In the last half of 2025, Gertrudis Espinal watched as, one by one, children left the child care program she runs out of her home in the Bronx. The city had run out of voucher money that her families needed to pay for care, and by February, she only had seven children enrolled – half as many in the previous year. 

“We should be focusing on teaching the kids right now,” Espinal said, rather than having to fight for funding. “It’s their future.”

In New York City, most of the low-income families who use a child care voucher enroll their children in home-based programs. But those small programs are uniquely vulnerable to economic shocks because they enroll fewer children than center-based programs and have less access to grants and resources than other child care settings.

Some organizations are trying to help with various initiatives designed for home-based providers. Espinal is one of 50 Bronx-based child care providers who benefited from a guaranteed income pilot program called the Thriving Providers Project, a national program run in six states by the nonprofit Home Grown, which supports home-based child care.

Beginning in June 2024, Espinal received $1,000 monthly, paid out every two weeks for 18 months, which she could use with no restrictions. She used the funds to buy supplies, like books, paint, and a sand and water sensory table for the children in her care, and paid electricity bills, which in the past she’d had to put on her credit card. 

“It gave me peace of mind,” said Espinal. “I have the money, so your mind is focusing on what you need to, [like] training and teaching these kids to develop their skills and the foundation,” she said. “You’re in peace of mind, so you are projecting a more peaceful and a better environment to the kids.”

Educators and experts say this kind of support, in particular programs that help boost wages for employees, could be life-changing for providers and help stabilize the shaky industry.

“Family child care is still waiting for compensation that is matching the true cost of care,” said Lara Kyriakou, senior director of policy at All Our Kin, a nonprofit that supports family child care providers and that partnered with Home Grown to run the Bronx pilot program. “Educators are really concerned about being able to take care of their own personal and family needs, and being able to meet the needs for their program and the children they care for.”

Research that Stanford University’s Center on Early Childhood conducted on Thriving Providers shows that the predictable funds allow early educators to pay off debts and buy food; in some cases, it’s the difference between keeping their businesses open or closed. Child care income can fluctuate based on enrollment, attendance and state voucher policies, which makes reliable income more critical, experts say. With predictable funds, “you are able to just continue functioning without any concerns about funding,” said Kyriakou. That supports providers but also enables a “continuity of care and a stable, nurturing environment” for children.

Elizabeth Olivo, a Bronx-based home-based provider who also participated in the Thriving Providers Project, said she used the stipends to purchase essential materials and supplies for her program.

“Nearly every major operating expense for my family child care program has increased, making it more challenging to maintain stability while continuing to provide quality care for families,” Olivo said by email. (Recent research shows operating costs have increased for providers across the country, who in many cases are passing those costs on to families.)

Olivo fears what will happen to the industry if the current status quo continues. “If these rising costs continue without additional support,” she said, “many family child care providers may struggle to remain open.”

Research shows even modest cash bonuses and stipend programs for providers in states like California and Virginia improved chronically low early educator retention rates. In the District of Columbia, which offered a wage supplement of $10,000 to $14,000 per year to home and center-based providers beginning in 2022, research found child care employment increased by 7 percent within two years. 

New York child care advocates are also hoping that $500 million for child care that was included in a Senate budget proposal will make it into the state’s final budget. That money could provide additional compensation to child care providers to boost their chronically low wages. Nationwide, their median salary is around $13 an hour. 

Child care providers may have to continue looking to private initiatives such as Thriving Providers, and to cities and states for support, as opposed to the federal government. In early April, President Trump said “it’s not possible” for the federal government to pay for child care costs. 

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. You got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it too,” Trump said.

In recent months, however, many states have started slashing such funds, creating longer waitlists for families in need of payment assistance and forcing programs to close. The District of Columbia’s pay equity initiative is also at risk of elimination.

For Espinal, her business is struggling again now that the payment program has ended. As children lost their vouchers and her enrollment dropped, she had to let her assistants go. Once again, she is worried about being able to pay her expenses. 

“We really need more of this funding, not just in a project, but consistently,” she said. “Early childhood needs to be funded so we can thrive, so we don’t have to be fighting to thrive.”

This story about home child care 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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Right now, we are asking the wrong questions about AI in education.

The conversation is dominated by asking what the technology can do — How fast can it generate content? Personalize practice? Analyze data? But far less attention is being paid to what students need from the K-12 academic experience to develop critical thinking and analysis skills, and the role human relationships play in that process.

