Bonnie Albrecht’s path to accessing a government child care assistance program was long (the Texas mother spent nearly two years on a waitlist) and bureaucratic (involving seven pay stubs and countless phone calls). Edythe Smith, who lives in Syracuse, New York, juggled full time work with full time caregiving for her infant daughter from her home while she waited for the aid. Barbara Aranda had to call out from her job in Austin so often that she lost crucial income and had to turn to food pantries to feed her three kids. 

The three women have two things in common: All of them spent at least a year on a waitlist for child care subsidies that help mostly low- and moderate-income working families afford sky-high child care costs.

And they are all single mothers.

Single parents have been disproportionately affected by record high waitlists for child care assistance across the country, as I reported this week for Hechinger and The 19th. About 80 percent of subsidy recipients are — like Aranda, Smith, and Albrecht — single parents. Several of these (mostly) mothers told me about missing out not only on work, but promotions and basic financial and food security as a result of the long delays in accessing the assistance.

An already dire situation could become even worse if the Trump administration has its way. The New York Times reported earlier this month that U.S. Vice President JD Vance is pushing for an overhaul of the $12 billion Child Care and Development Block Grant to redirect some of the funds to stay-at-home parents — as long as they are married, that is. To qualify, one spouse would have to work at least 35 hours a week while the other stayed home.

On X, Vance has called universal child care “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class,” adding that “normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.” 

But Republicans are hardly unified in their take on what should happen with the nearly 40-year-old child care assistance program. Earlier this year, 40 Republicans in Congress advocated for “robust” funding of the program, although that push was unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, a conservative group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, Advancing American Freedom, has spoken out against Vance’s idea, because it would “punish work” and “expose the sanctity of the family to government intrusion,” among other concerns.

Some experts doubt that Vance’s plan will ever take effect. But the idea is serving as a serious distraction at a time when waitlists continue to grow in many states, leaving countless parents —  especially women — shut out of the workforce. 

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

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Every fall, millions of American parents and caregivers make extraordinary sacrifices to send a child to college. They work overtime, postpone retirement, take on debt or set aside other priorities because they believe higher education can create opportunities they never had.

Students make sacrifices too. Many work nights and weekends, juggle family responsibilities or borrow against their future because they believe a college degree is worth it.

Those sacrifices deserve accountability. And it’s time for colleges to provide it.

For too long, colleges and universities have responded to growing public skepticism by defending the value of higher education. We produce reports, commentaries and a lot of billboards explaining why college still matters; we remind families that graduates earn more than nongraduates over their lifetimes and celebrate the role universities play in preparing the workforce.

Every one of those arguments is true. They simply miss the point.

Most Americans recognize a degree has value. What they increasingly question is whether today’s universities have earned the right to charge what they do. They feel defeated by colleges that raise tuition more readily than they reduce bureaucracy. They chafe at institutions that scrutinize family finances more rigorously than their own budgets.

Too often, university leaders assume declining public confidence can be reversed solely through better messaging. It cannot. Trust is earned through disciplined stewardship and measurable results.

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

Families are right to expect universities to treat every tuition dollar with the same care they bring to their personal finances.

Students are right to expect that their degree will open the door to opportunity and that earning it won’t burden them with a debt they carry into adulthood.

Taxpayers are right to expect institutions to operate efficiently and demonstrate measurable value.

Universities are good at explaining why costs are unavoidable, but they are reluctant to ask whether every cost is justified. Before asking families to pay more, every university president and chancellor should first answer one question.

What have we done to deserve that investment?

Related: If higher education wants to rebuild public trust, start with making college affordable

The value of affordability is a lesson I’ve learned throughout my career in higher education leadership, first as executive vice president for research and partnerships at Purdue University, then as president of the University of Vermont and now at the University of Arizona. In my time serving at these institutions over the past 14 years, there have been no across-the-board tuition increases.

Purdue froze tuition in 2013 and that freeze remains in place today. While at Vermont, we froze all tuition and fees for all students for five years. At Arizona, we have held resident undergraduate tuition flat for three consecutive years while eliminating a $177 million budget deficit and restoring the university’s financial foundation.

Those outcomes didn’t happen because higher education suddenly became less expensive. They happened because we made intentionally different choices.

To eliminate the deficit and restore financial sustainability at Arizona, we cut administrative spending by more than 20 percent; dissolved inefficient, multimillion-dollar administrative units; and challenged ourselves to operate leaner, including a comprehensive evaluation of all leadership positions that reduced the number of vice president positions to three.

At the same time, we strengthened transfer pathways with community colleges, introduced accelerated three-year medical and veterinary degree programs to address critical workforce shortages and expanded flexible online programs to reduce both the cost and the time required to earn a University of Arizona degree.

Every unnecessary dollar a university spends is a dollar that a family must earn, save or borrow. Those choices carry a human cost. They mean more debt, more financial pressure and greater sacrifice for the families who place their trust in us. Universities should spend tuition dollars with the same discipline families use when deciding whether they can afford college in the first place.

A university education must deliver far more than a diploma. It must prepare graduates for meaningful careers while equipping them with the judgment, resilience, adaptability and perspective to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

That is why Arizona is leveraging philanthropic contributions and strengthening industry partnerships to expand internships and experiential learning and significantly increase study abroad opportunities for students whose financial circumstances would otherwise keep those experiences beyond their reach.

Opportunity should not depend on a family’s income. It should be part of what every great public university provides.

Elite private universities dominate the national conversation about higher education while educating only a tiny fraction of America’s students. They are extraordinary institutions that deserve credit for their achievements. But they are not the institutions that will determine whether most Americans can afford or obtain a college degree.

Related: America’s regional universities can still be a bargain in a sea of high-priced options

That responsibility and privilege belong to flagship public universities. We educate millions of students from every background and create opportunities at a scale no other sector can match. Our defining strength is not exclusivity. It is excellence at scale delivered at a price families can afford.

The American people are asking universities for something reasonable. Challenge costs before raising prices. Reduce bureaucracy before financing it. Measure success by the opportunities we create, not simply the number of students we enroll.

When public universities make those choices, states should respond by investing more in the students they educate. That investment is not a subsidy for the institutions. It is a down payment on the workforce, economic competitiveness and civic leadership every state needs.

Public funding should reward institutions that produce results and the lion’s share of America’s degrees while responsibly managing taxpayer and tuition dollars.

Americans shouldn’t have to trust higher education because university presidents tell them to. They should trust us because our actions leave them no other conclusion.

Suresh Garimella serves as the 23rd president of the University of Arizona and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about college costs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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CINCINNATI — The meeting with staff members of Cincinnati Christian Schools began with a prayer. Then they told Mike Grimmer and Linda Kelly that their granddaughter could no longer attend the private school.

Annabelle Kelly had enrolled there three months earlier, in August 2025, in a program specifically for students who struggle in mainstream classrooms. Annabelle, 15, has Rett syndrome, a genetic condition accompanied by significant cognitive and developmental delays. Her grandparents, who took legal custody of Annabelle when she was 5, believed that the small, faith-based setting of CCS would be a better fit than the local public school. She received a voucher from the state through a school choice program specifically for students with disabilities, which authorized paying CCS up to $29,750 for Annabelle to attend tuition-free. 

But at the meeting in November, Kelly said, the school’s director of academic support services told her and Grimmer that Annabelle’s physical and educational needs were too extensive for her to continue at CCS. If they wanted her to stay, Annabelle would need an aide to work with her one-on-one, and her grandparents would need to pay the additional cost, roughly $25,000 per year.

Disability advocates warn that as private school voucher programs spread, more parents will find themselves in similar straits. Federal protections for students with disabilities don’t apply to private schools, and neither the schools nor voucher programs like the one Annabelle qualified for are required to inform parents that they waive certain rights when they leave the public school system. When Congress passed legislation last year establishing the nation’s first federal voucher program, it did not include language that disability rights groups had lobbied for that would have required private schools receiving federal funds to follow the law known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. 

“If there are public funds being spent, public protections need to be afforded,” said Chris Roe, director of state policy at the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a policy advocacy organization that provides training and guidance in special education law. “At the very least, states that provide voucher programs should be required to inform parents of the rights they are giving up.”

