peer recommendations, for example. It doesn’t completely eliminate the gap, but Bleemer and Mehta’s data shows that fewer minority students are excluded by holistic admissions in comparable departments across universities. After they published their research late last year, the UC Berkeley computer science department made plans to eliminate its GPA requirement of 3.3 in favor of a comprehensive model. Eleven other majors will follow suit next year, including economics, psychology, and data science, a spokesperson at UC Berkeley told me. Even so, holistic major admissions is “a second-best policy,” Bleemer told me. “It strikes me that universities would be better off just letting students study what they want.” 

That, however, would require hiring more faculty members and staff—which means the university as a whole spending more money—or reallocating resources from departments with fewer majors. Either way, these are decisions that carry political pitfalls for the deans or higher-up administrators who must make them. At UC Santa Barbara, for instance, faculty in less popular departments push back on the idea of making sacrifices for the sake of in-demand majors, says Tamara Afifi, chair of the department of communications. If college administrators were to redistribute that money anyway, they might have to lay off faculty or let positions lapse through attrition—a decision sure to be controversial. Taking money from departments like Santa Barbara’s global studies to feed demand in STEM subjects wouldn’t be a one-to-one conversion, either; studies indicate that teaching technical fields like engineering costs more per student. And finally, looming above interdepartmental disputes over resources, the larger UC system is making difficult decisions about how and where to spend money in its constituent schools. “It’s a big puzzle,” Afifi told me. “And once you take one piece out it affects everything else.” 

Afifi, who just finished her first school year as chair, said she didn’t want to keep a policy that excludes students like Gonzalez. But for now, she doesn’t see another option. The department has 27 faculty members, 40 graduate students, and close to 2,000 undergraduate majors. That’s up from 1,215 majors five years ago, according to university statistics, with little to no increase in faculty or staff. Classes are bursting at the seams. Afifi recently approached a dean to ask for more resources, arguing that they should be redistributed from departments with less demand. The dean agreed that something should be done, and then passed her on to a higher-up administrator, who agreed that something should be done, and then passed her on to someone else—and so on. “They agree,” she said, “but they don’t give us the funds.” 

To ultimately solve this problem, then, universities must gather the will to rise above internal politics and deliver resources where they’re needed. Until that happens, students like Savannah Gonzalez and Maria Tinoco will be deprived not only of hundreds of thousands of dollars in future earnings, but of their dreams, as well.

The post The Invisible College Barrier appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Illias Gomez thought he was doing pretty well for himself when he got a part-time job as a host at a local Olive Garden during his sophomore year in high school.

“It was my first job, so I thought I was making a lot of money,” Gomez recalls of the position, which paid $10 an hour.

His perspective changed when—in the summer of 2021, before his senior year—he landed an internship at IBM making $21.50 an hour, working on media and entertainment projects for the company. The higher wage not only more than doubled his salary, but also proved life-changing for Illias and his family, who reside in Mesquite, Texas, just outside of Dallas.

For starters, the job came with a $750 stipend for home office equipment. Gomez used the stipend and his salary to buy an L-shaped desk and two computers to create a home studio. The studio serves as a sanctuary where he can pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a video game developer—a dream that goes back to when he was a four-year-old playing God of War on his uncle’s PlayStation 2.

He also saved up to buy himself a car—a blue 2004 Honda Civic EX. He bought his stepdad a heat press machine for their fledgling custom T-shirt business. And he bought his mom a manicure nail table so instead of shelling out money to local nail salons, she could do her nails at home, as well as those of her family and friends.

At 32 hours a week, the IBM internship essentially made Illias a breadwinner for his family overnight, even if only for that summer.

“I never expected this early in my life to be paid that much,” Gomez told me during an interview in a second-floor conference room at Emmett J. Conrad High School, located in the city’s Vickery Meadow neighborhood, a densely populated area that is home to many immigrants and refugees from around the world.

“That money really helped out,” he said. When his mother, a building code officer for the city of Dallas, heard how much his salary was, “she was surprised, because she was like, ‘You’re close to making as much as I’m making.’ ”

Gomez landed his lucrative IBM internship through a program called P-TECH, which stands for Pathways in Technology Early College High School. Not only does P-TECH connect high school students to employment opportunities in promising fields, it also offers them the chance to take college courses while in high school and to earn credits toward both—a concept called dual enrollment. For Gomez it meant that, when he graduated this past May from Conrad High at the age of 18, he also had an associate’s degree in applied science in interactive simulation and game technology. He didn’t have to pay a dime. His mother was so inspired by Illias’s example that she decided to go back to college herself.

Dual enrollment is one of the most encouraging trends in higher education. Such programs have been shown to boost college attendance and reduce the time it takes for students to earn postsecondary degrees and vocational certificates. One of the abiding problems, however, is that students of color and from lower-income families tend to be underrepresented. Historically, dual enrollees have typically been whiter, wealthier, and already high achievers academically.

What makes P-TECH different is that, as a nonselective program, it serves lower-income minority students, many of whom weren’t doing well in school—like Gomez. The program does that in various innovative ways: by giving the high school students a new identity as college students capable of doing college work, by providing them with jobs in a field they’re passionate about, and by connecting them with businesses in search of an educated workforce. 

The success P-TECH has shown with students like Gomez has helped it spread rapidly—from a single school in Brooklyn, where it was launched in 2011, to 210 today throughout the United States (and many others in several countries, from Morocco to Singapore to Australia). 

But that growth pales in comparison to the potential interest. There are more than 21,000 public high schools in the United States, meaning that only about 1 percent of America’s high schools have the program. Even in Dallas, where 18 high schools participate in P-TECH, demand far outstrips supply. At Conrad High, for instance, there were twice as many applicants as there are spots at the school in the fall of 2022. 

One limiting factor, not surprisingly, is cost. High schools and colleges foot the bill for administering the program, and employers have to be persuaded to see the value in student interns’ work enough to come up with the money for their salaries. For the program to become available to all students, a national-level investment would help tremendously.

The program’s first school, known simply as P-TECH High School, launched in 2011 in Brooklyn as a collaboration between IBM, the New York City Department of Education, and the City University of New York (CUNY). It was the brainchild of Stanley Litow, then an executive at IBM, who designed P-TECH as a special education project for the company. Litow says he wanted to help improve students’ lifetime earnings and to address the “skills gap”—that is, the gulf between available jobs that require certain skills and the people who have the education necessary to fill those jobs.

“Those who go into the workforce with a postsecondary degree will earn $1 million more over their lives than those with only a high school diploma,” Litow says, using an oft-cited statistic about the value of a college degree.

From the beginning, Litow aimed to create a model that could be broadly replicated everywhere. Seeing that some similar programs had limited their own growth by restricting admissions to high-achieving students, Litow decided to avoid that pitfall with P-TECH. “For that reason we resisted suggestions to restrict admissions to only the highest-achieving students and made admissions open to all,” Litow told me recently. “Had that not been done, its success would have been marginalized because it only worked for high achievers.”

In fall 2011, 104 students dual enrolled at P-TECH High in Brooklyn and the New York City College of Technology, better known as City Tech, which is part of CUNY. Among those students, 16 became the first to take a college course in summer 2012. They took math and computer science classes and worked toward associate’s degrees in computer systems and electromechanical engineering. 

By fall 2013, there were 82 students dual enrolled and in an average of five college courses.

President Barack Obama gave P-TECH a shout-out in his 2013 State of the Union address and visited the high school later that year, praising it as “a ticket into the middle class [that’s] available to everybody who’s willing to work for it.” He added, “And that’s the way it should be.”

Another world leader toured Brooklyn P-TECH the following year: Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who became the first to expand the program outside the U.S. Since then, 26 nations have followed. 

The discussion to implement P-TECH in the Dallas Independent School District began in 2015 on the sixth floor of a Bank of America building in the city’s downtown. It was Michael Hinojosa’s second stint as superintendent of schools in Dallas. Two high schools that had previously been in danger of being taken over by the state had found success by adopting an early college model, but the district hadn’t seen fit to take up P-TECH—at least not yet.

Gathered around the table with Hinojosa were representatives from the county government, the rail system, the county hospital, and the Dallas County Community College District. As Hinojosa recalls, Joe May, now chancellor emeritus of the community college district, said, “Hey, we’ve heard of this P-TECH model and we’d like to see if you’d be interested in taking this thing to scale to put it at all your high schools.” 

“And I said, ‘Well, sounds interesting. Absolutely, let me do a little investigating,’ ” Hinojosa told me. “ ‘Let me talk to my team.’ ”

Hinojosa consulted with his central office staff and had them organize a trip to New York City to learn more about the original P-TECH. Based on their research, they altered the program slightly to fit Dallas students’ needs, adopting a four-year model rather than the six-year plan used in New York. Six months later, the Dallas school district launched eight P-TECH schools for the 2016–17 school year. It launched another 10 the following year. The school district set aside $25.5 million each year to set up the infrastructure for the program, and the community college ponied up the rest through tuition waivers totaling roughly $24 million a year. 

Since 2016, the program has grown from eight schools to 18. In the 2020–21 school year, 5,835 students were on one of 36 “career pathways” that include health sciences, business administration and management, information technology, engineering, and hospitality management.

In 2021, 12th-grade Dallas P-TECH students had earned an average of roughly 56 dual credit hours apiece, along with good money from a growing roster of industry partners. “It just took off,” Hinojosa said. “It’s been nothing short of phenomenal.”

In order to become a success, Dallas P-TECH needed to build strong ties to business. Corporate partners don’t make financial contributions to P-TECH beyond paying interns’ wages. Instead, they offer mentoring and internships—or, as Hinojosa likes to say, some “love.” The Dallas school district started with about 25 industry partners, including AT&T and Microsoft, and now has close to 100, from Cisco Systems Inc. to PepsiCo/Frito-Lay. The roster includes several airlines and big banks and tech giants, a list that stands out for both the sheer number of industry partners and their diversity, which offers opportunities to kids with a wide range of interests.

Hinojosa told me students are landing great jobs at major U.S. companies. “American Airlines just hired 11 kids out of one high school making $58,000 a year with a 401k and free flights all over America,” he said. “And every one of them [is] Latino or African American.” 