I see that gap clearly as a parent. My daughter — a student in an excellent public charter school — has selective mutism, which means that in many school settings, she can’t reliably use her voice with adults. And yet, every day, I watch educators work to find (analog!) ways to reach her and help her develop skills — through patience, consistency, challenge and care. They create conditions for her to feel safe enough to try, to risk and to grow.

That experience has clarified something for me, both as a parent and as the leader of a K-12 organization: Learning is not just about access to information or efficiency. It is built through human interaction — through trust, responsiveness, risk-taking and the steady presence of adults who know how to meet students where they are.

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

If we don’t anchor our decisions about AI and education technology adoption and integration in that reality, we are solving for the wrong problem.

In my role at a K-12 instructional provider that specializes in equipping educators with high-quality, standards-aligned math and literacy resources, I think often about which materials promote learning in ways that leverage the benefits of human interaction.

Because the complex work of educating our children is inherently human work. When done well, it’s the result of collectively creating and experiencing the world alongside each other. 

That is why, as we increasingly adopt artificial intelligence and other technology in the coming years, we must be careful to select tools, programs and platforms that allow us to continue cultivating deep learning experiences that promote our capacity for understanding and community. 

So much of the vital human core at the center of education stands to change with the rapid integration of AI in K-12 schools. But should it? 

To be sure, many things stand to improve because of emerging digital advances in education. We can imagine tools that help teachers analyze student work more efficiently, platforms that provide multilingual support in real time and adaptive systems that offer targeted practice without requiring hours of manual planning. We can also envision environments where data is easier to understand, where time-consuming administrative tasks shrink and where students have more opportunities for personalized feedback.

But sometimes, already, in the rush to capitalize on the promise of personalized learning platforms, we have been losing sight of what can be most important about what they’re learning in the first place. A classroom full of students working independently with the support of AI chatbots, for example, can be devoid of opportunities to build critical skills like collaboration, debate and communication.

Academic development requires more than just finding the right answer. Yes, fact-finding and procedural fluency are vital for students’ long-term success. Equally important is conceptual understanding, which requires engaging with divergent opinions, wrong answers and productive cognitive struggle.

That is why I take an approach to ed tech that emphasizes what works — I call it “technopragmatic.” I do not want us to slow down — these advances herald much promise for better education outcomes and for closing long-standing equity gaps. But we do need to keep asking questions. We can’t introduce AI-powered “solutions” simply because we are able to generate them. We should be considering what we want to use new technology to do on behalf of our children and our own collective future. 

We must ask: Does the technology align with our goals?

Related: Schools need more ways of knowing if AI and ed-tech tools are working

After years of being an educator and principal, I have many questions about what our ideal classrooms will look like five years from now. How will the components of great classrooms shift in this new technological era? And how will we ensure that the end-users who will be most impacted by these choices — teachers, students, families — have a voice and a hand in shaping the decisions we make?

In a K-12 system in which the fastest-growing student population is English language learners, research has already demonstrated the positive impact of digital tools that help with translation and comprehension while providing real-time feedback and interactive practice for speaking and writing that’s not only convenient but engaging. 

Yet as helpful as AI can be in supporting multilingual learners, the technology can also introduce bias, particularly for students with disabilities — further evidence that emerging AI tools are most effective when paired with strong teacher guidance.

Moving forward, we must ensure that AI platforms and digital education tools remain enhancements as opposed to replacements for how we teach and learn.

Otherwise, we’ll end up creating spaces that do not center human thriving — not just for my child and other students with varying needs, but for all students. 

Artificial intelligence and evolving technologies can absolutely advance our capacity to collaborate, problem-solve and think critically — if we make it so. But we cannot ever forget that it’s ultimately the human experiences we share that are the most important part of the learning that we do.

Joy Delizo-Osborne, president and CEO of Student Achievement Partners (SAP). SAP is a nonprofit that supports teachers and educational leaders of schools and systems with research- and evidence-based guidance on high-quality, standards-aligned math and literacy instruction.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about AI and education 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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Career “pathways” have become a big idea in high school reform. The goal is to give all students a structured sequence of courses in a career field, along with early exposure to the workplace and opportunities to build practical, job-related skills. 

Many aspects of these programs are similar to the curriculums at traditional vocational schools. But this newer incarnation simultaneously aims to make the vocational high school more college oriented and the comprehensive high school more career oriented. 