Kelly said the decision from CCS came despite the family being transparent about Annabelle’s needs when they applied to the school: They shared medical information, copies of her academic evaluations and her learning plan from the public school she attended. The then-eighth grader attended three trial days at the school before enrolling, and several previous conferences with teachers had gone well, her grandmother said.

“We were blindsided by the school’s decision,” said Kelly. 

Raymond Kochis, superintendent of Cincinnati Christian Schools, declined an interview but said in response to written questions that the costs of educating Annabelle exceeded what had been determined initially. “When a student’s needs evolve,” Kochis wrote, “the school works with the family to determine the most appropriate level of support.” (According to Kelly, Annabelle’s needs had not changed, and school officials quickly dismissed any alternative solutions she proposed.) 

Related: 10 things to know about Trump’s new school voucher program

Private school voucher programs have proliferated in the United States in the last decade. The number of students with disabilities in these programs has grown too: In the 2025-26 school year, Annabelle was one of more than 200,000 students nationwide either using vouchers meant specifically for students with disabilities or enrolled in the country’s largest voucher programs, compared with more than 180,000 the year prior. 

The federal school voucher program goes into effect next year. After failing to persuade Congress to include language stating that voucher programs and participating private schools must comply with IDEA protections, COPAA and other disability rights groups are focused on pressing states that choose to participate in the program to enforce the IDEA even for private schools. 

Signed into law in 1975, the IDEA states that everyone ages three to 21 with a disability must be provided a free public education that meets their particular needs. In collaboration with parents, public school districts must develop an individualized education program, or IEP, establishing learning goals and plans appropriate for the student. The law also states that students with disabilities must be taught alongside children without disabilities “to the maximum extent appropriate.” Today, 8 million public school students are served by the IDEA.

While voucher programs like the one Annabelle received, Ohio’s Jon Peterson scholarship, are publicly funded, participating private schools like CCS control their own admissions and enrollment decisions. Students using a private school voucher are considered “parentally placed,” and private schools are not required to follow an IEP or uphold any IDEA protections. Families that use these vouchers sacrifice key civil rights afforded by the IDEA, including protection against discrimination and removal from the school based on a disability.

Kelly doesn’t remember, when filling out the scholarship application and enrolling Annabelle at CCS, being told that the rights and protections that apply to students with disabilities in public schools do not extend to private schools. Since students must have an IEP to qualify for the Jon Peterson scholarship, she assumed that the IDEA’s rules and policies would be followed. 

In a response to written questions, a spokesperson for Ohio’s Department of Education and Workforce said there are multiple safeguards for students with disabilities who attend private schools. The department’s website never explicitly states that private schools are not required to comply with the IDEA’s mandates and regulations. But it does mention on a page of regulations that if a student is enrolled in a school that is not public, it is “not obligated to provide the child” with a free appropriate public education. Ultimately, the private school is not required to follow the IDEA, and parents have little recourse if the school chooses not to. 

However, as states expand their voucher programs, more are aiming to serve students with disabilities. States including Florida, Indiana and Ohio award more voucher money to these students to account for the additional costs of educating them. Texas’ Education Freedom Accounts program gives priority to students with disabilities and their siblings. As of June 2026, more than one in four Texas students awarded a voucher for the coming school year has a documented disability. 

Ohio is one of at least nine states that have created voucher programs specifically for students with disabilities. On paper, the policies of Ohio’s Jon Peterson scholarship, established in 2012, seem more rigorous than others. For example, schools receiving scholarship funds are expected to employ staff with special education training and credentials. If a school formally declines to enroll a child, it must provide the scholarship applicant with a reason in writing. Schools receiving scholarship funds are also expected to provide the student’s assigned public school district with records of how the IEP was implemented and how the student is progressing toward its goals. But there are no consequences listed for schools that do not follow these rules.

Data published by the state Department of Education and Workforce suggests that many students only use Jon Peterson scholarships for a short time. In 2025, 8,680 students received a scholarship. Just over half of those students had participated in the program for three years or more. Reasons students might leave the program include transferring to a different voucher program, moving to a different district, graduating, or returning to public school. 

Voucher rules for students with disabilities vary dramatically nationwide. For example, Florida’s program for students with disabilities — which has the most participants of any program in the country (140,147 in 2025-26)  — does not require students to have an IEP to access the program: A valid diagnosis from a medical professional is also accepted. Oklahoma’s scholarship for students with disabilities requires participating schools to provide services and accommodations for those students, but it does not require private schools to document IEP implementation or hire appropriately credentialed special education staff. 

A January 2026 report by COPAA outlined challenges it said private school choice programs raise for students with disabilities, many due to a lack of regulations and oversight. Most states do not require private schools to keep data on whether they are effectively educating students with disabilities, the report noted, and, according to Roe, states do not have to publish data on voucher programs, which could provide an opportunity for accountability. 

Roe, lead author of the report, said these programs might initially appeal to families that  have struggled to get public schools to follow their children’s special education plans. “Parents are enticed by the idea that they don’t have to fight their public school anymore for what they should be getting under the law,” he said. “But then they realize there are few schools that will take a child with nonverbal autism or with Down syndrome.” 

Related: Young kids with and without disabilities can learn side by side. One state has instead kept them apart for years 

When Kate White, who is now 11, started preschool at her local public school in the suburbs of Cincinnati, her mother, Nicole White, noticed she wasn’t developing many communication skills. Kate has Down syndrome and has had chronic ear and airway complications since birth, which were affecting her ability to learn. 

Nicole White worried the local public school couldn’t provide the support Kate needed and began looking around for alternatives. Eventually she found the St. Rita School for the Deaf. When she asked school administrators if they could help a student with Down syndrome who was learning American Sign Language, White recalled, “They said ‘absolutely;’ they didn’t bat an eye.” She enrolled Kate at St. Rita in 2019 with support from the Jon Peterson scholarship. At first, White said, “it was phenomenal.”  

But as Kate got older, White wanted a more traditional curriculum for her daughter that emphasized numbers, letters and colors alongside ASL. White was also concerned that the environment at St. Rita did not include students of all learning types and abilities. “I wanted her to be exposed to what the world is like,” she said. 

Kate’s IEP called for occupational and physical therapy, but St. Rita eliminated those services before her third year. School administrators told White that school budget cuts were to blame. In 2022, Kate returned to her local public school district, which for her mother seemed like the least bad choice. “I was looking at the students ahead of her at St. Rita’s and there were four students in the graduating class. I didn’t want that for Kate, but I wanted the support that St. Rita’s gave its students. So what do I do? Where do I go?” 

In a response to written questions, Angela Frith, president of St. Rita, said that the Jon Peterson scholarship does not cover the full cost of educating a student at the school. Families now have to pay a third-party clinic out of pocket or use private insurance or Medicaid if they want to get occupational and physical therapy on site. 

COPAA’s Roe said he worries experiences like White’s will become more common. Private schools meant for students with disabilities can provide valuable support, he said, but students sacrifice an opportunity to learn among nondisabled peers.  “If parents are looking for an inclusive environment, private schools are problematic,” Roe said. “There are a lot of barriers.” 

Annabelle did not attend school for several months after CCS did not welcome her back, but eventually Kelly enrolled her in ninth grade at Princeton High School, her local public school. She says Annabelle is happy there. “I made assumptions about Princeton based on what I knew about the school 20 years ago,” Kelly said, “back when special education was completely segregated.” 

Her granddaughter is now making progress on her IEP goals, Kelly said. Annabelle reports that her favorite class is gym, which she takes with a diverse group of other high school students. Said Kelly: “Annabelle is now where she needs to be.” 

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.

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

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The morning after Edythe Smith gave birth to her daughter, she got some bad news. State funding for a government program that helps low- and moderate-income families pay for child care had just been frozen in Syracuse, New York, where she lives.

Smith is a single parent who works full time from home as an auto claims insurance adjuster. When her maternity leave ended last fall, she had no choice but to return to work while continuing to care full time for an increasingly mobile — sometimes perilously curious — baby. 