So what’s the case for businesses to get involved?

In 2016, Ed Magnin, director of development at Magnin & Associates, a Dallas-based video game developer and a Conrad High School partner, joined Dallas P-TECH, motivated by the chance to help prepare and shape the workforce he needed. (Dallas College officials, for their part, say employers routinely make suggestions about what courses will benefit new hires.)

“If we can turn out students that have skills that are in demand in industry, that’s one reason for [companies] to volunteer to work with the schools,” Magnin told me. “It’s also something the Chamber of Commerce can sell to companies as to why they should move here: We have good schools and our students are earning college credit while they’re still in high school.”

Beyond that, Magnin said, businesses like his can better afford to pay fair wages when they’re hiring entry-level workers straight out of high school. Magnin & Associates takes on two interns per semester. One such intern was Gomez, who worked for Magnin as a tester finding bugs and glitches in video games before he landed the internship at IBM. 

Hinojosa observes that not all jobs require a four-year degree. P-TECH gives an advantage to high school graduates who might struggle to earn an associate’s degree if they had to do it on their own as adults rather than during high school.

“These industry partners are so happy with this because now they see a ready workforce,” Hinojosa said. “And now they’re thinking about, ‘Do you really need a full bachelor’s degree to work at American Airlines or Accenture?’ Because these kids can do all these things that they never had any idea they could do.”

Remarkably, in 2021, about a third of students who earned an associate’s degree that year in Dallas had failed their eighth-grade exam. “They shouldn’t have even been in high school,” said Hinojosa, who completed his last year with the district in June 2022. According to a recent study of the program, such turnaround stories are typical for P-TECH students. An April 2022 evaluation by MDRC—a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research organization—found that P-TECH schools in New York City were “particularly successful at helping students at risk of underperforming in high school achieve important academic milestones.”

The evaluation found that, “in particular, [P-TECH] increased dual enrollment for this group of students, which may be significant since prior research has found that students who take college courses while in high school are more likely to both enroll in college and complete postsecondary education degrees.” MDRC plans to release a final report on P-TECH in New York, including a cost study, in 2023.

Statistics show that Illias Gomez has plenty of company among his fellow high schoolers who benefited from P-TECH. Of all the Dallas high school students who got two-year degrees or earned 60 dual credit hours in 2020–21, 71 percent were P-TECH students. 

“This past year in the pandemic, 910 kids—actually 910 is 10 percent of our senior class—graduated from high school with an associate’s degree for free,” Hinojosa told me. “No debt.”

Today, much like Gomez, not only are Dallas high school students earning college degrees along with their high school diplomas, but they’re also making good money while still in high school. In summer 2021, more than 400 Dallas public high school students got internships in which they earned an average of $17.50 per hour. Collectively, they earned more than $1.6 million, Dallas school data shows.

“The cool thing about this is our students are saying, ‘I’m earning more than my mom. I don’t know what to do with this money,’ ” says Sibu McNeal, director of workplace learning at Dallas ISD P-TECH and Early College Programs. “These are good problems that we’re having now.”

Other school districts are looking at these results and following suit. In May 2022, on a visit to Conrad High, I met a group of education leaders from Chicago who had come to learn more about how they could implement P-TECH back in the Windy City. The group included Pedro Martinez, the chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools. Martinez told me he sees P-TECH in Dallas as a “very, very strong model” and he hopes to soon pilot the program at 10 to 20 schools in Chicago. The city already has one P-TECH school, Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy, but Chicago’s educational leaders are thinking of greatly expanding the program. Martinez said, “I think this is the future of education.”

Despite the interest from Chicago, P-TECH is still a relatively rare model on the American educational landscape. Of the nation’s 15.3 million high school students, only about 1.5 million are in dual enrollment programs, according to researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University. Less than 10 percent of those students are in P-TECH. Of those 1.5 million dual enrollment students, the vast majority—particularly Black, Hispanic, and low-income students—do not earn anywhere near enough credits to graduate from high school with an associate’s degree the way Gomez did.

“In every state where we’ve looked at this, the average number of dual enrollment credits students take before they graduate is small—usually around 6 to 9 credits or 2 to 3 courses,” says Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College. There aren’t reliable statistics for the average number of credits earned by P-TECH students—in part because the length of the program varies across the country—but in P-TECH’s birthplace, New York City, students are earning an average of 32 credits from State University of New York branches as they move from high school to college.

In fact, Litow said P-TECH should have become more prevalent in Chicago years ago. It’s not for lack of trying—this won’t be the city’s first attempt at implementing the program. A district official says five early college high schools were established to “emulate” P-TECH in 2012, but Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy—a school that Time magazine praised in 2014 as “The School That Will Get You a Job”—was the only one that managed to stay true to the model. 

Different factors, such as changes in leadership, can sometimes make it difficult to bring even successful programs to scale, Litow said. But more than that, P-TECH could use federal support. Right now, a patchwork of local school systems have adopted the model, each figuring out on their own how to find funding and adapt the program to the needs of their communities. One idea Litow would like to see: Expand eligibility for Pell Grants so they cover dual enrolled students, not just traditional college students. That move alone would “immediately” lead to more schools opening because it would take the tuition cost burden away from states and localities, Litow said. Another, similar, move would be to open up federal work study grants, which currently pay 70 to 75 percent of the wages that employers pay to students. That would bring in more industry partners to P-TECH programs. Another would be for the U.S. Labor Department to fund apprenticeships for more high school students. 

All three of those changes would not eliminate costs for states and school districts, Litow said, but they would introduce a more efficient cost-sharing model that would help the program to expand. And over the long term, he predicted, it would save money by reducing the need for remedial courses, increasing college completion, and saving tax dollars by keeping graduates out of the social safety net.

During their first two years, P-TECH students at Conrad High attend classes at their school that are taught by professors from the nearby Dallas College Richland Campus. Illias Gomez said one of his most memorable classes was a project development class taught by the adjunct game design professor Paul Lachowicz, who taught students the ins and outs of using Unreal Engine, an open 3D creation tool that people can use to make video games and movies. Gomez spent hours playing around in the engine under Lachowicz’s eye, building worlds—and problem-solving skills—in the classroom.

Conrad’s upper-level students spend more and more time independently taking college courses. Gomez told me the experience taught him important lessons about time management. “No one’s telling you, ‘You have to go to this class. You have to go to that class,’ ” he said. “It’s like, you know what time your class starts. You have to be there for your grade, your attendance, because even though you’re not paying for it, you’re having that opportunity to have that class for free that could cost thousands of dollars as an adult.” The IBM job, meanwhile, was a sweet deal for reasons that transcend how much it paid. Unlike his restaurant host job or the days when he did yard work in his neighborhood to make money, Gomez didn’t have to leave home.

“It was like working a real office job, but from the comfort of our own home,” he said. “Like it was almost a workshop. It’s like a giant workshop where we just learned different things about how it is to be a consultant, as well as problem solving for a company.”

Gomez plans to take his studies in gaming beyond the next two years at the University of North Texas. He has his eyes on Southern Methodist University. There, he hopes to join the Guildhall, which bills itself as a “premier graduate-level video game development education program in the United States.”

Gomez has a keen sense of the role that P-TECH played in positioning him where he is today.

“P-TECH is one of those things where you look at it now and it may not be so big to you, but later on it means pretty much the world, because that’s when you realize that you not only saved yourself and your family a lot of money, you saved yourself a lot of time,” he told me. “And so it’s one of the things where there’s going to be some sacrifices, but those sacrifices are what help you become the grown young adult that you will be.”  

The post A Job and a College Degree Before You Graduate High School  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In late spring 2019, Linda enrolled in her freshman year at Southwest Tennessee Community College (SWTCC), a public, two-year, open-admissions college in Memphis. The school charges in-state tuition of roughly $4,500 a year, but it is free for students, such as Linda, who are eligible for full Pell Grants. The modern campus has a predominantly African American student body. And Linda, a Black returning student in her mid-50s, looked forward to the fall semester. Full of ideas for starting her own business, she had been working as a home health aide—mainly for Alzheimer’s patients, whom she joked around with and seemed to love—but now the determined student had what she called a “game plan.” “I want to work with kids and help them through problems at home the school system ignores before they get to a point where they fight their teachers and the schools put them out,” Linda told me. “I want to be the one to make a difference.”

Linda tested below college level in math, English, and reading. But before entering community college, Linda learned about a free summer bridge program run by a local nonprofit, which coordinated with SWTCC and offered condensed instruction in those subjects, followed by another round of testing. If Linda passed, the program could help her avoid remedial courses that didn’t earn her credits. It also offered opportunities. She met a program coach who could help her navigate college life and even assist with a possible transfer to a four-year college once she completed her associate’s degree. At lunchtime every day, Linda and other incoming SWTCC participants gathered for a free meal provided by the program. Speakers offered advice about what to expect in college. Three weeks later, Linda passed her math placement test: “I was like, ‘Let’s get it!’ ” said the longtime Memphis resident, who has a big, deep laugh. “The summer program helped me find my footing.”

Few students arrive at SWTCC well prepared. In fact, in Memphis, half the students who graduate from local public high schools and enter in-state public colleges require at least one remedial class. At SWTCC, about 70 percent of students are eligible for federal Pell Grants, compared with just 15 percent at Ivy League institutions. Roughly a third of SWTCC students are, like Linda, over 25 years old. Within three years of full-time classes, pursuing what is typically considered a two-year degree, only about 10 percent of students graduate, and little more than 5 percent transfer to four-year colleges. But Linda seemed determined to complete her degree. “This is my time, and I’m willing to put in the effort,” she said. “Where my head is right now is getting my bachelor’s degree, so let’s get this part over with.”

I wrote about Linda and several of her SWTCC classmates for this magazine last year. At the time, I worried about how the novel coronavirus and the concomitant shutdown of in-person instruction would affect students like her, who statistics indicated faced unlikely odds—even before the pandemic—of achieving associate’s degrees, let alone transferring to four-year colleges.