Are the millions of dollars invested in these programs actually helping students get a head start on college and careers?

That question can’t be fully answered yet. But a new research report from Delaware — a national leader in the pathways movement — offers some early clues.

The state launched career pathways in 2014. Today, about 70 percent of high school students, or 30,000 teenagers, are enrolled, according to the nonprofit Rodel, which works with Delaware policymakers to reform education and improve the state’s workforce. 

Ideally, students take a sequence of three or more courses in fields like healthcare, construction or education. Many also earn early college credits or make significant progress toward industry certifications, and some participate in internships or apprenticeships. 

Researchers at RTI International, a nonprofit research organization, tracked more than 6,000 graduates who had completed at least two courses in a career field and surveyed them to see what they were doing in the years immediately after high school.

Three-quarters of the students surveyed were enrolled in college or another postsecondary training program after graduation, which is higher than the national average of 63 percent. But fewer than half were still studying or working in the field they had chosen in high school. 

For example, among students who completed a pathway in architecture and construction, fewer than 20 percent pursued construction-related majors. Many shifted instead to fields like science and engineering (40 percent), business (8 percent) or healthcare (6 percent).

Most popular high-school pathway fields in Delaware

That mismatch isn’t necessarily a failure. For some students, the wrong path was clarifying.

“When the students talked to us about it, they really considered it valuable to learn something they didn’t like,” said Sandra Staklis, lead author of the RTI report. “One student told us, ‘Oh, my mom and my aunt are nurses. And so I tried it out. And it turned out it wasn’t for me, but it was good to know that.’”

Related: Dual enrollment has exploded. But it’s hard to tell if it’s helping more kids get a college degree

Students also talked about gaining a broader set of skills that are useful in any field. “Students said they were learning those workplace skills like time management and working with other people on a project,” said Staklis. “A lot of academic work traditionally has been more individual, like reading a book or taking a test.” 

Still, the findings raise a fundamental question: Are pathways meant to steer students into specific career fields, or help them figure out what they don’t want to do?

Students also described how much they valued the mentoring they received from their instructors, many of whom didn’t spend their professional lives in schools but in industry. One student profiled in the report, Kwame, said his teachers in the healthcare field showed him how to break down dense medical material and so he could study to earn his paramedic certification. He’s now majoring in public health at a four-year college and hopes to become a surgeon. 

Two lessons stood out from the Delaware study.

• Workplace experience matters most but is hardest for schools to deliver. Students who participated in internships or apprenticeships were more likely to continue in their field, the report found. Another student named James, also profiled in the report, pursued an education pathway in high school and, during his senior year, he shadowed a teacher, which taught him a lot about managing classroom behavior. He’s now pursuing an associate degree in elementary education. 

But these opportunities are difficult for schools to provide, requiring coordination with employers as well as solutions for scheduling and transportation. 

Workplace learning was more common in vocational high schools, where students often complete core coursework earlier and can spend more time outside the building during their senior year. By contrast, one-time experiences — such as guest speakers or field trips — had less impact but were easier for schools to arrange.

• Students need better guidance especially when they want to change direction. Once students start a pathway, it can be difficult to switch. “If you’re a junior and you want to switch to a different pathway, you’d have to go back taking classes that are mostly freshmen and sophomores, and it just becomes logistically difficult to allow that,” said Staklis. 

Luke Rhine, vice president for postsecondary success at Rodel, which commissioned the analysis, said the findings were encouraging but point to a need for stronger advising, which he calls “navigational support.”

The report also points to more questions for future research. 

It’s unclear how much of the higher college-going rate can be attributed to pathways themselves. The study is not causal, Staklis said, and students who complete these sequences may already have been more likely to pursue further education. Other incentives to pursue higher education could also be playing a role, including Delaware’s generous scholarship programs, which cover tuition at Delaware Technical Community College and Delaware State University for many students. 

While a majority of students were working, most were in part-time jobs in retail, delivery or fast-food that fit in with their studies. Longer-term outcomes — including careers and earnings — remain unknown.

Related: Young, employed — and unhappy

Some researchers question the structure of the pathways model in a rapidly changing economy. Kerry McKittrick, co-director of the Project on Workforce at Harvard University, issued a report last week, “Pivots Without Pathways: Career Navigation in a Fragmented Labor Market,” based on an analysis of community college students and young adults. McKittrick argues that it might not make sense to require young students to go through a sequence of technical training classes for jobs that may not exist in five years.