“It’s super disruptive to my job,” she said. And it became even more disruptive as the months wore on and the child wasn’t content anymore to spend much of the day confined to a playpen by her mother’s desk. At moments, Smith had to juggle intense work phone calls with keeping her daughter out of serious mischief.  

“It’s really hard to excel at your job or find opportunities for promotion when your whole life is revolving around” a baby, Smith said.

Thousands of families across the country have found themselves in a similar situation. The number of children on state-run waitlists for child care subsidies nearly doubled between early 2024 and early 2025, with many lists continuing to grow throughout 2025, according to a May report from the National Women’s Law Center. That’s the largest year-to-year increase since the nonprofit group started compiling the data two decades ago.  

An analysis from The Associated Press released earlier this month similarly found hundreds of thousands of children languishing on waitlists last spring in 23 states and Washington, D.C. In Georgia, New Jersey and South Carolina, some eligible families were turned away because of enrollment freezes, the AP found.

The child care assistance comes from a nearly 40-year-old federal funding stream called the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Currently around $12 billion in CCDBG money flows to states, which is matched by around $4 billion from the states and other sources. The funding is then distributed in the form of vouchers to parents or subsidies directly to their child care providers. 

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues. 

The record high waitlists have forced families across the country to turn to unregulated providers or suboptimal babysitters for care. They have left cash-strapped parents relying on food banks and other charities for basic necessities. And they have also made it difficult, if not impossible, for countless women to find and keep jobs — hindering their participation in the workforce as families’ need for stable income has only increased in the face of rising gas, grocery and other costs.

Starting in 2020, Congress appropriated $28 billion in emergency money to the program, but that extra funding expired in fall 2024. Some states have increased funding to try to fill the gap, but families’ need for child care assistance has only grown. Meanwhile, in some communities, fewer child care centers are accepting the subsidies because they don’t fully cover the cost of care, limiting the supply on multiple levels.

“There’s fewer resources and more need,” said Karen Schulman, senior director of state child care policy at the National Women’s Law Center, who authored the May report.

The assistance program may soon be facing even more financial pressure. In an action championed by Vice President JD Vance, the Trump administration is moving to redirect some of the funds to married couples with one stay-at-home parent, The New York Times reported earlier this month.

This shift in eligibility would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home with their children. But without more funding, such a change would make the long waitlists even longer for a program that already only serves about 1 in 7 eligible children, advocates say.

“This is the administration’s latest effort to force an outdated vision of the family on all Americans, including by making it harder for women to stay in the workforce,” said Amy Matsui, vice president for child care and income security for the National Women’s Law Center, in a statement. 

Indeed, in interviews with over a half dozen mothers — several of them their family’s sole income earner — across four states this summer, they described the immense challenge of thriving at work while languishing on child care waitlists. 

One Texas mother delayed her return to the workforce for years as she waited for her baby to make it off the waitlist. Another had to call out from her job in retail for a home goods store so often that she lived in fear of getting fired.

“At a time when families need to bring in income because they have formula and diapers to pay for, they can’t work,” said Beth Messersmith, senior director of MomsRising North Carolina, which advocates on issues affecting mothers, including child care. “It leads families to slip into poverty.”

Related: Child care crisis deepens as funding slashed for poor families 

When Smith became pregnant, she assumed that her income level would qualify her for some form of child care subsidy. Paying out of pocket for child care wasn’t an option. Most quality centers in her neighborhood charge about $400 a week — twice the amount of her mortgage. “I could have looked for uncertified daycare opportunities where you pay someone very little,” she said. “But ethically and from a safety standpoint, it didn’t seem like it would work.” 

As the months of her maternity leave wore on, Smith resigned herself to the prospect of returning to work with her infant still at home and by her side. It seemed sort of manageable until Smith’s daughter, Judy, began to crawl, and then toddle. And just as her daughter became more mobile, Smith got a promotion at work.

On top of the challenge of keeping Judy safe while training for her new role, Smith worried about her daughter missing out on socializing with other kids, and the kind of verbal interactions with teachers and peers that a quality child care center could provide. A developmental screening questionnaire Smith filled out last spring showed that Judy could use a little more support with her communication and language.

“There’s not a lot of opportunity now for her to engage with her peers,” Smith said. But “the minute she is around another child, she feels compelled to use her language.” 

Smith muddled through by regularly extending her work day from 7 a.m. to midnight, to give her enough time to get her research and reports done. “During her nap time I’m like a bat out of hell trying to get as much done as I possibly can,” she said. 

While Smith felt lucky throughout the winter and spring that she could juggle it all, she wasn’t exactly thriving.

“I’m happy with my salary and the small promotion that I got,” she said. “But the reality is that had she been in care I would have been able to apply for competitive promotions and fulfill them with confidence. Right now, I don’t question my job security, but I do question my ability to do my job as best I can.”

Like Smith, when Amie Stevens signed up for child care assistance in 2023, she thought she was being proactive. Her daughter was 5 months old, and Stevens, who lives in Austin, Texas, figured that she would be able to return to her career as a massage therapist by her daughter’s first birthday.  

But getting off the waitlist would take close to 2 1/2 years.

The family had some income coming in from Stevens’ partner, but it wasn’t enough to cover all of the bills. They went on food stamps, and Stevens took some parenting classes from Catholic Charities to qualify for free diapers. She scoured phone apps for offers of gift cards in exchange for filling out surveys. And she turned to her parents in Iowa for some financial help. Meanwhile, Smith became pregnant with a second child. 

“I was getting a little discouraged,” she said. “‘Am I ever going to go back to work?’ I thought I would have to wait until the kids went to kindergarten.”

Finally, earlier this year families in her county got word that the waitlist was starting to clear, largely due to a property tax increase to raise more funds for child care. Stevens then had 90 days to find a job. She found a part-time massage therapist opening at a local chiropractor office and picked up some extra hours doing office work to meet the minimum 25 hours per week necessary to keep the subsidy. 

The income was critical, and Stevens was also happy to finally get out of the house more. “I love what I do,” she said. “It really doesn’t feel like a job if you like it.” 

For Barbara Aranda, a single mother who also lives in Austin, staying out of the workforce wasn’t an option. She had tried to sign up for child care assistance two days after her youngest daughter, Mackenzie, was born.  

Aranda couldn’t afford any centers without the subsidy, so she relied on a patchwork of babysitting support from her niece and others. But babysitters weren’t always available, so Aranda ended up calling out from her full-time job in retail a couple of times a week on average. 

She didn’t get paid for days that she couldn’t show up, and as the months wore on, Aranda began to fear losing a job she’d held for over a decade.

With less money coming in, Aranda canceled her cable subscription and started visiting food pantries. But she still fell behind on car and rent payments, she said, and “there were times when we struggled to get enough food.”

When Mackenzie, now 3, finally came off the waitlist last February, Aranda enrolled her in child care as soon as she could. She stopped calling out from work except on the rare occasions Mackenzie is home sick. Her income increased. Yet she’s still trying to pay off the debt accrued during nearly three years waiting for a subsidy. 

“If not for the wait, I would be in a different place financially now,” she said.

Related: The problem child care subsidies can’t solve: the shrinking provider pool

Even before waitlists surged in size, some child care voucher programs were designed in ways that can complicate life for working parents, according to advocates.

Taylor Moyer, a mother of three in Virginia Beach, Virginia, wanted to return to work when her oldest was still young. But she couldn’t apply for jobs if she didn’t have child care, and without a job she wasn’t eligible at the time for the state’s child care assistance program. “I felt like I couldn’t win,” she said.

Other states have strict income limits for recipients of child care vouchers, so families near the cutoff may be booted from the program if they get even a modest raise or additional hours. “There can be a benefits cliff where if you get a promotion, you lose your subsidy,” said Messersmith, the North Carolina advocate. “It makes it very tenuous for families.”

And untold numbers of eligible families never even apply, because they don’t know about the benefit or are daunted by the bureaucracy and the prospect of a long wait. 

“There are (about) 100,000 kids on the waitlist in Texas,” said Kim Kofron, executive director of early childhood education at Children at Risk, a Texas nonprofit that advocates for children. “But we also know we’re serving only 17 percent of eligible families.”