As I spent time with Linda, however, she seemed relatively unfazed by the disruption to in-person classes. In her second year at SWTCC, she posted journal entries for her social psychology class. For a theater class, she wrote a paper about the difference between a live performance of The Wizard of Oz and watching Hamilton on TV. She found a job at a nursing home that paid enough to cover her textbooks, and she considered the responsibilities a useful counterpart to her sociology major. Even after testing positive for COVID-19, Linda stayed up late to watch online lectures after her shifts and imagined herself moving to a better position at the nursing home after completing her associate’s degree. She also envisioned working with youth once she achieved her bachelor’s degree. However sleep deprived she might get, Linda told me, she would do what was necessary to succeed.

“This is where I’m supposed to be,” she said. “I’m going to school. I’m going to school. Or else SWTCC will have to put me up out of here. You can get all the certificates in the world, all the training in the world. But when you have a degree behind your name, that degree makes everything else mean more.”

Nevertheless, after many of the initial supports provided by the summer program faded away, Linda seemed unprepared to seek the help she needed to get ahead on her own. Crucially, assuming that she would graduate, she waited until the end of her fourth full-time semester to take the necessary steps to transfer to the University of Memphis, a local, public four-year school. “Right now, I have to focus. I have to grind this,” Linda said, explaining her rationale. “I’m just trying to get through.” She intended to take fewer classes at the university each semester, which she expected would make the final “two years” to the bachelor’s degree easier for her. “And with the work study stuff there, I will still be at school and able to do work, and I’ll be getting paid,” she said. 

As Linda approached the end of her second year at SWTCC, she anticipated a happy, post-graduation summer, catching up with family and friends and preparing to start at the university. Since enrolling at SWTCC, she had stopped watching television and taken a smaller apartment. 

But when she filled out an SWTCC form for students intending to graduate, Linda discovered that she had several more classes to complete to reach the 60 credits required for her degree. The remedial courses, she learned, did not count toward that number, and she also had failed a credit-bearing class while simultaneously enrolled in the remedial class supporting it.

Undeterred, Linda signed up for a third fall semester and took a new job, driving patients to their doctor’s appointments. The position came with health insurance, which Linda had never had, and a 401k retirement plan. Her shifts, however, were longer than at the nursing home and—because they demanded lifting clients on and off stretchers and wheelchairs—left her more fatigued, reducing her motivation to study into the night.

As days went by with little rest, Linda considered dropping out. More than two years of full-time work and full-time community college had caught up with her. Eventually, she decided that she had accomplished enough. She had experienced college and could get by on her work as a driver.

In December 2021, she withdrew. 

Linda’s experience is not unique. Students lack college preparation not only in Memphis but also across Tennessee and the country. In Tennessee, only 17 percent of public high school students test ready for college in English, math, reading, or science. Nationwide, even before the pandemic, nearly two-thirds of community college students and a majority of all American college students showed up on campuses “unprepared”—defined as requiring remediation. Data from 2011 showed that at community colleges, only 10 percent of students who took remedial courses earned their associate’s degrees within three years, while nearly half never completed them. 

Higher ed institutions face an abiding conundrum with students who begin behind. Getting them up to speed to learn at the college level is necessary but wastes the students’ time and money (remedial classes typically don’t count for credit toward a degree) and discourages them from remaining enrolled. Now, however, this unsolved question looms large over an entire generation. How should the country and its educational institutions deal with students who lost out on years of pandemic-era learning? 

Previous efforts have met with limited success. In 2015, Tennessee became the first state to shift remedial course work systemwide from a prerequisite model to a corequisite one. Accordingly, Linda took her remedial English class during the same semester that she took credit-bearing English 101, rather than separately. Studies show that corequisite remediation improves students’ completion rates of lower-level courses but fails to help more students achieve their degrees. 

States like Florida have chipped away at required remediation altogether. In 2013, Florida eliminated placement tests and made remedial classes optional. The number of students passing college-level English and math classes increased, but the changes also came with enhanced academic support services, which simultaneously helped students, and course passage rates, while ticking up slightly, remained shockingly low. 

Through a program called Seamless Alignment and Integrated Learning Support (SAILS), Tennessee experimented with moving remedial math earlier in a student’s education. The program used high school juniors’ ACT scores to place them into remedial math classes during their senior year of high school. Those who passed the classes would not have to retake remedial math in college. Participants became much more likely to enroll in college-level math courses; however, they passed those college-level math courses at the same rate as traditional remedial students. 

Other states tried similar measures, with mixed results. The Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative, which, at the time, required participation by some high school students in Math for College Readiness, resulted in greater enrollment in college-level classes but no proof of more success in them. With similar programs, West Virginia did not achieve progress, but Arkansas and Mississippi did, according to the Community College Research Center. 

Many American high schools, however, have not had the resources to offer sufficiently high-level courses to prepare students to meet college learning expectations—especially high schools with significant racial and ethnic-minority student populations. Only 57 percent of African American students have attended schools where they could graduate ready for college.

Even at high schools where such classes are available, the highest-risk students frequently avoid them. This was true well before COVID-19, when students rarely, if ever, faced online learning.

During the pandemic, Linda’s Latina classmate at SWTCC, Tracy, tried to keep her young siblings and cousins, who were home from elementary school, logged into their activities and focused throughout the virtual school day. However, she could tell that no one, including her, was learning what they were supposed to be learning. Students at all educational levels, particularly those needing the most help with college preparedness, developed more significant deficits. 

Simultaneously, those in a position to guide students into college missed out on contact even with students who were attending and participating in online high school course work. Mentors from college-access nonprofits, representatives of free community college programs, and scholarship providers lost opportunities for building relationships. School counselors had less ability to facilitate essential milestones like making college officers aware of particular students or ensuring that students turned in key documents. 

In emergency meetings at the height of the pandemic that I attended, coordinated over Zoom across Tennessee, various college-access practitioners lamented not having the minimum contact information, especially email addresses, for applicants. Before the pandemic, staff had a chance to at least talk with students when they got off morning buses on their way to class—and even then, some students struggled. Before COVID, when school was in person, skipping classes would have led to a truancy charge. In the virtual educational environment, kids could log into school, get counted as present, and then leave, without anyone monitoring whether they were actually sitting and watching the class. The practitioners expected post–high school college enrollments to drop and continue dropping for some time. 

Tania is a bubbly Latina student who reads Japanese graphic novels in her spare time. In high school, she learned what it would take to apply to and enroll in college. Initially, she assumed that this wouldn’t be something her family could handle. Neither her immigrant parents nor her older siblings had any postsecondary education. But Tania loved learning, earned high grades, and forged close relationships with teachers. She joined the National Honor Society, and volunteer tutoring through the organization sparked her interest in a helping profession, such as teaching or social work. She began asking her high school teachers and her college counselor about college admissions and scholarship money.

Her parents assumed a hands-off stance regarding her education. Tania’s mother, who has schizophrenia, mostly stayed in bed; her father worked long hours. In Mexico, he had left formal education after sixth grade and liked the idea of his daughter going to college. It fulfilled his vision of the American dream. Tania felt guilty about possibly leaving home but delighted in the possibility of a new life chapter in a dorm.

In the spring of 2020, when Tania was in her junior year of high school, education in America moved online, and she lost contact with her college counselor and her teachers’ direct support, as did many students who could no longer chat with faculty after class or struggled with Zoom. Meanwhile, her family was falling deeper into debt. “You know, furniture, rent, credit cards, the usual things you would be in debt for,” she said. “My dad is struggling financially, and it just breaks my heart.” Before long, Tania took a job making sandwiches at Subway. She told her dad, “I want to help out.”

Though she graduated from high school in 2021, she decided to remain home and continue working. She hoped that she would get to college eventually and that her initial, good high school grades might still warrant admissions and scholarships. But students who have not enrolled in college directly from high school have always had difficulty getting back on track. They become even less prepared for college-level course work and tend to become saddled with competing obligations like child care and other demands of home. 

By spring 2021, overall enrollments at community colleges clocked in nearly 10 percent lower than in the spring of 2020, more than double the losses at four-year colleges. At SWTCC, enrollment fell 18 percent. Between the spring 2020 and fall 2020 semesters, half the African American male students previously enrolled at SWTCC dropped out.

Students who graduated from community college earned 10 percent more than those who enrolled but left without achieving their associate’s degrees. Those who graduated became more likely to find full-time jobs, compounding their higher wages over time. Raising graduation rates would reduce income inequality, bringing more people out of poverty.

Community colleges have become entry points to a bachelor’s degree, a sheepskin that moves the needle on economic mobility even more significantly. Nearly half of students in higher education are enrolled in community colleges; half of all students receiving bachelor’s degrees were previously enrolled in community colleges, a proportion that has grown in recent years.

But due to poor preparation, the conduit connecting community colleges with four-year colleges has increasingly appeared blocked. Though more high school graduates have been entering higher education through community college, a smaller proportion of those students have been achieving bachelor’s degrees, as more community college students have dropped out. Two-thirds of all first-time, full-time community college students have failed to obtain their associate’s degrees within three years. African American students like Linda have suffered from shockingly low completion rates: Only a quarter of first-time, full-time African American students have earned associate’s degrees in the same period.

In Memphis, Rod, an African American high school honors student, intended to study auto maintenance at SWTCC to prepare himself for jobs working with his hands, doing something involving cars. He earned good grades in high school and befriended several of his teachers. Nevertheless, Rod graduated in 2019—before the pandemic—testing below college level in English, math, and reading. Because his single mother was raising five children on her own and needed his financial help, he worked full-time over the summer before starting community college and didn’t participate in a bridge program as Linda did. He therefore entered college even more behind. He spent his entire first semester in remedial classes that did not count for credit.

Rod is a consummate charmer, a holder of doors, and a pronouncer of “ma’am”s. He passed his remedial courses on the first try and quickly found positions at local warehouse jobs that paid about $15 an hour. By his second semester, feeling like he was wasting time in college, he downshifted from four to two classes. By the end of his second year of college, he had lost motivation to continue his education. He never recovered from his initial lack of preparation and the time his remedial classes, which offered no credit but were nevertheless required, added to his load.