“Pathways are a powerful option, but this linear path to a career is really the exception,” said McKittrick.”In a world where jobs continue to change, we also need to equip students and workers with the skills they need. … I’m talking about adaptability and decision making and information literacy and networking.”

Those skills, argues McKittrick, aren’t learned in a classroom, but through trial and error.  What’s most important, according to McKittrick, is for young people to have the opportunity to explore professions beyond what adults in their family do and to develop networks. 

Notably, she agrees with one of the Delaware report’s central findings: Workplace experience may be the most valuable component of a pathways program. 

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

This story about high school pathways 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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When I taught middle school math, some of my worst days as a teacher were spent sitting at an uncomfortable cafeteria table, watching someone slog through a PowerPoint about strategies for classroom management or student engagement. 

Like students, teachers learn best by doing; research has long shown that learning is more effective when it’s active. The ineffectiveness of our training was compounded by the fact that, in my school district, Brockton Public Schools, near Boston, we did not have a math curriculum, so classroom instruction was disjointed.

As a result, our students’ math scores were consistently dropping. Then Covid hit. By 2021, only 12 percent of our middle schoolers met or exceeded math expectations on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).

When I became the middle school math and science curriculum coordinator in 2021, after teaching in the district for 13 years, one of the first things we did was adopt a core math curriculum for all middle schools. And our rollout to teachers was active. For every classroom in grades 6-8, we delivered in-person professional learning that invited teachers to experience math content just as their students would.

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

Of course, that didn’t guarantee our teachers would use the curriculum, so we carved out daily common planning time and had every grade-level team sit down together to discuss what students would learn. We reviewed how students would be assessed, how teachers could support all learners — including students with disabilities, underserved populations and multilingual learners — and how the teachers would work with student groups.

Teachers were skeptical at first. Some told me, “My students won’t work in groups,” or “They’re not going to talk about math.” 

But when instructional coaches from our curriculum provider modeled lessons in front of their classes, teachers saw what was possible. Their students were talking, collaborating and fully engaging in the work. 

Teachers also saw that the coaches were there to observe, model and provide feedback — not to judge. That opened the door to trust. Teachers felt safe to admit what they didn’t know and try new strategies. Before long, teachers saw the value in making the shift from being the “sage on the stage” to facilitators of learning. 

We added peer observations, too. Teachers now observe each other teaching and give feedback. It’s the feedback that drives change. 

Change isn’t always easy, even when it’s needed. But if we can do it, any district can. 

When we were looking for a math curriculum, we not only wanted to change what was taught but how. Before, teachers primarily focused on procedures because that’s the way they were taught: “Memorize these steps. Now practice with the problems on this worksheet.” 

That approach, however, doesn’t help students grasp the “why” behind mathematical ideas. Now, we balance procedural fluency with conceptual understanding and real-world applications so students can grasp the underlying principles and reasoning behind math concepts.

Yet, even though teachers see how effective this approach is, they do sometimes fall back into old routines because it seems easier to hand out worksheets than to help students understand how and why math works. This is why accountability is crucial.

In every middle school, leaders regularly conduct learning walks, in which they stroll through math classrooms to make sure teachers are teaching to the grade-level standards using our curriculum. Because the leaders have been trained in our curriculum, they know which teaching practices to look for and which math practices students should be demonstrating. When our walks reveal that teachers need support, we provide it. I am constantly taking courses and adapting my coaching to meet teachers’ needs. Sometimes just a few small tweaks can help even the best teachers take their practice to the next level.

Over the last four years, our schools have made significant improvements. From 2021 to 2025, the percentage of students meeting or exceeding expectations in math on the MCAS increased from:

• 11 to 21 percent in sixth grade (a 91 percent increase).
• 13 to 16 percent in seventh grade (a 23 percent increase).
• 13 to 21 percent in eighth grade (a 62 percent increase).

This progress took a great deal of rethinking how we view math instruction, how we support our teachers and how we believe in our students.

This approach is particularly important in a district like ours, with so many diverse needs. We serve over 15,000 students in Brockton. Seventy-two percent are low-income; more than 34 percent are multilingual learners; and 53 percent identify their first language as something other than English. Last year, 1,500 migrant students entered our district; some of these new middle schoolers hadn’t been in school since second grade. 