In Syracuse, Smith finally got some good news at the end of June, nearly two months after her daughter’s first birthday. An influx of state funding meant that she and hundreds of other families in her county would finally come off the voucher waitlist. Even then, completing the final steps wasn’t easy. It took weeks of stressful back and forth to confirm that there was no father — Smith had used a donor — and, therefore, no other potential source of income to support her daughter.

But at the end of July, Judy at long last started at a nearby child care center. Smith no longer feels so overwhelmed each weekday as the work day begins. And her daughter, now 15 months, is thriving and loves playing with a 16-month-old buddy every day in care. 

But Smith is still trying to make up for lost time, working late many evenings to do so. She estimates that it will take about a year of extended work days to feel at the top of her game at work again — about the same amount of time she spent on the waitlist. “That’s how far back it set me,” she said.   

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. 

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

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Every community college reformer wants to help more students earn degrees and get through college faster. A much-admired City University of New York support program has done that, some say brilliantly — but a recent 14-year study finds that those additional degrees haven’t translated into higher earnings. 

That’s a puzzle. 

College graduates generally earn more than people without degrees. In New York, even completing a two-year degree is associated with $10,000 to $14,000 more earnings a year. So why didn’t the extra degrees generated by CUNY’s ASAP program produce bigger paychecks?

ASAP, short for Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, was created in 2007 to tackle one of community colleges’ biggest and most pernicious problems: a majority of students drop out before graduation, with poor employment prospects and often with debt. The ASAP program surrounds students with unusually intensive support; not only do they have access to extra academic advising and tutoring, they’re required to use these services. And they receive help with expenses such as textbooks and transportation. 

In 2010, CUNY subjected ASAP to a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard for evaluating education interventions. Some 900 low-income students who had enrolled full-time in three of CUNY’s community colleges were randomly assigned either to ASAP or to the regular CUNY experience. After three years, the difference was enormous: 40 percent of the ASAP students had earned a degree versus 22 percent in the control group — an 18-percentage-point difference. 

The astounding results were replicated in separate randomized evaluations of similar programs in Ohio and Westchester County, New York, demonstrating that the program also worked for older students and in less urban settings. On the strength of this research, the ASAP program spread rapidly. Today more than 90 colleges are following CUNY’s recipe across 11 states, and an unknown number of copycat programs have sprung up around the nation. 

In the latest follow-up study, released last month and which tracked students through 2024, the degree advantage for ASAP had shrunk at CUNY, as more non-ASAP students had slowly earned degrees, too, but the edge remained substantial. About 58 percent of students offered ASAP had earned at least a two-year degree, compared with 50 percent of students in the control group.

But when researchers from MDRC, an independent nonprofit research organization, looked at earnings over those 14 years, the advantage completely disappeared. Students who went through ASAP — graduates and drop outs combined — earned about the same income, on average, as those who had the usual CUNY experience, according to New York state employment data. 

The former students’ average wages are low — roughly $37,000 a year — because the averages include people who are unemployed or working outside of New York state (counted as earning zero). A future study is expected to include out-of-state earnings, but Michael Weiss, a researcher at MDRC who conducted the evaluation, doesn’t expect out-state earnings to suddenly shift the results in favor of ASAP.

Another possible explanation is that not all associate degrees are highly valued in the labor market. In 2010, the year the study launched, CUNY’s ASAP program excluded many fields of study, including nursing and relatively well-paying health fields such as radiologic technology. Many of the additional two-year degrees documented in this study were earned by students in the liberal arts. Those degrees may not lead to high-paying jobs. Some graduates end up in customer service or childcare. Meanwhile, a student who left college without a degree might have entered the workforce sooner and worked their way up to a better-paying position, such as a retail store manager.

A liberal arts degree might, of course, be a stepping stone to a bachelor’s degree, which typically carries a bigger earnings premium. But researchers found no discernible long-term effect of ASAP on bachelor’s degree completion. The program did appear to help a small share of students — about 3 percent — earn bachelor’s degrees faster than they otherwise would have.

Steering students toward higher-paying fields has been top of mind at some community colleges that embraced the ASAP program. In North Carolina, for example, the program targets high-demand, workforce-aligned majors, often excluding liberal arts.

But Christine Brongniart, executive director of CUNY’s ASAP program, wants to stick with its ASAP-for-all approach, assisting any full-time student, regardless of field of study. The goal, she said, is to help students complete degrees quickly in the field of their choice. 

CUNY says ASAP’s mission isn’t simply to maximize earnings, and there may be other personal and societal benefits to finishing a degree that wages cannot measure. But if taxpayers are spending tens of millions of dollars on an intensive intervention, earnings are one legitimate outcome to examine.

The cost per student has dropped from $6,000 a year back in 2010 to $3,400 today (thanks to higher caseloads for each advisor), and the program has expanded greatly, now serving more than 22,000 students. The city’s budget for it surpasses $76 million a year. 

CUNY has also updated ASAP since 2010, adding a stronger career component. Advisers require students to take advantage of career resources such as job fairs and resume workshops, and are more deliberate about helping students find a lucrative Plan B when Plan A fails. For example, a student who can’t get into nursing might be steered toward another healthcare field, rather than defaulting to liberal arts. It’s possible that today’s ASAP students will earn more than their predecessors.

And there is an important counterexample in Ohio. A separate randomized evaluation of ASAP launched in 2015 found significant earnings gains six to eight years after students enrolled. The Ohio program served a different population, including many older students, in a different, less urban labor market.

That’s one reason Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy that has helped fund ASAP’s expansion, hasn’t given up hope. Arnold acknowledged that the New York graduation gains did not translate into higher cumulative earnings, while pointing to the positive Ohio findings as evidence that more research is needed. (Arnold Ventures is one of The Hechinger Report’s many funders.)

“Single studies rarely provide complete answers,” the foundation said in a post on its website. 

But student results from CUNY’s ASAP program are providing an important lesson: Getting across that graduation finish line is something to celebrate, but it isn’t the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a long, complicated path to a good middle-class life. 

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about CUNY’s ASAP program was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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In one of Denver’s wealthiest suburbs, where median family income tops $150,000 and nearly every kid is expected to go to college, students are now lining up for trade certifications.

Their parents aren’t worried; in fact, most of them are championing the move.

For decades, Americans have been treating college as a career plan, spurred by the “college for all” movement — a decades-long educational and political push that aimed to make a four-year college degree the standard expectation and primary goal for all high school students. The data show that it doesn’t work. 

Although 88 percent of college freshmen say getting a good job is “a main reason” they enrolled, more than half of college graduates are underemployed a year out, working jobs that don’t require a degree. A decade later, 45 percent still are.

These aren’t students who dropped out or gave up. They did everything right and still couldn’t find their footing. 

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

The problem isn’t that college doesn’t matter. It’s that college has become an expensive career exploration strategy, with no exit ramp for students who may need one. No wonder confidence in higher education is slipping.

It does not have to be that way. The opportunities for those without a four-year degree are exploding. The U.S. faces an annual shortage of nearly 712,000 workers with certificates and associate degrees in fields where workers without a bachelor’s degree can earn upward of $55,000 a year, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found.

The jobs are there. The pathways to them are not.

One course correction to the “college for all” movement is playing out in Denver’s Cherry Creek neighborhood, where high school students are participating in a program that offers real-world skill building and trade certifications, ranging from computer science to aviation to health science. 

Students split their time between the program and their regular classes, with transportation provided to and from their home high school. When I visited the program, I met three students who were all headed down different paths: One intended to pursue a bachelor’s degree for engineering. Another was interested in an associate degree for construction management. The third was excited to earn an industry credential to become a chef. 

The common thread they shared was that they were all locked in on their career paths. They had real experience in the field from the Cherry Creek Innovation Campus and clarity that they were moving in the right direction. Most Cherry Creek students still end up enrolling in college, but they do so with direction and purpose. 

Georgetown’s ROI data shows that associate degrees and certificates often deliver a higher return on investment than bachelor’s degrees in the first 10 years after completion, although the data also shows that ROI for bachelor’s degrees pulls ahead at 15 years and then widens the gap thereafter.