During the pandemic, colleges and college students received substantial aid from the federal CARES Act (March 2020), the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (December 2020), and the American Rescue Plan Act (March 2021). Still, four-year colleges received nearly twice the aid of community colleges on a per-pupil basis. This was because the CARES Act funding formula penalized institutions educating part-time students, predominantly community colleges. The Biden administration’s subsequent American Rescue Plan removed the penalty, doubling the funding community colleges collected from the federal government. State lawmakers, for their part, have long funded community colleges at lower levels than four-year public colleges. Though allocations for community college students grew over recent years, they still received less money overall, and fewer resources for academic and student support. 

Shortly before dropping out of SWTCC, Rod received a bill for $230. He hadn’t known that when his enrollment fell below part-time status, he would have to repay a pro rata share of the Pell Grant aid he received. Moreover, by dropping out within the first two-thirds of a semester, he became ineligible for Pell support. He would have to repay another portion of the grant money.

College readiness entails not just academic skills but also help seeking, task management, interpersonal communication, problem solving, study strategies, and personal decision making. It also encompasses understanding how to register for classes, seek advice and counseling, solicit financial aid, and ask for career development assistance. Deficits in preparedness in these areas cast their shadow far across the college experience. While plenty of children growing up in middle-class families lag in these areas, they often have the advantage of parents who went to college and know how to negotiate bureaucracies. 

Last spring, Rod’s SWTCC classmates, Tracy—the Latina student who had been helping her younger siblings and cousins during the school day—and Mia—a mixed-race student who ranked fifth in her high school class—graduated with their associate’s degrees. With the help of the bridge program in which Linda participated, both tested out of remedial courses and avoided wasting college time in non-credit-bearing classes. 

Tracy intended to earn a bachelor’s degree to become an interior designer. Still, at SWTCC, she majored in general studies, thinking that more of her credits would transfer to a four-year college that way. This was not exactly true, particularly given the number of prerequisite course requirements in the interior design bachelor’s major and its onerous subject-area credit requirements. 

Tracy thought she had applied to transfer to the University of Memphis and gained admission so she could start classes the following fall, but somehow the steps she needed to take to enroll seemed murky and difficult to complete. She made an appointment to speak virtually with an adviser, but she had to miss the meeting to help with family chores. Her mother had lost her job; without citizenship, she couldn’t get a driver’s license, and the multigenerational household depended on Tracy to drive her rickety, used car to errands and appointments. Then a new company bought the house her family rented and told them they had to move out within the month. “We’ve been trying to get settled,” Tracy explained to me. “The younger kids had to change schools. Then my car wasn’t working. It’s a journey, I guess. If I’m able to help out, then I’m going to help out. And [for college] I don’t really understand what I need to do next.”

Mia was also waiting for someone to tell her how to transfer to the University of Memphis. She had started community college determined to become a therapist, but the path to the necessary degree looked more and more uncertain. Her parents hadn’t attended college, so they couldn’t help her with the transfer process. Mia seemed to expect the community college to email her a list of specific instructions, but no such email ever arrived. 

She decided, therefore, to find herself a job instead, but she appeared unsure of how to do that either, and even more uncertain of how to find work related to her new associate’s degree in psychology. Rod, meanwhile, told her the local Walmart was hiring. She took a position there, working nights restocking shelves.

In numerous areas, the pandemic deepened rifts in educational preparedness that will resound for years. It brought to the fore the necessity of a broader, more effective campaign to address college readiness and academic preparation.

The lack of college readiness for so many community college students has its origin, of course, in a K–12 system that fails students in countless ways. But short of reforming that system from root to branch, a more targeted set of improvements could make a substantial difference. 

To resolve learning deficits at the high school level, all high schools must offer curricula for training students with sufficient skills and knowledge to succeed in college. To do that, the country urgently needs a standard, national definition of college readiness. The Common Core State Standards, a 2010 educational initiative detailing what K–12 students should know in English and math at the end of every school grade, as a means for spurring high, standardized academic benchmarks, must now be integrated more closely with college course work. This would contribute to greater curricular continuity, aligning more closely what students would leave high school knowing with college learning expectations. In Washington State, for example, high school and community college teachers have jointly used the Common Core standards to identify learning goals and assemble courses. The state’s Bridge to College class in English draws from the Southern Regional Education Board’s Literacy Ready class, materials created by New York State, and California State University’s expository writing course. Nevertheless, definitions of college readiness vary by state, and not every state has adopted or implemented the Common Core standards. 

Following the example of a handful of successful programs, additional initiatives in the junior year of high school could further align curricula and match student progression. In Long Beach, California, the Early Assessment Program has measured college readiness among 11th graders to allow students time to improve their skills in courses jointly designed by district and postsecondary faculty. Long Beach City College has accepted the courses for placement. To adapt writing instruction to better meet college expectations, Philadelphia high schools have partnered with college writing instructors. On behalf of the New York City school system, the community-based organization LINCT to Success has had high school seniors take City University of New York placement tests and used the results in individualized learning plans. Faculty at CUNY have also developed the At Home in College program. Its English and math transition courses have made a limited difference in course passage rates in college. It is not enough for states to eliminate remedial courses. Students like Linda and Rod need to enter college prepared with the academic skills to succeed there.

At the college level, while isolated efforts have helped some students succeed in remedial courses, several clear areas for further reform persist. One successful model for accelerated and integrated reading and English composition, for example, developed at Chabot College in California by Katie Hern, has entailed a single-semester, four-hour English composition course that combines reading development with composition while also training students in critical thinking and college expectations. Participants have demonstrated a nearly 25 percent greater likelihood of completing college-level English courses. Remedial learning initiatives must integrate research and theory on culturally responsive teaching, inclusive instruction, adult learning theory, and cognitive psychology to improve student learning outcomes. Currently, most of those teaching college-level remedial courses have adjunct faculty status. Substituting full-time faculty would enable access to institutional orientations and training and more support for this critical type of teaching. Incoming students must also receive more detailed counseling on how colleges use placement test scores and how the scores impact students’ college trajectories. 

Whether in remedial classes or not, underprepared community college students desperately need more and better counseling and guidance to navigate the complicated choices they face. That means colleges must address preparedness more broadly, beyond explicitly remedial courses, with efforts to help at-risk students continue throughout their education. Right now, the onus is entirely on the student to navigate through their institution. They’re given a remedial class, but the college offers little or no help beyond that. 

If students are to remain enrolled and graduate, they must make a series of good choices following remediation and navigate other forces threatening to undermine their progress. Linda, for example, passed several remedial courses but did not understand the credit loss entailed and therefore failed to establish a plan for recouping those credits on an acceptable schedule. 

Teaching and promoting the behaviors necessary for college and transfer success seem best conveyed through coordinated efforts by faculty and student affairs professionals. More communication among advisers and faculty can help integrate the messaging students receive. This would allow students like Tracy and Mia to parlay their associate’s degrees into further educational training and eventually better jobs.

Various colleges and nonprofits run programs contacting people with college credits and no degree, making efforts to convince them to reenroll. Investing in keeping students enrolled through graduation and potential transfer seems a more efficient way to boost the country’s overall educational attainment than trying to reenroll students who attempted college but dropped out. Only a third of students who reenrolled in college between 2005 and 2008 ultimately earned degrees, a lower completion rate than among first-time students. Loan policy has created a significant obstacle: Following a six-month grace period, payments on loans a non-enrolled student previously entered into come due, and federal unsubsidized and private student loans will have already accrued interest. Moreover, federal student loans have a maximum lifetime limit.

The types of reforms and additional services that community colleges need to add to help students like Linda and Tania succeed will require a major investment from Washington. The average community college receives half or less revenue per student than the average four-year state college, and far less than elite private universities. They simply don’t have the money for the counselors they need to hire, or the administrative support staff needed to coordinate curriculum with high schools. 

Last year’s Build Back Better reconciliation bill, which included tens of billions of dollars for community colleges and services like counseling, died in the Senate last winter. A revived version that passed this summer did not include money for higher education. Still, future investment in community college isn’t inconceivable after the midterm elections, given that vocational programs are, at least rhetorically, a Republican priority.

Tania, meanwhile, is making the best of things at the sandwich shop where she now works, her astuteness and attention to detail noticeable to her customers. She now pours the dreams she had for college into her younger sister, who Tania feels determined should enroll somewhere selective, live in a dorm, and experience everything she originally wanted for herself. When she talks about it, she smiles, and her eyes brighten. 

Though her father still wants her to go to college, even if she had to juggle work and school, Tania plans instead to apply soon for a new job at a national drugstore chain. She hopes to work her way up to the pharmacy, considering pharmacy work close to her original interests in teaching or social work. Eventually, she envisions moving to wherever her sister might attend college. Tania is building hope around the promise of economic opportunity through her sister’s education, if only she is prepared to figure out how to pursue and complete it.

The post The Memphis Post-COVID Community College Blues  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Advanced College is a for-profit school in South Gate, California, a Los Angeles suburb that’s 95 percent Hispanic. Photos on Google Maps show a one-story beige building with a small parking lot. A banner on a car stereo store next door announces, “No Credit Needed.” Two doors down, there’s a crematorium, and across the street, a burger shop. Advanced College offers only seven programs, according to its website, including a credential in “computerized accounting” (tuition and fees: $13,573), a certificate in phlebotomy ($3,500), and a certificate in vocational nursing ($35,000). 

The Department of Education’s College Scorecard reports that the school had only 31 students and a mere 52 percent completion rate as of July. And despite the name, just 43 percent of Advanced College’s students earn more than they would with just a high school degree. The school is under the dreaded “heightened monitoring” by the Education Department for “financial or federal compliance issues.” 

Nevertheless, Advanced College is among the approximately 1,000 “eligible training providers” as of July 22 (and more than 5,700 programs) approved by the state of California to receive training funds under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the federal government’s largest workforce development program. Under the WIOA, state and local workforce agencies provide unemployed and underemployed workers “individual training accounts” (typically funded between $3,000 and $5,000) to pay for training from state-approved providers included on an “eligible training provider list”—an ETPL—required under federal law. (The only way an institution can get federal training dollars is to be on a state’s ETPL.) 