It’s been gratifying to see progress, especially when so many other districts still haven’t caught up to where they were before the pandemic.*

To help students reengage with concepts and fill in gaps in prior knowledge, we offer an interactive video streaming program to our middle schools. As students participate in exercises that adapt to their level and in game-based activities, they build their skills in a low-risk environment, which alleviates math anxiety. 

Given the ongoing teacher shortages — we still have five openings to fill this year — the video program has been a lifeline for providing targeted remediation when certified teachers aren’t available. Not surprisingly, the two schools that use the program are also our top performers. In fact, one school had a 440 percent increase in sixth grade MCAS passing rates between 2021 and 2025.

Related: Kids and parents dislike math homework, so teachers are scrapping it. Will students be better off? 

Another hurdle we’ve faced has been in promoting the idea of productive struggle. Productive struggle keeps students in the zone of learning where they feel challenged but not overwhelmed. 

When students work through problems that require effort, they build perseverance and flexible thinking. When they try, fail and try again, they learn from their mistakes. They build resilience and start to take more ownership of their learning.

Many teachers are nurturers. They don’t like watching their students struggle, so they sometimes model too much or intervene too early. But math requires struggle. 

To help teachers get more comfortable with this idea, we’ve adopted teaching practices from mathematics education professor Peter Liljedahl’s “Building Thinking Classrooms.” Practices such as giving thinking tasks and using vertical nonpermanent surfaces, such as whiteboards and chalkboards, are pushing students to build their thinking and support each other.

By 2025, according to an independent education consultant, 93 percent of our teachers were using our core curriculum. There is now consistency in math across our middle schools. Students can move from one school to another and pick up right where they left off. That consistency lends itself to greater collaboration. When teachers no longer have to worry about what to teach, they can work together and focus on how to teach their students better.

We still have more to do, but our progress shows what’s possible when we believe in teachers and students and give them the resources they need to do their best work.

*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify some teachers’ response to the new curriculum and the district’s post-pandemic performance. 

Candice McGann is the middle school math and science coordinator for Brockton Public Schools, which is located 20 miles south of Boston. Before stepping into this role in 2021, she taught middle school math for 13 years in the district. 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about math curriculums 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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For too long, higher education has acted as if learning only counts when it happens inside a classroom. Millions of Americans know otherwise.

Opportunity should not require relocation, excessive debt or navigating systems built for someone else’s life. Our nation needs to broaden its definition of where learning happens and recognize learning wherever it happens. 

Apprenticeship is a natural place to begin building that broader network of opportunities. At a time when the nation is debating college costs, workforce shortages, economic security and the future of work, apprenticeship offers something rare: a solution that works for students, employers and communities at the same time. It is a framework to learn, earn and advance. 

As chancellor of the California Community Colleges, serving more than 2.2 million students across 116 colleges, I see every day that students want pathways that are practical, affordable and connected to opportunity. Employers want workers who can contribute on day one and continue growing over time. Communities want stronger local economies.

Apprenticeships offer exactly that. They combine paid, on-the-job learning with classroom instruction. They allow students to earn a paycheck while building skills. They reduce the need for debt. They create real experience, real momentum and real credentials. They give employers a direct hand in shaping the talent they need while strengthening communities’ access to essential workforce services.

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

Importantly, apprenticeships connect education to the dignity of work. They remind us that intelligence is expressed in many forms, through design, craftsmanship, leadership, repair, teaching and service.

What makes apprenticeships especially powerful is that they work at scale and deliver measurable results. Research from California’s community colleges shows that apprentices consistently out-earn their peers and achieve higher success rates in their coursework across nearly all fields of study while enrolled. And they continue to out-earn their peers two years after completing their programs.

For employers, that means a reliable talent pipeline with strong retention. For students, it means building skills without taking on debt. Apprenticeships can change their lives.

One example: A student named Manuel is an apprentice in one of our manufacturing programs. His pathway began in a classroom and moved into a paid computer-controlled machine operator role at Eibach, Inc., a major U.S. and global manufacturing company. After completing his first apprenticeship, he is now advancing into a higher-level programming track, earning a salary while he learns and builds his career step-by-step. 

Congress has an opportunity to strengthen and expand this proven workforce strategy. Doing so means sustained investment in apprenticeship programs, stronger incentives for employer participation and better alignment between workforce and higher education policy to expand earn-and-learn models nationwide. 