That nuance matters: For students who need economic traction now, shorter-term credentials can be the smarter first move.

The “college for all” movement, while well-intentioned, has created a false binary between academic preparedness and workforce skills. Programs like Cherry Creek’s not only improve engagement in high school and college-going rates but also offer a more defined pathway into the workforce. 

In my former role as CEO of a public charter school foundation, I was fortunate to be able to support the journeys of hundreds of students from college acceptance to college graduation. But it’s the journeys that didn’t work out as planned that have stuck with me the most.

Take, for example, the experience of a student from Oakland who I met through our career coaching program. She grew up wanting to be a nurse and had enrolled in a nursing program for a bachelor of science degree, diligently setting out on her long-awaited career path and becoming the first in her family to go to college.

But she had never been exposed to real-world healthcare or nursing work in high school, and she got two years into her program before realizing nursing wasn’t for her. She transferred to a community college, worked at a fast-food restaurant, and went through what she now calls “a lost phase.” 

Two years gone; not because she failed, but because the system never gave her a chance to figure out her path before she enrolled. What’s worse, most students in this situation are left saddled with student loan debt. We can do better. 

Related: As college graduates fret over finding jobs, a record shortage of workers is projected

If we want to meet the needs of a rapidly shifting economy — one in which college graduates can’t find good-paying jobs and employers can’t find graduates with the right skill set — we need to stop treating college and career readiness as separate tracks. 

It’s time for families to stop picturing shop class when they hear “vocational training.” That’s a stigma born from a past of underfunded, poorly constructed programs that filtered kids out of opportunities rather than into them. 

Today those programs look vastly different. Take, for example, nonprofit Ridgeline’s maritime career exploration program for high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area, where rising 11th and 12th graders get hands-on paid career experience in a variety of maritime fields such as ship engineering, ferry and container ship operations and port management. Some maritime jobs require apprenticeships; others require a degree from nearby Cal Poly Maritime Academy. Many pay six figures.

It’s time to set a new standard: Every high school should offer students the opportunity to graduate with a diploma and an industry-recognized credential or documented work experience. 

Honor the choice to skip college while giving those who want a degree more purpose. Everyone wins.

Patrick O’Donnell is CEO and co-founder of Ridgeline, a nonprofit that connects Bay Area students from underserved communities to high-wage, high-demand careers.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about college and careers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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SEWARD, Alaska — It was 2018 when Casie Warner first realized there was a major problem in this popular cruise port, nestled on an inlet about a two-hour drive south of Anchorage. At the time, Warner worked as a home visitor, providing advice, support and resources to low-income parents with young children. 

Time and time again, Warner would hear the same story from parents: “‘I wasn’t able to make my medical appointments. I didn’t have child care,’” said Warner. “‘I couldn’t pick up an extra shift at work because of child care.’” 

Warner set out to find a solution. But Seward, like many rural communities across the country, is considered a child care desert, where options are scarce and there are no quick fixes.

Then, some unexpected help arrived. In 2021, Norwegian Cruise Lines donated $1 million to Seward to help with post-pandemic economic recovery. The city council voted to spend the money on the two issues deemed to be the most relevant for residents of the town of 2,800: housing and child care.

Five years later, licensed child care slots are up by 150 percent.

In rural communities, the availability of affordable child care is a key component of economic success. At a time when child care shortages are pronounced, especially in rural areas, Seward’s approach of prioritizing child care and investing in new programs and providers offers a potential road map for other communities looking to strengthen their child care industry, support the local economy and eventually retain or attract new residents. 

“The hope is that if we can address child care, that perhaps it will have a bigger ripple effect,” said Courtney Bringhurst, a Seward city planner. “We’re hoping that it will help more families be willing to relocate to Seward and stay,” she added. “If we can get more families to stay, that will help strengthen our schools, which will give more opportunities and interest for other businesses to come to Seward.”

 Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.

Although Seward’s success so far in expanding child care slots shows what’s possible with more money, experts caution that in most places, public dollars, not private donations alone, will need to fill the gap.

“It’s impossible math otherwise for these programs to continue operating, particularly in rural communities,” said Hailey Gibbs, associate director of early childhood policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

About 1 in 7 people in the U.S. live in a rural community, and though they need and use child care as much as their urban counterparts, they face many more problems getting it. In sparsely populated areas, families are likely to live far from the few providers that exist. The most used child care option for rural families is a provider that operates from their home, but those small businesses are squeezed by low profit margins and high costs. 

According to the Center for American Progress, almost all — 96 percent — of Alaska’s children live in a child care desert, defined by the think tank as an area where there are three or more children for every licensed child care slot. The problem is even more acute in rural areas that are also low income: In those parts of the country, there are nine babies for every one licensed child care slot, CAP says.

Alaska’s economy pays a penalty for the lack of child care — according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the state lost $165 million because parents couldn’t access child care to go to work or school. 

But the economic effects are only part of the story. Rural families are more likely to experience food insecurity and to be on public assistance, and rural children under 5 have one of the nation’s highest poverty rates. Poverty and food insecurity are linked to poor school performance, which high quality child care could alleviate — but that care is not an option for many. 

“We know that fewer than half of children from low-income families are ready for school at age 5, and the gaps are just so much larger in rural communities,” said Karen Harrison, lead adviser for workforce development at the global nonprofit Save the Children, which runs several rural child care initiatives in the United States. “Many families in rural communities are left without options.”

Related: In-home child care could be solution for rural working parents

In Seward, Ella Wright said she and her husband spent the first five years of their daughter’s life working part time in nursing and mental health jobs respectively, due to the lack of child care. Until her daughter got a spot at a part-time preschool at age 3, “we had no breaks,” Wright said. 

In 2023, about half of Alaskan parents who were surveyed said that, like Wright, they could not fully participate in the labor force because of child care access and affordability. 

The picturesque town of Seward, framed by snow-capped peaks on the Kenai Peninsula, cannot afford to lose workers due to a lack of child care. Summers in Seward are lively. On days when cruise ships are in port, tourists meander up and down the main street, stocking up on souvenirs and taking pictures in front of Resurrection Bay’s ice-blue water. During these months, seasonal workers flood the town to work at restaurants and shops. 

But the town’s year-round employers, including a state maximum-security prison and a medical facility, face ongoing worker shortages. The shortages have been so pronounced that in 2023 the town had to temporarily close its small local jail, diverting people in custody to state-run facilities, until it could hire more employees. 

“It’s very difficult to maintain a strong, year-round economy, because we can’t maintain families year-round in Seward,” said Bringhurst, the city planner. “People just can’t maintain a job if they don’t have reliable child care.” 

The donation from Norwegian couldn’t have come at a better time for the town. In 2019, a child care program closed unexpectedly just three years after it opened, eliminating 20 child care spots from the community. (Qutekcak Native Tribe, a Seward-based social services agency that ran the program, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Then in 2021, a preschool program funded by federal Title I money closed after the local elementary school no longer enrolled enough children from low-income families to qualify for the funding. That left two licensed programs and 20 slots for more than 80 children who needed care. 

Norwegian’s donation was part of $10 million in support to Alaska port communities that were affected by Covid-related tourism drops. Warner had transitioned from her role as a home visitor to running a child-focused nonprofit, Happy Youth Programs and Educational Resources, or HYPER, which was chosen to lead the town’s new child care strategy. 

Using half of the $1 million donation, HYPER trained providers so they could meet requirements for state licensing and offered start-up funds to help cover the high costs associated with launching or expanding home-based child care businesses. The organization also developed a retention bonus program to boost salaries for providers, paid for early educators to attend trainings and established a year-long subsidy program to help families pay for child care. 

Seven miles north of downtown Seward, off the only road into town, Josie McClain’s home-based child care program is tucked away in a clearing down a long gravel driveway. The town’s investment has made an immense difference for McClain, who has a degree in elementary education and launched her program in late 2019 after years of running the local teen and youth center for the city. 

On a recent morning, a dozen children roamed around a playground fenced off in front of McClain’s house. McClain and her assistant watched, sometimes stepping in to comfort crying toddlers, fix broken sandals and navigate arguments over the swings. 