California’s ETPL includes high-performing institutions, but they are hard to distinguish from lesser schools and questionable for-profits. These include the Stellar Career College in Modesto, whose students earn a not-so-stellar median annual income of $25,723, according to the College Scorecard, and UEI College–Gardena, where 93 percent of students take out federal loans and 22 percent are in default or delinquent. Also on California’s list is American River College, a community college in Sacramento with a 30 percent graduation rate, and various branches of the Milan Institute, a for-profit cosmetology school that, among other things, offers a 75-week course in “barbering” for $18,781. (It, too, is under Education Department monitoring.) 

These ETPLs are meant to ensure that workers qualifying for federal job training assistance have high-quality programs from which to choose. But as the California examples show, the lists fall short. As an instrument for giving workers “choice” while demanding “accountability” from training programs, ETPLs are a failure. And this is a major reason why federal job training efforts are much less effective than they could be. 

Rather than ensuring practical, affordable training for in-demand jobs, the lists are a haven for expensive for-profits and fly-by-night concerns. Some of the nation’s best training providers actually eschew being on an ETPL because of the bureaucratic hassles. At the same time, states’ poor data collection (despite all the bureaucracy) means that potential trainees can’t compare programs for the best investment of their time and federal aid. The Education Department’s College Scorecard, for instance, is not cross-referenced on ETPL sites, depriving a would-be trainee of valuable information. Collecting reliable performance data from providers has been a long-standing challenge. Worst of all, the ETPL represents an archaic approach to workforce development—“train and pray”—where workers enroll in training programs that may or may not match up to the jobs available or impart the skills that employers want.

With employers starved for skilled talent, the federal workforce development system should provide workers with the skills to land in-demand jobs. Yet the number of workers enrolled in WIOA-funded training has been declining, indicating a broken system. The best place to start is to fix who’s doing the training.

“The ETPL is a dinosaur,” says Kris Stadelman, who recently retired as executive director of the NOVA Workforce Board in Silicon Valley and was also CEO of the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County in Washington. “It does not at all work in the way it was designed,” she says. “And it should just be put to bed.” 

Congress appropriates nearly $3 billion a year to fund worker training programs via almost 2,400 “American Job Centers” authorized by the WIOA. Given this decentralized infrastructure, the ETPL was meant to provide workers with maximum flexibility in choosing a training program.

This concept of “customer choice” was also intended to fix an earlier iteration of the federal workforce program, the Job Training Partnership Act of 1982. Under this law, participants didn’t pick their training but were assigned to programs chosen and contracted out by local workforce development agencies. “Often these arrangements led to overconsumption of some training and lack of flexibility for funders, students, and employers,” a 2011 analysis by Carl Van Horn of Rutgers University and Aaron Fichtner of the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development concluded. Widely publicized incidents of abuse fueled the JTPA’s reputation as a boondoggle for state and local governments. 

In a 1990 screed from the Cato Institute, the journalist James Bovard excoriated the program for “providing contractors with a license to steal.” “JTPA has spent taxpayers’ money to set up a circus museum, teach cab drivers to smile, and enable a small-town mayor to fly to Japan,” he wrote. In addition to numerous audits by the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Labor’s inspector general faulting the program’s contracting practices, Bovard cited a 1988 investigation by The Plain Dealer, finding that Ohio Governor Richard Celeste had funneled $1.4 million in JTPA contracts to campaign contributors. Among these was a $100,000 effort “to train 32 unemployed coal miners to become engineering aides.” “Only two of the trainees got jobs, which is not surprising because there was no demand for engineering aides in the area of Ohio where the training occurred,” Bovard wrote. 

Successor legislation to the JTPA, the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, created the ETPL to be a tool for consumers—a Consumer Reports for training programs, as the former workforce director Stadelman says. Meant to help trainees, the ETPL has instead created a different set of pitfalls. 

One problem is that anyone can apply to become an eligible training provider. Most states actively solicit applications. The result is an array of programs that may or may not align with the skills and credentials a local economy needs. Among the more than 1,500 approved programs in Virginia, for example, trainees can pursue credentials in everything from an associate’s degree in diesel technology to certification as a wind turbine technician, an EMT, or a truck driver. They can also seek training as a bail bondsman, an ethical hacker, or a massage therapist and get certificates in such specialties as permanent cosmetic tattooing, professional horseshoeing, or the appropriate use of pepper spray (for aspiring security guards). No doubt these might be excellent programs, but what’s lacking is information about the availability of area jobs for students interested in these fields (that is, whether there’s a local shortage of farriers or cosmetic tattoo artists). 

In West Virginia, many of the approved providers are online and based out of state, so they might lack a connection with local employers. A scan through the state’s ETPL includes providers based in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, and even California. (This would be the Ding King Training Institute, which offers a certificate in “painless dent repair” for vehicles for $13,000, according to West Virginia’s ETPL online.) 

The options are dizzying. “People don’t make good choices without a lot of instruction in the current labor market, an assessment of their skills, understanding not just who succeeds at that training but how much money they make at the end,” Stadelman says. 

And in California and Virginia, at least, the number of for-profit providers on the state’s approved provider lists equals or exceeds the number of public institutions, such as community colleges, which means that the choices available to students might be more expensive than they need to be. (Trainees pay out of pocket for costs above the training dollars provided in their individual training accounts.) 

A student interested in becoming an administrative assistant, for example, could enroll in a three-week, 120-hour certificate program at Rappahannock Community College for $320—or they could spend $4,000 for a certificate from the for-profit MD Technical School. Another for-profit, the Joshua Career Institute, offers a 600-hour certificate program for $8,000. Virginia’s ETPL describes all three offerings as “administrative assistant” training, and none of the programs have outcomes data available on the site (all values for completion rates and earnings are listed as zeros). 

Even though states don’t do much to police the schools allowed on their ETPLs, some for-profit providers exploit the fact that they are on the list as a badge of quality in their marketing. The online training provider MedCerts, which offers IT and health care certifications, boasts on its home page that it has “approved ETPL status in 30+ states.” Aryan Consulting and Staffing, an approved Maryland provider that offers entry-level pharmaceutical manufacturing training, promises, “If you are unemployed and receiving government benefits, you may be qualified for complementary training and placement program (sic).” The for-profit Medical Learning Center writes on its “Payment Options” page that it “is an approved Northern Virginia Workforce Investment (NVWIB) trainer provider for Virginia Residents. Funding is provided for Nurse Aide that covers the total cost (sic).”

A second problem plaguing the ETPL system is the lack of performance data. WIOA participants cannot tell which programs work and which don’t. 

“Everybody likes to talk about customer choice, but the caveat is that it’s got to be informed customer choice,” John Pallasch says. He was executive director of Kentucky’s workforce development program and served as assistant secretary for employment and training at the Department of Labor. “We have to give the customer better information—real-time information—so that they can make informed decisions.”

Department of Labor regulations require states to collect information from approved providers, including the number of WIOA participants enrolled in a particular course, the cost of the course, and outcomes such as the percentage of enrollees who receive a credential and whether they’re working. This data is supposed to be available on a state’s ETPL and on trainingproviderresults.gov, a project initiated by the Labor Department in 2019 that was intended to be for training programs what the College Scorecard is for colleges. 

But click on provider listings on a state’s ETPL or the website, and lots of information is missing. Clicking on the “Course Performance” tab for half a dozen approved courses on West Virginia’s ETPL yielded straight zeroes for such measures as “wages at placement,” “number employed after six months,” and “number receiving degree or certificate.” 

Trainingproviderresults.gov frequently shows only asterisks for employment rate, completion rate, and earnings with the note “Data Suppressed.” In fairness, the site is relatively new, and states have not finished submitting their data. But the problems are still profound. “The data in there is junk because that’s the data that the states are giving us,” says Pallasch, under whose watch the site was launched. 

One problem is that training providers aren’t handing over data, a challenge that dates back to the 1998 Workforce Investment Act. In a 2003 audit, the Department of Labor’s Office of the Inspector General found that many ETPL providers considered reporting requirements to be “burdensome,” especially if they didn’t have many WIOA-funded students. “The cost of collecting the data often exceeded the benefit when few WIA participants were in a class,” the office reported. Some programs also worried that disclosing personal information about students, such as Social Security numbers and wage data, would violate students’ privacy rights and subject them to liability.

Although new regulations have since resolved the privacy concerns, a November 2020 report from the research organization Mathematica found that in many states, local officials still said training providers “could not, or would not, provide the required performance data.” 

It’s not clear, however, that training providers would be forthcoming with their data, even if barriers disappeared. I emailed 10 providers on the Virginia and Maryland ETPLs, asking about the number of WIOA-funded participants they’ve served in the past year and their outcomes. Eight out of 10 did not respond, and two failed to follow up after an initial response. 

Some training providers might be reluctant to disclose their outcomes because they don’t have good news to report. Pallasch suggests that states might not want to dig too deep, for fear of failing to meet federally mandated performance targets. “I know firsthand that in Kentucky, we cleaned the data well enough to get the performance measures and then we moved on,” he says. “We didn’t clean it pristinely, and there’s not a state out there that does, because there’s no incentive to do that at the state level.” 

The consequence of this missing data is that WIOA participants don’t have the information they need. It also means that poor-performing programs slide under the radar. 

“If we’re being honest about our eligible training provider lists right now, we know that they are bloated. We know that there are programs on there that are not performing,” Pallasch says. “States will tell you that they have a process to go through and check performance and purge their lists, but I would love to see an audit trail. I would love for any state to say, ‘Here are the 2,200 programs we had on the list last year. Here’s the data we looked at, we kicked these 400 off, and we brought these 200 on.’ I assure you there’s not a state out there doing that.”

On the other hand, ironically, some of the nation’s best providers aren’t even on state ETPLs, because of onerous reporting requirements.

Particularly problematic is a requirement that approved providers report performance on all students, not just those funded by the WIOA (though this requirement was frequently waived during the pandemic). Many community colleges opt out of applying for a state’s ETPL because they don’t “have the capacity to collect and report on these data for their thousands of students, even if they did decide that being on the ETP list was important,” according to Mathematica.