Related: The US wants more apprenticeships. The UK figured out how to make them coveted roles

Internships and work-based learning are core to Vision 2030, the roadmap for California’s community colleges. Education must be connected to economic security, social influence, workforce relevance and student success. Within that framework, apprenticeship is the gold standard.

The model extends well beyond the traditional trades. California is expanding apprenticeships into nursing, teaching, information technology, advanced manufacturing and public-sector careers. In health care, that means helping incumbent workers quickly build skills and move into higher-wage roles. In partnership with labor, it means ensuring apprenticeships lead to recognized credentials and degrees, not just short-term training. 

Scaling this kind of opportunity requires partnerships. California’s community colleges work closely with employers, labor organizations and community-based groups to design programs that meet real workforce needs. 

Faculty have been deeply engaged in advancing credit for prior learning. They are creating rigorous processes to recognize the knowledge and competencies developed in these apprenticeship environments and translate them into appropriate academic credits that lead to degrees.

Related: Apprenticeships for high schoolers are touted as the next big thing. One state leads the way

A journey-level electrician should see a pathway to an associate degree. A manufacturing apprentice should be able to build toward engineering technology credentials. A health care worker should be able to turn experience into academic progress and career advancement.

All of this matters for adults returning to education, for veterans transitioning to civilian careers and for communities that want to see opportunity in more places.

Apprenticeships deserve broad-based support and national scale. They are both practical and proven, rooted in work ethic and upward mobility. They strengthen both the economy and the social fabric.

America will build a stronger future when we decide to invest in the people who will build it.

Sonya Christian is the chancellor of the California Community Colleges, the largest system of higher education in the nation.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about apprenticeships 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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It hadn’t occurred to Ryan that going to college could endanger his parents’ safety, until he was halfway through filling out the financial aid form.

He sat in his room at his computer, staring at the box he had to click acknowledging that his parents didn’t have social security numbers. It was in that moment that he understood for the first time the risk he was about to take. He worried it was too great and closed his laptop.

“I don’t want to sacrifice my family for my possible success,” said the high school senior, a U.S. citizen who lives in Los Angeles and who asked that his surname be withheld to protect his family. “I felt like it was very selfish of me to put my entire family in jeopardy for the possibility of me getting into a good college.”

The form Ryan was filling out last fall, known as the FAFSA, is required for anyone applying for federal financial aid, and for many low-income students it is the only possible route to affording a college degree. The Education Department is not supposed to share student information with agencies responsible for immigration enforcement. But now that the federal government has been disregarding longstanding norms on data sharing, some students with undocumented parents are not applying for federal financial aid, even though they’re eligible.

Their fears that pursuing a secure economic future could lead to family members being deported, or worse, come at a time when the detention of parents of U.S. citizens has skyrocketed, according to data obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights and analyzed by ProPublica. 

The number of students filling out the federal aid financial student aid form has risen nationally, as a recently streamlined process has made it easier to fill out. But in some schools in immigrant communities, those numbers have declined notably. In California, for example, between 2025 and 2026 there was a decrease of nearly 3,000 students, or an 8 percent drop, in the number of high school students from mixed-status families filling out the FAFSA, even as total applications in the state increased, according to federal and state data analyzed by The Hechinger Report.

“Across the country, our members are hearing directly from students who are increasingly hesitant to complete the FAFSA because they’re worried about how their families’ information could be used,” said Sean Robins, director of advocacy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “That is shaping the real decisions, with students either delaying, reconsidering or even opting out all together.”

He added, “What we’re seeing is that fear, and not academics or finances, is becoming a barrier to college access.” 

Related: Fear, arrests and know-your-rights: How one school district is grappling with ICE coming to town

Most states don’t collect information on a student’s immigration status, but the numbers outside California suggest it’s not the only place where students from mixed-status families — those where a child is a U.S. citizen but a parent is not — aren’t filling out the FAFSA. In 10 schools near the Texas border where almost all of the students are Hispanic, for example, close to 500 fewer students completed a FAFSA this year, even as completed applications grew overall in the state. Some schools that serve immigrant communities in and around Chicago and Minneapolis, among other districts, have also seen drops in FAFSA completion.