A little girl shuffled over to McClain, her rainbow-colored sandals on the wrong feet, and pointed through the playground fence, across the yard, to a sea of yellow dandelions.

“I see a lot of flowers!” exclaimed the little girl.

“Should we make dandelion jelly this week?” McClain asked. The little girl nodded eagerly.

“I’ll look up a recipe,” McClain promised. She kissed the girl on her head and sent her off to play.

The weight of her role in the community isn’t lost on McClain. The children in McClain’s care have a deep attachment to her. Several call her “grandma” and, during the day, wander over to cuddle on her lap or give her a hug. 

Related: OPINION: How a small town in rural Maine built a public school that serves a whole community, including infants and toddlers 

Many of the parents McClain serves wouldn’t be able to work if it weren’t for her. Several work in critical industries, like the local bank, the school system and the hospital. As McClain looked around the playground, she pointed out children whose parents would have left Seward if she hadn’t had room for them. Hers is one of two 24-hour programs in Seward, offering reliable care for parents who work nights, as well as backup and emergency care when parents have unforeseen needs. 

“There isn’t any place for them to go,” McClain said. “There isn’t an alternative.”

Running her program has involved sacrifice. On weeks when she can’t make the more than two-hour drive to Anchorage to load up on more affordable food and supplies, she must pay more at the stores in Seward. Recently, a federal food program for child care lowered their reimbursement rates, meaning she gets less money for the healthy food she serves children five times a day. To save money, she’s teaching herself how to can food for the winter. She hasn’t taken a vacation in years.

HYPER’s support and recent efforts from the state have helped ease the load a bit. In 2023, McClain was able to expand her child care program thanks to money from the organization. She used $10,000 from the nonprofit to help pay for a new screened-in porch to give children more room to play, including outside in cold and rainy weather.

“It made my small house one thousand times better,” McClain said. She also got licensed as a group child care program, allowing her to take in four more children for a total of 12. 

For the first time in years, McClain has been able to stop living paycheck to paycheck and save money. She receives an annual bonus of several thousand dollars from HYPER each year. For the year that HYPER subsidized parent tuition, McClain could count on a reliable payment each month instead of having to “hunt down money” from families.

Recently, Alaska invested more in child care, from which McClain has also benefited. In 2025, the state allocated about $6 million more to expand eligibility for child care assistance, and this year, added close to another $6 million for annual grants to help child care programs operate. More is needed though, experts say. Earlier this year, lawmakers approved $6.4 million to help retain early educators, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy later vetoed those funds, along with $3.7 million that would have gone to Head Start, the federal and state-funded preschool program for low-income children.

Related: Rural Americans rely on Head Start. Federal turmoil has them worried 

While the cruise company’s donation funding boosted child care in Seward, and state initiatives have provided additional support, the town’s child care crisis is far from solved. Early childhood jobs, with their low pay and lack of benefits, are hard to fill, Warner said. McClain fears she will have to drop four children from her program if she can’t find someone to replace her assistant, who is leaving soon.

And although two new providers have opened with HYPER’s support in the last year, there is still a shortage of infant and toddler spots. 

“I don’t think that the people who want more child care know how many hoops there are to jump through,” said Katie Shepard, who co-runs the newest program in town, Timberline Learning Center. “Anybody else who is not just dying to work with the kids is not going to go through all that.”

When Shepard wanted to open a part-time preschool program, the cost seemed insurmountable. HYPER provided a $30,000 grant to cover start-up costs, program supplies and business licenses. “Unless we had that kind of money to put into something like this, I don’t think it would have been possible,” Shepard said.

On one summer morning, 10 children scampered around the community room of a Methodist church downtown. 

“Who wants to play the bug game?” asked one boy, who was sitting in the middle of the room with bug-themed bingo boards. Several children crowded around him.

At the back of the room, Shepard sat by a large poster where students could write their names and stick them by a picture of their favorite bug.

“I LOVE butterflies!” exclaimed a little girl as she ran up to Shepard. With her teacher’s encouragement, she carefully glued her name on the paper. “Glue is so sticky,” she said.

Nearby, Wright’s daughter sat at a table carefully placing pictures of bugs onto a clear piece of sticky paper. Wright has seen how her daughter, now 4, has thrived at preschool. 

“Language-wise she’s grown, she’s task-oriented. She’s an only child, so that socialization is key for her,” Wright said. Last year, the family received a subsidy from HYPER to help pay tuition. “That was huge,” she said, adding that the family was able to save more money. She will be able to take on more hours at work once her daughter enters kindergarten full time in the fall.

Looking forward, Warner is trying to find a permanent source of funding for child care to help more families. Ideally, she says, that funding will come from a tourism tax. Recently, a new cruise ship dock opened, which will allow larger ships — and more people — to dock in Seward. If key infrastructure needs like child care aren’t addressed, Warner fears people won’t be able to live there.

“We have to support our year-round economy,” because, unlike the tourists, “We also love to live here when it’s quiet and cold.” 

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program. 

Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.

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

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For 15 years, we let children carry cellphones into most of our classrooms. By the time states began ordering the phones out, a generation had spent its childhood inundated by screens. We had protected everything about the arrangement except for the children. 

Similarly, during the rise of the commercial internet, we wrote rules to protect the privacy of platforms and the people profiting from them. The protections we later built for children, like the rule that a website must get a parent’s permission before collecting a child’s data, would never have been able to make up for the ground we had already ceded.

As a subject matter expert on human trafficking and child labor exploitation at the U.S. Department of Education, I watched systems that had been built to protect children instead shield the privacy of the people harming them. That failure taught me that the guardrails we neglect to build at the outset are protections we forfeit permanently. 

Now we are watching artificial intelligence companies race to install enforceable rules protecting their interests. We’ve seen this before: If the pattern holds, the industry protections that set the precedent will not be dislodged by the child protections that follow. This time, the protections for children have to come first.

I believe no AI tool that teaches, assesses or tracks a child should be eligible for a school district contract until it passes a bias test that is built around the very same students that digital tools have harmed before. 

Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

Last year, a study of AI assistants used by teachers found them recommending harsher approaches for struggling students whose names read as Black. A separate study found that an AI grader gave essays by Black students lower scores than essays by Asian students, reproducing a gap already present in human scoring.

None of this bias has to reach a child, because districts already have the place to catch it. Most districts already run a privacy check before buying a technology: They check whether a digital tool will keep a child’s data private and secure; a tool that fails is not supposed to be bought. Bias testing would work inside that same check. To test a tool for bias, an evaluator gives it nearly identical student work, changing only the name on each sample and the background and speech patterns the writing itself signals, and compares how the tool responds. An evaluator also examines what the tool teaches students about people: which stereotypes it repeats and whose history it tells in full. 

A tool that fails either examination should lose its eligibility. What makes a tool safe for the children most at risk makes it safe for every child.

Nearly every state has moved to regulate AI in some way, and a handful have enacted chatbot laws aimed at protecting children. California requires a chatbot to tell a child they are using AI and to remind that child to take regular breaks. New York State requires chatbots to detect expressions of suicidal thinking and refer the user to crisis services.

These are positive changes, but the child protected while engaging with AI at home has no comparable protections at school. Only a few states have passed laws directing their education agencies and school districts to manage AI tools. In Oklahoma, for example, an educator must review any content an AI tool generates before it reaches a classroom, and no AI tool may become the primary basis for a grade, promotion or retention decision.

Oklahoma’s law goes further than most. Typically, when one of these laws passes, it is little more than preliminary direction telling agencies and districts to develop their own policies. 

This month, New York City barred students through eighth grade from using generative AI, and Los Angeles Unified blocked every student from using generative AI on district devices, including the AI helpers built into Google Classroom, which nearly every American school uses. They banned what they could not test. New York City’s ban lasts one year, and the city will spend that year reviewing every technology tool in its schools. That review is what every district should be able to run before a tool reaches a student. A ban buys time but does not tell a district which tools are safe, and it takes useful tools away along with the harmful ones.