National or multistate providers have to meet the requirements of multiple ETPLs. “If you’re LinkedIn Learning or a Cisco certifications class, would you want to submit to all 50 states the data on everybody who took your class and whether or not they got a job and how much they made if they got a job?” Kris Stadelman says. “No. So you just never get on the ETPL.” 

“Many small organizations that run good programs opt out [because] it’s too bureaucratic,” the former director of a nationally recognized training program based in Maryland says. (They declined to use their name or the name of their institution to preserve relationships with state officials.) “We started to pursue [an ETPL application] but stopped because the process … was lengthy, and it was clear they were going to mess with a program we felt good about. We didn’t want to change it for dribs and drabs of money.”

Among the cutting-edge institutions you won’t find on state ETPLs are well-regarded ones like Western Governors University, an online institution that offers skills-based credentials, and Southern New Hampshire University. (The Washington Monthly has written about Western Governors University in the past, and SNHU has ranked in our top 20 best colleges for adult learners.) Amazingly, SNHU is not on New Hampshire’s ETPL. Ultimately, it is WIOA participants who lose out. The result is not protection for the consumer but limits on choice and limits on marketable skills workers can acquire,” Stadelman says.

A third and final problem with ETPLs is philosophical: their reliance on “consumer choice,” without sufficient consideration of that training’s ultimate value. Only about one in three people who enroll in WIOA training ends up in a job related to that training, according to Labor Department data. The problem, Pallasch says, is the lack of employer input into the kinds of programs the WIOA offers and that participants enroll in. “We ask people, ‘Hey, what do you want to be when you grow up? Okay, great, go into training.’ And then they finish their training and come back to the job center asking for job search assistance,” he says. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. One obvious solution for fixing the ETPL is for the federal government to insist on better data and provider quality. 

“As much as I don’t like … the big bad Department of Labor saying, ‘States, you must do this,’ ” John Pallasch says, “in some instances the department can signal, ‘Hey, we’re serious about performance. We’re serious about accountability. We’re serious about outcomes.’ ” 

To overcome states’ worries about failing to meet federal performance targets if outcomes aren’t up to snuff, states could get temporary “amnesty” for coming clean and a grace period from penalties while they purge their lists of poor performers. At the same time, Congress should modify the requirement that ETPL providers report on all participants, opening the door to more community colleges and national providers, as some advocates have urged. 

Another step is to prohibit states from including on ETPLs institutions that would fail the “gainful employment” rules proposed by the Biden administration to regulate the quality of two- and four-year institutions—and particularly for-profits—that rely on federal student loans. (For an idea of which schools might be removed from the ETPLs, see “The Best and Worst Colleges for Vocational Certificates”.) This change would not get at the many training providers that only rely on WIOA dollars and not on federal student loans to finance students’ education, but it would be a good start.

California’s South Bay Workforce Investment Board, one of the nation’s better workforce development agencies, is a rare example of how an ETPL works when good data is a priority. 

Operating just south of Los Angeles, the organization created its own approved provider list that the executive director, Jan Vogel, says benefits from a rigorous screening process for training providers. “We kick people off the list all the time,” he says. 

Vogel asks private-sector industry experts to evaluate an applicant’s curriculum before the program is added to the ETPL—something most state agencies don’t typically do. “We might go to a school that’s nice and clean with a shiny sign and give them an ‘A,’ but our expert would say, ‘Your curriculum is not up to industry standards, the teachers are using a curriculum that’s archaic, and we wouldn’t hire them coming out of that course,’ ” Vogel says. “We wouldn’t have known that, so having an industry expert give us that information is very helpful.” 

Vogel’s team also checks the books of for-profit providers applying to the ETPL—another unusual step. It scrutinizes performance, too. “We don’t go simply by what they tell us,” he says. “We actually verify placements to see whether or not it is accurate.” 

Congress should use carrots and sticks to encourage more workforce development agencies to be like South Bay. It should also make the system employer driven, rather than solely reliant on “customer choice,” so training providers and their programs impart the skills and credentials employers want. This approach might not require an ETPL at all. 

The best models for this are state workforce development efforts, such as Virginia’s Fast Forward program (formerly the New Economy Workforce Credential Grant), offered through the commonwealth’s community colleges. 

Fast Forward offers short training programs (six to 12 weeks) where enrollees earn industry-approved credentials for a specific list of 40 in-demand careers in health care, IT, business, manufacturing, logistics, and skilled trades. Local businesses work with a community college to design curricula. Some programs even have “guaranteed interview agreements with local businesses,” the initiative’s website says. Since its launch in 2016, the program has boasted a 90 percent completion rate and has awarded more than 32,700 credentials. Students have seen dramatic annual wage increases ($11,626 on average, or 55 percent). 

By contrast, just 3,121 people enrolled in Virginia’s WIOA adult and dislocated worker programs between April 2020 and March 2021. Of those who finished their training, median quarterly earnings were $6,156 six months after exit ($24,624 on an annualized basis). 

According to the National Association for Business Economics, a trade association for professional economists, more than half of businesses in January 2022—57 percent—said they couldn’t find enough skilled workers to hire. This skills crunch will continue in the long run. By 2030, the placement giant Korn Ferry reports, the U.S. will need 6.5 million more “highly skilled” workers (that is, with some postsecondary credential) than it is on track to produce, particularly in fields like IT and advanced manufacturing. 

The nation’s public workforce system should ensure that U.S. workers don’t miss out on these opportunities. Americans deserve quality training that’s worthy of their potential.

The post Train in Vain  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Three weeks after Pam Eddinger arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, in July 2013 to take over as president of Bunker Hill Community College, she found herself in a meeting with Bill Swanson, the then chairman and chief executive officer of Raytheon. At the time, it struck Eddinger that this was the only meeting that her predecessor, Mary Fifield, insisted on attending during the transition. There was a good reason for that. Swanson was the rare corporate leader who had gone to a community college, having spent two years at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo before transferring to California Polytechnic and graduating with a degree in engineering. He was, consequently, someone who believed in the power of two-year institutions to give students from diverse backgrounds a strong educational foundation and the skills they need to be prepared to enter the workforce.

During the meeting, Swanson and Eddinger discussed continuing the project he and Fifield—along with a handful of other Boston-area chief executives—had begun 18 months earlier. Called Learn and Earn, the program provided paid internships for Bunker Hill students at Raytheon, Bank of America, and other large corporations. The idea was to make Massachusetts’s economy more competitive and give the students, most of whom came from lower-income backgrounds, access to local companies that typically recruit from elite schools. Swanson and the other business leaders had studied “co-ops” at places like Northeastern University, where undergraduates spend three or six months doing paid work for employers in jobs that align with their course work—and often receive full-time job offers from those employers after graduation. “We saw that the ability to learn in the classroom and then get practical experience was a very powerful combination,” Swanson told me. “When you get that link—when you’re working and you’re getting an education—the education becomes more valuable to you because you see the applicability to your job.”

By the time Eddinger got to campus, Learn and Earn was gaining momentum and a handful of students had already gone on to land positions with the companies they interned for. During her meeting with Swanson, Eddinger promised to double the size of the program to signal her support for it. At the time, roughly 30 students a year were participating. It took until 2019, when the college added two staff members to coordinate the internships, for the number to increase to 60. But the lag wasn’t just a personnel issue. Administrators had set up an arduous screening process that sometimes included up to four interviews before a student would be placed with an employer. “We were so careful about wanting to send students who would succeed out in the field,” Eddinger said. “What that ended up [being] was a barrier.” They also began hearing that students of color and female students were having trouble accessing the program. Internal numbers showed that males were overrepresented and women and people of color were underrepresented. 

After seeing the data and talking with students, Eddinger felt they needed to change the way they were doing things. Over the next two years, she and her team retooled Learn and Earn and made the program more accessible to women and people of color. How they managed to do so is an important story—especially now, as America’s often dysfunctional college-to-job pipeline is gaining attention from policy makers on both sides of the aisle.

Eddinger didn’t need much convincing to support Learn and Earn. The program, she thought, wasn’t just a way to teach basic career literacy skills like how to craft a cover letter, write a professional email, or divvy up tasks on a team, though that was important. It was also a bridge connecting the “last mile” between college and employment—the steps that are necessary for getting a job but don’t “automatically appear for everyone,” as Eddinger put it. 

Solutions to getting students, especially those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, through that “last mile” have proved elusive on a system-wide scale. The issue lives in a policy gray area, making it easy for the two main players—colleges and employers—to slough off responsibility. 

Beginning in the early 1980s, as employment-for-life began to disappear and the workforce became more mobile, businesses became increasingly less willing to invest in training new employees and transferred that burden to the education system. At the same time, the contraction of the manufacturing sector was accelerating, wiping out jobs that required only a high school diploma. Postsecondary education became the price of admission for a middle-class life as jobs in the technology, health care, finance, and service sectors became a bigger part of the economy. But colleges, which had traditionally been focused inward on academic achievement, were by and large slow to expand their definition of student success beyond the grades they got in the classroom. 

Middle- and upper-middle-class students figured out long ago that the key to overcoming this dilemma was to take an internship. Doing so allowed them to pick up job-specific skills that were unlikely to be taught in college and to make connections that could lead to a job offer from that firm or a similar one. Prestigious four-year colleges institutionalized that practice by creating portfolios of companies that would come directly to campus to recruit and some, like Northeastern University, promoted “experiential learning” programs in which students spent a portion of their sophomore, junior, or senior year working full-time, usually in their field of study.

The issue, of course, is that these solutions are only readily available to students affluent enough to be able to take unpaid or minimum-wage internships. (More than 40 percent of internships are unpaid, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.) Not being able to take an internship is a double disadvantage for low-income, first-generation students, who often don’t have family members who can give them insight into professional career paths or connections to high-paying employers the way students from middle-class and wealthier families do. 

The process Eddinger and her team used to make Learn and Earn work better for women and people of color was simple: They talked to them. What they discovered were economic and cultural barriers that required very hands-on and tailored interventions to overcome. 

For instance, one student who was working in the college’s business office as an assistant to a staff accountant and who was graduating with an accounting degree told Austin Gilliland, dean of professional studies, that he didn’t think he qualified for a Learn and Earn internship. “I was like, ‘This is crazy. Why don’t you think you’re qualified? Why aren’t these things on your résumé?’ ” Gilliland told me. “And he said to me that it was against his culture to brag about his accomplishments.” 