The FAFSA unlocks access to more than just federal grants, loans and work-study: Many states and individual colleges require students to fill it out for their own need-based aid programs. The Education Department is not supposed to share student data for any reason other than financial aid purposes, but college counselors say they felt they had to tell worried families that there is no guarantee the Trump administration will adhere to past precedent. Over the past year, the administration has attempted to use data from other federal agencies to help with its deportation efforts, including voter registration rolls, tax filings, public housing and low-income food assistance programs, although federal courts have blocked some of these attempts.

“I can’t look them in the eye anymore and say federal law prohibits them using your data in other ways,” Ryan Fewins Bliss, executive director of Michigan College Access Network, said of college applicants with undocumented family members. “It also could be the pathway to getting your family detained.”

The Education Department did not respond to several requests for comment.

Some states, including California, New York and Washington, have separate financial aid application processes for state aid, with explicit promises not to share student data with federal agencies. But in Michigan and several other states, government officials have tied FAFSA completion to state aid and tuition-free community college. The move was seen as a way to ensure students weren’t leaving federal money they were entitled to on the table, but it now puts some students in a bind.

Related: Funding cuts, shifts in aid could make college harder to afford for low-income families

A counselor at a high school in southwest Michigan, who asked to remain anonymous to prevent drawing the government’s attention to her school, said parents have been too scared to show up to public events where the school informs families about the college application process. Some parents have refused to fill out their portion of the financial aid forms, making the calculation that the risk is too high and the reward too uncertain, which means their children can’t get the aid even if they qualify. Some students have been skipping school so they can work to supplement their families’ income because parents either have been deported or are scared to leave the house, the counselor said. Those absences make applying to college more challenging. 

This year, one of the counselor’s college-bound students decided to join the military instead. His mother was near the end of a four-year process of applying for a green card when she was issued a deportation order last fall, the counselor said, and the student enlisted because a lawyer told him military service could delay his mom’s deportation.

Another college counselor in Michigan, who also requested anonymity to protect her students, said some of her college-bound seniors who are U.S. citizens disappeared earlier this year.

“Students are leaving the country to be with their families because their parents are self-deporting — for them we can’t even talk about FAFSA,” she said.

Ryan said he too has seen people’s parents disappear. When he weighed that prospect up against his dream of going to UCLA, it started to feel less important, less significant. His father works six days a week, getting up at 5 a.m. to take the bus to the restaurant where he works. His mom cleans houses.

“Filling out that information and sending it on purpose, it made me feel bad, because it felt like all the work that my parents both put in, I could just be destroying it,” Ryan said. “If the government wanted to find out where I lived or who my family was, their status, they could find it. I gave it to them.”

He explained, “I didn’t want to risk something like that, just for me — one person does not weigh the same as my mom, my dad and my grandma.”

Most of the parents of his friends at school are citizens, and they couldn’t understand why in November, Ryan still hadn’t filled out the FAFSA. Only one knew about his parents’ citizenship status — Ryan didn’t feel like it was his secret to tell, and he didn’t want to put them at greater risk. He also hesitated to talk to his parents about it, not wanting to pile the pressure on them, but it was a lot for him to hold and decide on his own.

Related: More first-generation students in Texas are applying to college

Karla Ramos understood what Ryan was going through. Now a counselor at the nonprofit College Access Plan, she was also a U.S. citizen from a mixed-status family when she applied to college. Ryan confided in her.

“Something as delicate as keeping your family together, especially when raids are happening in their community — I work with students who have to decide, and I have to tell them there’s no guarantee,” she said.

Some of her students decided against filling out the FAFSA, she said.

“We have students who have worked for years to be university-bound and who got into four-year colleges and are deciding to go to community college instead” because that’s what they can afford, Ramos said. “The local community college is amazing,” she added, “but this is limiting people in terms of their access to education.”

Overall FAFSA completion in the state has grown by 9 percent this year, the most recent numbers show. California officials say the decline among students from mixed-status families is concerning.

“It’s absolutely connected to immigration enforcement,” said Daisy Gonzales, executive director of the California Student Aid Commission, which is responsible for administering college financial aid in the state.

“If we’re not seeing these students in these numbers, it is very unlikely that we will see them in future years,” she added. “After you see higher education declines, you will see increased poverty, increased unemployment, which only widens our workforce gaps.”

Ryan spent more than two months wrestling with the decision. UCLA was impossible for him to afford without federal aid, but the choice weighed on him, especially as immigration arrests in Los Angeles shot up last fall. Neighbors were being picked up, including those without criminal records. And some people weren’t just being deported — they were getting sick or even dying in detention facilities. He heard stories of people who had been deported to countries where they had never lived.