Even the most precise law will not be enough to protect a child. A law is only a promise before it is enforced. The school district must keep the promise by examining every tool before it is bought and again while children use it. Even without any new laws, every district carries a legal duty of care for every child, yet almost no district has the staff, training or technology to fulfill that duty. 

The privacy checks that most school districts run today do not test tools for bias at all: No state requires districts to do so, and no law requires the companies to disclose bias found in their AI. 

But those checks, which ask only whether a tool protects a child’s data, cannot determine whether a tool built on a large language model is safe for a child. That underlying AI model may treat a child differently even when race is never named, because it can infer race from the child’s name, neighborhood, school, language spoken at home or writing style. Those are the most obvious clues; a standard checklist is unlikely to catch the subtler ones. Facing public scrutiny, the companies that built these models have made the bias harder to detect. The companies trained the models to stop saying explicitly biased things but did not remove the bias itself. 

Related: AI gives more praise, less criticism to Black students 

When researchers gave AI models writing samples in the dialect many Black Americans speak at home, the models said nothing negative about Black people yet judged the writers themselves as less intelligent and matched them to less prestigious work. This is why no tool should keep its eligibility without being retested while students use it. These systems change after they are sold. 

Although a privacy check will not catch this bias, until recently, one protection remained after the check: A biased tool could still be pulled out of schools if statistical proof showed it was harming one group of children more than another. The U.S. Department of Education recently withdrew the rule that made this possible. Now, its Office for Civil Rights will act only when someone can prove a school or district intended to discriminate. Proof that children of one race are being harmed more than another will no longer be enough, and the tool will remain in the classroom. 

No one intends there to be bias in these tools: The models absorb it from the internet they learn from. The harms appear only in the patterns of which children are taught less, scored lower and tracked as struggling.

Once again, everything about the arrangement is protected — except for the children.

Shauna D. A. Knox is founder and CEO of The Emancipation Group, an innovation studio that combines research and development with digital product development to ensure Black children and families achieve authorship and ownership in the innovation economy.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about protecting children from AI was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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Choosing a college? Check out our tracker to make sure your favorite schools dont have shaky finances.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — Nalia Mutz started her freshman year at the University of Lynchburg in 2022 knowing exactly where she wanted to be four years later: right on track toward her dream of becoming a doctor.

When the university eliminated a dozen majors in 2024, the resulting layoffs left fewer professors to teach the science courses she needed to graduate. She began to fear earning her biomedicine degree the way she’d planned could take two extra years. 

“It was just a lot of cuts all around, and then they just didn’t have enough staff,” Mutz, 21, said. 

Higher education has faced fiscal headwinds in recent years as hundreds of institutions grapple with declining enrollment because of demographic trends and growing public skepticism about the value of a college degree. Trump policies targeting international students and cutting federal research funding made the financial situation more dire, as have new caps to graduate student loan borrowing and threats to block undergraduate programs from accepting federal financial aid unless alumni earn more than a typical high school graduate. 

As colleges tighten their belts, millions of students like Mutz feel the consequences. Small, private nonprofit institutions that rely heavily on tuition — like the University of Lynchburg — are likely to be hit hardest.

While just a small fraction of colleges will end up closing, those that survive may resort to cutting programs and staff, a move that could balance the books but leave students adrift. Experts and students themselves say it’s time to pay more attention to the impact of college downsizing.

“The academic literature draws a straight line from student-faculty ratios and advising supports to what that means for students’ likelihood to persist and complete their college degree,” said Justin Ortagus, professor of higher education and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin. “It has a real impact on their ability to graduate.”

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

A new interactive tool from The Hechinger Report, the College Financial Health Tracker, allows users to research whether a particular college is showing financial warning signs: dropping enrollment, declining revenue, growing deficits and shrinking endowments. The tracker also includes data on faculty layoffs and cuts to academic programs, as well as accreditation decisions. 

Hundreds of four-year colleges and universities show clear signs of financial stress, according to Hechinger’s analysis of a decade of federal higher education data for colleges primarily granting bachelor’s degrees.

• Roughly 1,100 out of the 1,900 colleges in our dataset experienced enrollment drops in three of the five years from 2019 to 2024, the most recent year for which data is available. About 6.4 million students attended these schools.
  
• About 1,500 colleges saw net revenue from tuition drop from 2019 to 2024. 

• Roughly 960 institutions, enrolling 5.2 million students, had 75,600 fewer instructional staff in that period. 

• Nearly 440 colleges and universities reported ending the financial year in the red in three of those five years. 

It can be hard for students and families to figure out how a college is doing financially. Small colleges tend to provide limited information about their finances in annual public reports. And unlike public institutions, private nonprofits are exempt from public records laws.

Yet the tough choices colleges make to stay afloat directly affect students. Meal plan costs can go up. Library hours may decrease. Staff might not have the time to handle complaints about dorm conditions. Cuts to academic advising staff can increase caseloads, which research links to worse graduation rates. 

Faculty make up the largest — and an increasing — portion of college job cuts, federal data shows. Hechinger’s analysis found private nonprofit institutions that cut instructional staff tended to do so at a faster rate than their enrollments fell, leading to worse faculty-to-student ratios. Layoffs can mean fewer professors to teach classes, making it harder to graduate on time or in a chosen major. Buyouts can mean fewer classes taught by the most experienced faculty. 

And replacing tenured professors with instructors who have fewer job protections could limit academic freedom and hurt the student learning experience, said Tim Gibson, president of the Virginia conference of the American Association of University Professors, which filed a complaint in February 2025 protesting cuts at the University of Lynchburg.  

“Faculty in those positions tend to be very afraid of speaking out on matters of curriculum or governance issues, or pushing back,” said Gibson, an associate professor of communication at George Mason University.

Scores of schools that Hechinger’s analysis flagged with warning signs have cut staff and campus amenities to balance their budgets. 

At the University of New Hampshire, officials closed the dining hall on weekends, shut campus pharmacies, raised tuition and laid off dozens of professors and staff members. Students have protested the state legislature’s votes to further cut funding for higher education.

Students at Meredith College in North Carolina are protesting layoffs they say have led to fewer courses offered and the elimination of four dean positions.

Rhode Island’s Johnson & Wales University cut 91 faculty and staff positions last year. Students have raised concerns about worsening dorm conditions, the rising cost of laundry and meal plans, and a new policy requiring students to live on campus for three years. 

Related: More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, new projection shows 

And the University of Lynchburg cut, in all, 12 undergraduate majors, 25 minors and five graduate programs, as well as announced 40 staff and 40 faculty reductions.

For most universities, financial troubles start with student enrollment. Declines have been accelerating; in 2019, for instance, about 1,050 colleges and universities — or 53 percent — had experienced enrollment drops in three of the previous five years. By 2024, that figure rose to about 1,090 institutions — or 58 percent. And public universities in particular are seeing steeper enrollment declines: One in 3 public universities saw enrollment decline at least 10 percent from 2019 to 2024. That’s up nearly 50 percent from 1 in 4 in 2019. 

The problem is likely going to get worse. 

“Looking at demographic projections, with smaller high school graduating classes coming, it’s going to be harder for them to compete for students and get enough bodies in the door,” said Robert K. Toutkoushian, a University of Georgia professor who specializes in economic analysis of higher education issues.

At Lynchburg, enrollment rose to nearly 3,600 in 2020, before dropping to roughly 3,200 in 2024.

The institution’s struggles offer a glimpse of what students at more colleges may soon encounter. 

It ended four of five fiscal years at a deficit, reporting a $2.1 million loss as of mid-2025, according to a financial audit from that year. The university said it had a positive cash flow in fiscal year 2026.*

Graduation rates have slipped: Fifty-seven percent of students seeking bachelor’s degrees graduated within six years as of 2024. That’s down from 66 percent in 2021, though similar to the 2014 rate, 56 percent. 

An accreditation body placed the university on warning in 2024 and again in 2025 for its failure to meet standards for financial responsibility and student outcomes. Morrison-Shetlar told the accreditors she’s confident the university will reach full compliance by December 2026. The accreditor did not respond to emails or phone calls seeking comment.