Understanding that many students were unsure of themselves or reluctant to step forward, Bunker Hill, where approximately one-third of students are the first in their family to go to college, changed the recruiting process. They removed the grade point average requirement because it discourages poorer students, who typically come from less academically rigorous high schools and often struggle with grades in their first year of college. (See Rob Wolfe, “The Invisible College Barrier”.) And administrators worked with companies to rewrite job postings so they aligned with course descriptions. Then, instead of sending a generic email to all students in a particular major informing them of internship opportunities, they started crafting personalized messages stressing an individual student’s qualifications. A computer science major, for instance, now receives a note about a programing internship that says something like “ ‘We think you can do this internship because you’ve taken CSC 236 SQL programming, and that’s what this job requires,’ ” Gilliland, who oversees Learn and Earn, explained. “We sort of took that self-selection piece out of it and said, ‘We know you have the skills because you’ve done this training with us.’ ”

Administrators also discovered that many students weren’t interested in careers in banking and tech or at a defense contractor—the types of companies that initially participated in Learn and Earn. Instead, they aspired to work for small businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, and other mission-driven organizations. This presented two problems for the staff. First, they didn’t have many intern placement relationships with such employers. Second, those organizations typically don’t have the funds to offer decent wages. 

Eddinger and her colleagues addressed the second problem by tapping into an anonymous family foundation specifically to support intern wages. To solve the first, Gilliland’s team set about diversifying the types of organizations that were participating in the program. 

These adjustments opened the doors of Learn and Earn to students like Julia Soriano. A first-generation college student, Soriano interned as a customer service representative with All In Energy, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing renewable energy to low-income communities in eastern Massachusetts while also diversifying the talent pool in the field. The experience taught her how to communicate in a business environment, work on a team, and conduct meetings remotely. After graduating in May 2021 with an associate’s degree in accounting, Soriano got a full-time job at All In, working in their accounting department. She expects to receive her bachelor’s degree in communications and logistics from Southern New Hampshire University next June. 

For Mackenzie Ensley, a fine arts student who enrolled in Bunker Hill in September 2020, the idea of working in a museum was so unfamiliar that she hesitated to apply to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum internship. “When I picture museums, I picture the part of the art world that intimidates me,” she told me. “I didn’t know if I could be in a position where I would need to know a lot of things about the materials the art was made out of or the solvents used to fix the pieces.” But a Bunker Hill staff member helped Ensley figure out which museum departments to apply to based on her course work and brainstormed potential interview questions—support that gave Ensley confidence she could be successful. (Ensley wound up working in the Gardner’s conservation department, learning how to write treatment proposals and condition reports—an experience that led her to pursue art conservation as a career.)

As Bunker Hill administrators expanded the program to new employers, however, they also had to educate some of them about the value of accepting interns from different backgrounds and how to treat them. A second museum, which had to be convinced to set aside slots for Bunker Hill students, asked applicants to describe what excited them about visiting the galleries. That was problematic, Eddinger said, because it presumed that the students had the money to go there in the first place. Some students also reported that managers were treating them differently than their peers from four-year institutions, giving them menial tasks rather than meaningful assignments, not including them in important meetings, or making comments that made them feel like they didn’t belong.

“It’s really trying to change the culture both inside and outside the college,” Eddinger said, noting that three-quarters of her students are in the two lowest income quintiles and about 60 percent are parents. “If we truly are going to be a city of diverse values, it comes down to how we embrace the next workforce.” Central to this is recognizing that community colleges offer rigorous postsecondary education and serve a talented pool of potential employees who have both the academic and cultural competencies that will help businesses thrive. “A lot of people say they want diversity and what they want is really white adjacency,” she added. “Those are different things.”

Another obstacle Learn and Earn administrators discovered was that even though the internships they were offering pay well—between $18 and $40 an hour—many students were reluctant to take them for the simple reason that they already had a job. Giving up steady income for temporary work experience often doesn’t make short-term financial sense, especially if you have children. In fact, it’s a risk that could potentially lead to a student dropping out if they give up their employment and can’t find another job after the internship is over. Relatedly, changes in routine that might seem small, like figuring out how to get to an internship that’s far from the bus line that runs through your neighborhood, can seem insurmountable—especially when a student is adding another responsibility on top of course work, a delicate child care balance, or dealing with housing insecurity.

To navigate these issues, Bunker Hill provides a variety of “wraparound” services to all its students. These include mental health counseling, domestic violence resources, a food pantry, and advisers to help students with everything from creating manageable schedules to switching course sections if, for example, they lose their babysitter and can no longer come to class on a certain day of the week. 

The Learn and Earn program has an additional layer of support in the form of a weekly class, led by a professor, for students to talk about the challenges they face in their internships. In those sessions, problems like not being sure how to respond to a supervisor’s email or how to handle a colleague who is treating you disrespectfully are worked through. Julia Soriano said these weekly meetings were crucial to her success. At the beginning of her paid internship, she felt overwhelmed. Her work with All In was taking up 20 hours a week on top of studying for two classes and taking care of two children at home. “By having a class every week, it was kind of like a reminder of, what are the goals you want to accomplish? What are the things we learned this week?” Soriano told me. “By sharing all of that and hearing the other students, that kept me on track to succeed in this internship. I stopped thinking I was the only one feeling this way or not getting things. It was a reminder that there is still time to develop our skills.” 

Over time, through sustained outreach, Bunker Hill has been able to bring more female and minority students into the program. This past academic year, the percentage of students of color matched its share in the school as a whole, and women in the program exceeded their proportion in the student body overall.

The college doesn’t have data, however, on how many Learn and Earn students get jobs after graduation—either at companies they interned with or elsewhere—and at what salary. Administrators started formally tracking that information this academic year, but it is notoriously hard to compile because there’s no central way to collect it. They have to continuously check with employers and alumni to get a handle on who is working where, an imprecise and labor-intensive process.

Despite the limitations with the data, there is evidence that paid internships lead to better professional outcomes. According to the 2021 National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) student survey, students who took paid internships received an average of 1.12 job offers while unpaid interns got an average of .85 offers. Those with no internship experience got .64 job offers, on average. 

Whether you have internship experience also affects your starting salary. A study by Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that college graduates with a paid internship on their résumé had on average a starting salary of $52,000—44 percent more than those who took an unpaid internship. Those who had no internship had a $37,000 starting salary on average. In fact, previous NACE research showed a negative correlation between unpaid internships and starting salaries.

Bunker Hill isn’t the only two-year institution working to bring experiential learning to its students in a way that makes sense for their lives. The Alamo Colleges District—a group of five community colleges in the greater San Antonio, Texas, area—also offers internships paid for by the school. Its program includes workshops to familiarize students with the employers they are applying to, help with résumé writing, and work on reference requests. Though the program is just one year old, more than 1,000 students have participated in these internships, and administrators are setting aside $2 million of their operating budget to expand the opportunity. Cuyahoga Community College, in northeastern Ohio, has a summer internship program that allows students to either work on campus or for an outside employer, at $11 an hour. The college also covers tuition for up to four credits and a $125 book stipend for the class. The idea, says Sandy McKnight, associate vice president of access, learning, and success at Cuyahoga, is to keep students engaged over the summer so they will return to complete their degree. 

That community colleges like Alamo District and Bunker Hill can find the cash to support paid internships is something of an anomaly. Most exist on very thin budgets. The average two-year school spends half as much, or less, per student as the average four-year state college, and far less than elite private universities. Even with the help of the Boston area’s corporate sector and a family foundation behind it, Bunker Hill lacks enough funding to offer a paid internship to everyone who wants one, to hire the staff necessary to do the hands-on work, and to provide the wraparound social services needed to make it possible for more students to take advantage of the internships. Though Learn and Earn has grown—from 20 students per year in 2012 to 116 per year today—for a campus of 16,000 the program remains tiny.

It’s clear that paid internship programs like Learn and Earn are unlikely to grow to scale and spread to more campuses without greater outside funding. (See Jamaal Abdul-Alim, “A Job and a College Degree Before You Graduate High School” .) In February 2020, the Department of Education took a modest step when it gave 190 schools waivers allowing them to pay for work study jobs with private-sector employers as an experiment. This meant that colleges like Alamo, which participated in the pilot, could let their students work at an outside job aligned with their field of study rather than for the university checking IDs at the gym. Though the program has continued under President Joe Biden’s administration, it is slated to end after the 2022–23 academic year. Last year’s Build Back Better reconciliation bill included tens of billions of new dollars for community colleges, including for wraparound services like child care. The bill collapsed last winter because every GOP senator and a couple of Democrats, most prominently West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, refused to vote for it, and though a slimmed-down version passed the Senate and was awaiting a House vote when this issue went to press in mid-August, it contained little money for higher education. Yet, given growing Republican support, at least rhetorically, for vocational programs, there could be bipartisan movement for more funding for community colleges after the midterm elections. 

While it waits for help from policy makers, Bunker Hill will continue to expand Learn and Earn and bring more students and potential employers together through paid internships. It’s the right thing to do, Eddinger said, because it’s a tool for retention and college completion and gives an economic lift to her students. She just wishes lawmakers would see it that way. “It’s a failure of public vision, and it’s a failure of public policy. There’s no other way to say it.”

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In January 2017, as it was preparing to exit Washington, the Obama administration left a little parting gift for the higher education community. It was a list of nearly 800 vocational programs, almost all of them at for-profit colleges, where graduates earned so little, or had to borrow so much, that they couldn’t pay off their student loans. 

The list was part of the Department of Education’s new “gainful employment” regulation, a years-in-the-making effort to set minimal standards for career training programs in areas like auto repair and dental assistant. The Washington Monthly used the regulation’s underlying data to create a first-of-its-kind ranking of the Best and Worst Colleges for Vocational Certificates in 2018. 

Under the gainful employment rule, the worst-performing programs were supposed to lose eligibility to receive federal student aid. That didn’t happen, because the Trump administration eventually repealed the regulation, claiming that it unfairly targeted for-profit schools. 