The university’s board of trustees has shrunk from 36 members in 2020 to 22. Former trustee Michael Gillette said he resigned in 2023 because administrators made key financial decisions without providing board members with budget documents. The university said it follows established governance procedures.

The University of Lynchburg spent at least $1.7 million to change its name from Lynchburg College in 2018 to raise the institution’s stature and attract more foreign students, who typically pay full price. Federal data shows the university had 249 international students — about 8 percent of the student body — in 2024, nearly quadruple the number in 2014. 

Appealing to foreign students to subsidize domestic ones is a popular strategy; about 750 public and private not-for-profit colleges have boosted enrollment of international students by at least 10 percent in the past decade. But those efforts are in jeopardy as the Trump administration pushes to make it harder for international students to get visas.

Recently, the university launched certificate programs like one for cannabis careers, its first Ph.D. program and several three-year bachelor’s degree programs. Morrison-Shetlar is focused on stabilizing the budget, launching a fundraising campaign and “adding programs that are attracting more students towards high-paying jobs, something that families are very, very aware of these days,” she said. “They want to make sure that their kids have a good job to go to and are well prepared for that job. And we do that very, very well at the University of Lynchburg.”

Mutz enrolled there because it was near her hometown and offered a better financial aid package than another local university. Her family still took out about $10,000 a year in federal loans, but she hoped that investment would be worth it as she pursued a biomedicine major.  

Mutz said officials announced the 2024 cuts in a mass email to students. “They did tell us you can still continue your degree plan,” Mutz said. But she said university officials didn’t acknowledge the cuts meant fewer in-person classes at the university — and she didn’t receive any follow-up after that initial email.  

Instead, students often learn new information first through the student newspaper, The Critograph. This year, student journalists reported about a recent and otherwise unpublicized round of university-wide faculty buyouts. The newspaper also revealed that the university is down to just three academic advisers, compared to seven previously. 

Morrison-Shetlar has said that students will still receive adequate advising, but some students have already run into problems. Willow Martin, a psychology major, received a surprising message from the advising office this year — that she won’t be able to graduate on time.

Martin, who expected to graduate in May, was told she needs 11 more credits, including courses that she fears the buyouts will affect.

“I’m not really sure who’s going to teach my upper-level psychology classes,” she said. “I’m not really sure what’s going to happen.”

Meanwhile, Lynchburg has moved some undergraduate classes online. 

Morrison-Shetlar, who will retire at the end of June, said students can take other classes through a regional consortium.

“All of the students work with their advisers to make sure that they can graduate on time and that the classes that they need are appropriately provided,” she said. 

Students said that is not the same as taking all their classes at Lynchburg. Some have started voting with their feet. Thirty percent of Lynchburg students transferred out in 2024, according to federal data — up from 18 percent a decade ago.

Related: Losing faith: Rural, religious campuses are among the most endangered  

Mutz tried to make it work at Lynchburg, but “I didn’t really like the environment,” she said. “The financial issues were a huge contributor. We were paying, but we just weren’t getting enough resources or benefits.”

She ended up transferring to Radford University, in southwest Virginia in the fall of 2024*. Even when she learned some of her core courses wouldn’t transfer because they didn’t meet her new university’s standards, she said it was the right choice to leave Lynchburg.

“All my friends that I know that went there transferred,” Mutz said. “I don’t know anyone that graduated from there.”  

*Corrections: This story has been corrected to reflect when Nalia Mutz transferred from the University of Lynchburg. It has also been updated to include details about the University of Lynchburg’s fiscal year 2026. A sentence has been removed saying that the university declined to provide certain enrollment figures. 

Contact investigative reporter Marina Villeneuve at 212-678-3430 or villeneuve@hechingerreport.org or on Signal at mvilleneuve.78. 

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

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I was supposed to be dancing, but instead I had been chatting incessantly. The teacher sat me under the piano so I could focus. From that tucked-away spot, I could see nothing but feet. Sneakers and socks sliding across the floor, heels lifting and landing in time with the music. 

“Focus on their feet,” he told me. “Rejoin your friends when you’re ready.”

I watched. I listened. And slowly, something shifted. The rhythm pulled me in. The movement entranced me. I quieted. When I stepped back in, I was fully engrossed in a way I had not previously experienced.

That teacher was the legendary Jacques d’Amboise, the late principal dancer from New York City Ballet — a MacArthur Fellow, a Kennedy Center Honoree and founder of National Dance Institute (NDI), an organization that brings dance education into New York City public schools like the one I attended. 

But all I knew then, as a fourth grader, was that this teaching artist was different from the other adults in my school. And that he kept showing up. That last part, I would later learn, is rarer than it should be. 

Teaching artists do far more than provide instruction in an art form. They bring different ways of seeing students, valuing skills and behaviors that are dismissed in the traditional classroom, like creativity, risk-taking and physicality.

Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

A teaching artist is a working artist — a dancer, a muralist, a spoken word poet — who works in partnership with classroom teachers to bring arts learning into schools. I was fortunate to have this experience, but most students never do. However, I believe we can fix this — to the benefit of these workers and the schools and students they serve.

If we believe arts education changes lives, we must invest in the people who make that change possible: Philanthropic funders should prioritize organizations offering a stable infrastructure for their workforce. 

Here’s why: Teaching artists look for what students can do rather than focus on the gaps in their skills or knowledge. And when they are able to stay — to build real relationships with students, teachers and school communities over time — the positive impact compounds.

Teaching artists are also place-makers who convert classrooms into studios, animate school hallways with rehearsals and art and bring families into schools to celebrate student achievements. They transform not just students but the adults around them. 

When classroom teachers collaborate with teaching artists, they discover new abilities in their students and learn new teaching approaches. 

Yet the arts nonprofits that maintain teaching artist rosters often cannot offer these professionals stable, sustainable careers. Teaching artists are typically hired part-time and employed seasonally, without benefits, at wages that are increasingly untenable as the cost of living soars.

Research on teaching artists reveals that they are the backbone of arts learning programs but also illuminates the hardships they face: A 2025 report found that teaching artists overwhelmingly worry about career longevity and cite “low compensation,” “inconsistent work often split over multiple organizations” and “hurdles like difficulty obtaining benefits.” 

Turnover is high, and when teaching artists leave, students lose trusted mentors, classroom teachers lose valued collaborators and schools lose partners who understand their communities. 

Today, I am a professor of education and have spent nearly two decades studying how young people learn in and through the arts. I now know that what I experienced under that piano wasn’t magic. It was the work of a highly skilled teaching artist. I was transformed over six years as a student with Jacques d’Amboise and the National Dance Institute.

I learned humility by dancing in ensembles in which my role was to support others as much as to shine myself. I learned cultural empathy by dancing with students from China and Russia, as well as from dancing in New York City neighborhoods different from my own.

As young artists, we connected through movement across language and cultural divides. I learned that dance was a way to express myself creatively, and that I didn’t need so many words.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The lesson the arts teach

National Dance Institute marks its 50th anniversary this year, offering a reminder that the enduring success of an arts education program depends on the well-being and tenure of its teaching artists and their ability to build dignified careers.

By providing its dance teaching artists year-round employment, including part-time roles with steady and reliable schedules, ongoing professional development and administrative support that alleviates many common burdens, NDI is able to recruit experienced dancers and educators committed to making teaching a long-term career.

The teaching artists, and the organization, become trusted members of school communities, with whom they partner for many years, and the artists find a pathway for promotion to full-time, salaried roles with benefits.

School districts partnering with arts organizations should prioritize contracts that reward continuity. And nonprofit leaders weighing budget priorities must realize that investing in their people is inseparable from investing in their mission.

This year, I am turning 50 alongside National Dance Institute. Looking back, what I remember most is not that Jacques d’Amboise was one of the greatest dancers of his generation. It’s that he captured the imagination of a chatty fourth grader by sitting her under a piano to watch feet, came back the next week and kept coming back after that.

Erica Rosenfeld Halverson is a board member of the nonprofit National Dance Institute, chair of Theatre & Drama and professor of Curriculum & Instruction in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and host of the podcast “Arts Educators Save the World.” 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about teaching artists was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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