But a funny thing did happen. Even though the federal funds weren’t cut off, within two years 500 of the 800 failing programs had been shut down or reformed by the 136 colleges that ran them, according to a study by New America, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Indeed, some of the biggest colleges in the for-profit game, such as the Education Corporation of America, with its 70 campuses nationwide, closed their doors entirely. It turns out that being “named and shamed“ was enough to convince many vocational college administrators to clean up their act—or for investors to pull the plug. 

During the Trump years, there was very little effective federal scrutiny of the bad-actor trade schools that remained. That’s a shame, because every year countless students—disproportionately military veterans and low-income people of color—get recruited into poor-quality career training programs that load them up with debt without teaching them marketable skills. At the same time, there are better-run certificate programs out there that lead to well-paying jobs—and there is rare bipartisan agreement in Washington that more should be done to help people access such training.

This past March, Joe Biden’s Department of Education unveiled a proposed new version of the gainful employment rule. It features more robust metrics and, to address conservative critics, covers a wider variety of public and nonprofit programs. Unfortunately, because it takes time to go through the rule-making process and accumulate the necessary data—and because the Education Department is understaffed and overwhelmed by other tasks, like student loan reform—the final regulation won’t come out until 2024, and a new list of failing schools won’t be released until 2027, at the earliest.

The editors of the Monthly think that’s too long to wait. That’s why we’ve put together the 2022 Best and Worst Colleges for Vocational Certificates rankings, using Education Department data similar to what the department itself will draw on for its gainful employment calculations. We selected the 10 most common undergraduate certificate programs, like medical assistant, cosmetology, and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) maintenance, then ranked the colleges that offer them by the median earnings of their students one year after graduation—which was 2019, the most recent earnings data available. For informational purposes, we also show the median student debt and debt-to-earnings ratio for each program.  

Looking at the lists, the first thing to notice is that some of these programs—nursing, precision metal (welding, fabricating, and so on), health diagnostics (which includes jobs like X-ray technician)—lead to relatively decent-paying careers. For instance, graduates from the top-ranked health diagnostics program at Red Rocks Community College, near Denver, Colorado, earned $87,754 annually. That’s more than double what a typical American ages 25 to 34 with only a high school degree made ($35,410).

Some other programs, however—cosmetology, medical assistant—don’t lead to high incomes. Graduates of the number 1 school for cosmetology, the Lia Schorr Institute of Cosmetic Skin Care Training in New York City, made only $36,823, barely above what a high school graduate brought in—and the rest of the top 10 cosmetology schools returned thousands of dollars below that. The payoff is even worse for those training in “somatic bodywork,” which includes massage therapy. Graduates of the best somatic bodywork program in the nation, the for-profit Sage School of Massage & Esthetics in Bend, Oregon, earned only $24,750. Of course, hairdressers and massage therapists can earn tip income that doesn’t show up in these numbers. Not so for back-office professionals like medical assistants, who don’t earn tips, just low salaries—$37,651 a year for graduates of number 1–ranked Oregon Coast Community College, southwest of Portland.

And that’s for graduates of the best programs. Look at the earnings numbers for the worst-performing programs and you’ll see the real damage an unregulated trade school system inflicts on students of modest means trying to get ahead in life. Graduates in health diagnostics from Germanna Community College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the bottom-of-the-barrel program in that category, earned only $21,585 annually. That’s a quarter of what their peers from top-performing Red Rocks Community College made—and nearly $14,000 less than the income of a typical high school graduate with no postsecondary training at all. 

If that doesn’t steam up your glasses, consider this. A full-time worker who is paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour earns an annual income of $15,080. Graduates of all 10 of the worst cosmetology programs, and most of the worst in the somatic bodywork category, earned less than that. They also carry student debt ranging from $5,398 to $12,672—debt that, given the graduates’ penurious incomes, they probably will never be able to pay off.

It’s hard to understand why any elected official, regardless of party, would resist cutting off the flow of federal student aid dollars to schools that fail students so miserably. Yet Republicans have consistently done just that, largely out of a desire to protect for-profit providers. Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos even put a top lawyer for for-profit colleges in charge of the department’s regulatory relief efforts. 

Our rankings, however, provide reasons for conservatives to be a little less defensive. When we last ranked certificate programs, four years ago, the great majority of the poorest-performing colleges were for-profits. That’s still the case in some categories this year, like medical assistant and dental support. But in other areas, like nursing and HVAC maintenance, for-profits are no more represented in the top and bottom 10 than are public colleges. 

How can that be? One reason is that a lot of the worst for-profit programs got shut down after the Obama administration released its gainful employment failure list in 2017. Another is that for certain professions, like nursing and HVAC maintenance, for-profit vocational colleges have the capacity to train more students, and often train them better, than public ones. That’s because they can finance the expensive equipment needed for instruction through high tuition—and if the instruction is good, the high cost pays off for the students. By contrast, public institutions like community colleges are typically prohibited from charging high tuition and must get by on generally meager local government support. 

The lesson for liberals is that there is a useful role for for-profit colleges in America’s vocational training system. The lesson for conservatives is that it’s no longer defensible to argue that a gainful employment rule—at least one based on the kind of data the Monthly uses for our rankings—would be unfair to for-profit institutions. Indeed, it is hard to come up with a simpler, lower-cost way to help more of the working-class Americans that both parties agree have been screwed in today’s economy than shutting down the worst-performing certificate-granting schools—regardless of whether they are for-profit, nonprofit, or public.

The post America’s Best and Worst Colleges for Vocational Certificates appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It has long been conventional wisdom that young people don’t vote. Compared to older groups of voters, that is true. But it is far less true than it used to be. More than half of 18- to 24-year-olds cast ballots in 2020, a threshold that had not been reached since 18-year-olds were first allowed to vote in 1971. It was a 12 percent increase over that age bracket’s turnout in 2016—one of the largest of any age group. 

Of course, 2020 was a presidential year, when turnout generally rises across the board. Is there any reason to think young people will show up for this November’s midterms? Actually, there is. In 2018, turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds jumped to 36 percent from 20 percent four years earlier. That, too, was the largest increase in any age cohort. 

With Donald Trump now out of office and Joe Biden’s poll numbers in the toilet, you would expect that young people, who overwhelmingly lean left, might lack motivation. And that might turn out to be the case this fall. But a Harvard Kennedy School poll in late April found that “18-to-29-year-olds are on track to match 2018’s record-breaking youth turnout in a midterm election this November.” And that was before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 

Although the recent burst of youth voting stems from larger forces—the mobilizing power of social media, progressive backlash to white nationalism—part of the credit goes to the work of student voting organizers, who mobilized young Americans to register and cast ballots despite the pandemic and restrictive voting laws. This includes small, student-led groups that work to get their peers to the polls, as well as national organizations like the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, which helps colleges develop registration and turnout plans. 

One of the difficulties these groups traditionally face, however, is getting cooperation from college administrators, who typically don’t consider improving voting turnout systems on their campuses to be part of their jobs (even though the founding mission statements of many of these universities include educating students to be active members of a democracy). All university presidents, though, are concerned about how their schools fare on college rankings. So, to give them an incentive to care about student voting, the Washington Monthly in 2018 began adding measures of student voting to our annual college rankings. 

One such measure is a survey by Tufts University researchers that tracks college student voter data: turnout, registration rates. Another way to judge colleges’ civic commitment is through reports that administrators submit about their efforts to promote voter participation. Then, beginning in 2019, we used that data to create an honor roll of colleges that submitted those reports every year and made them available for the public to read.

This year’s honor roll includes some conventionally prestigious schools—Harvard, Princeton—but other U.S. News & World Report heavyweights, such as Columbia University in New York, are missing. Meanwhile, the list is replete with colleges unheralded outside their states and regions, like Weber State University in Utah and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. This kind of diversity is evident throughout the honor roll, with 144 public institutions, 36 community colleges (up from 18 last year), and five historically Black colleges and universities (up from three). If schools like Northern Illinois University (west of Chicago) and Pellissippi State Community College (in Knoxville, Tennessee) can expend the time and energy necessary to make the list, you have to wonder why Stanford, Dartmouth, and Cornell haven’t bothered.

To make the student voting honor roll, universities had to submit 2020 and 2022 action plans to the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. Schools also needed to have signed up to receive data from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE), which calculates college-specific registration and voting rates. And they must have made their 2018 and 2020 NSLVE data available to the public. In short, schools need to have shown a repeated commitment to increasing student voting—and have been transparent about the results. We then ordered the list by student voter registration rate.

Appalachian State University, near the top of the list, illustrates the kind of tactics campuses can deploy to help students cast ballots. As part of its campus voting action plan for 2020 to 2023, the Boone, North Carolina, school delivered a full-court press of voting events: film screenings, debates, a lecture series, in-class presentations, virtual events, and registration booths at college activities fairs. Appalachian State also hired two fellows for its Campus Election Engagement Project and secured grant funding for another election fellow and other get-out-the-vote efforts. As a result, this public school of 18,000 students, with an 80 percent acceptance rate, outperforms all the highly selective Ivies on the list on voter registration, with a rate of 93.7 percent. 

The honor roll saw new heights of student voter registration in 2020, according to data that became available this year. On the list of 230 schools, 127 had a registration rate of 85 percent or more—compared to only 16 such schools on 2021’s honor roll—and 39 were over 90 percent. Participation by universities is higher, too: 25 schools joined the list this year, up from 205 on last year’s honor roll.

Despite these promising results, there’s more progress to be made. This year’s honor roll recognized 230 schools out of a total 850 that received consideration, which means that three-quarters of institutions need to do more to promote civic leadership on campus. Early indicators like that Kennedy School survey from April suggest that youth turnout may remain strong in 2022, but they also warn that young people can’t be taken for granted. In that poll, likely young voters expressed increased agreement with the statements “Political involvement rarely has tangible results” (36 percent), “[Their vote] doesn’t make a difference” (42 percent), and “Politics today are no longer able to meet the challenges our country is facing” (56 percent). When it comes time to push through those attitudes and get those voters to the polls, colleges are on the front line.

The post America’s Best Colleges for Student Voting  appeared first on Washington Monthly.