One afternoon, his mom picked him up from his after-school job where he helped other students from low-income families apply to college, and he unloaded the pain of what he had been struggling with. He knew how scared she had been over the past several months, sometimes choosing to stay home on her days off, aware of the ICE raids throughout the city. 

She mostly listened during that car ride. When they got home, she sat him down and told him to apply.

“This is what I want for your future. I want you to succeed, even if it costs me something. I want you to do the best you can,” Ryan recalled her saying. “The risk is worth the future you could have.”

A few days later, Ryan submitted the FAFSA. In March, when college admission decisions came out, he waited for his parents to get home — he’d promised they would all be together when he opened the letter. He was one of nearly 147,000 who applied to UCLA and was braced for a rejection, but when he opened the letter on his computer, it said, “Congratulations.”

“It took me a little bit to realize what actually happened, and before then, my parents were already screaming,” Ryan said. 

He is applying for scholarships and has saved money from lifeguarding the last several summers. He also plans to work while in school and will get state aid for low-income families. But given the total cost of around $45,000 per year, it’s his decision to fill out the FAFSA and get access to the same aid as other U.S. citizens that will allow him to afford to go to UCLA.

Just before he was accepted, the father of a family friend got picked up by ICE. Ryan sometimes worries about leaving for college, feeling if he stays home he could somehow protect his parents. But they want him to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor, or maybe a conservationist, and for now, that’s the plan.

Contact senior investigative reporter Meredith Kolodner at kolodner@hechingerreport.org or on Signal: @merkolodner.04.

This story about fears of filling out the FAFSA form was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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There’s a growing backlash to educational technology in the classroom, as I described in my story co-published with The New York Times in March. To dig deeper into the topic, I led a Hechinger Report webinar last week on screen time in the early grades. It featured Jill Anderson, a third-grade teacher in New York, and Miriam Kendall, a parent and head of the Illinois-based group Screen Sense Evanston.

After initially embracing devices, Anderson has cut down on tech in her own classroom.  Devices are “taking the social element out of learning, which I think is so important,” she said. “If we’re going to play a math game, why not play it with another child and learn to make eye contact and how to act when you win or lose?”

She added: “I almost feel this responsibility to intentionally have less tech here to make sure that they don’t have an excessive amount in general.” 

Kendall said she worries about the “gamification” of learning — educational apps using reward systems to capture children’s attention. “I think we are training our kids’ brains that learning is like a video game,” she said. 

We got such a huge response from webinar participants — more than 700 of you signed up! — and didn’t have a chance to answer every question. So I wanted to tackle some of those questions here:

After Anderson said that she noticed low-income students seem to have more screen time than more affluent students, a participant asked if there were any studies showing this to be true. Indeed, some studies have found this to be the case: One pre-pandemic study found lower-income children ages 0-8 spent more time on screens than middle- or higher-income children. A 2022 study found children whose families are higher income spend less time on screens, with the exception of video chats.

Another participant asked if screen time has displaced play and learning life skills for young children. Studies have found that excess screen time is associated with lowered executive functioning. Other researchers have found that more screen time for toddlers was associated with less time playing with other children.

One participant asked if literacy skills are dropping due to screen time because children are not reading as many books, and another asked if there is data connecting speech problems in young children to screen use. Literacy rates have been dropping for years, and while some researchers suspect screen time is a part of that trend, it’s not the sole cause. Poor reading instruction and lost learning time during the pandemic are among other potential reasons. As for speech, therapy referrals and speech delay diagnoses increased during and after the pandemic. A 2023 study found children who had more screen time at age one were more likely to have communication-related delays at ages 2 and 4.

My recent story offers more detail on ed tech use in the early years, and we wrote a piece capturing reader response — pro and con — to the original story.

I also filmed a short video of Anderson’s classroom and the full webinar can be viewed on YouTube.

This story about screen time 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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It happens every spring: Families receive financial aid offers from colleges, puzzle over them and are still left with the question — how much will this college actually cost me?

Instead of stating how much a family must pay out of pocket, some letters use jargon like “total net expenses” or “total net and indirect cost.” Different colleges calculate a student’s out-of-pocket costs differently and, because the letters come in hundreds of formats, families can struggle to determine which institution is most affordable. Sometimes the letters don’t reveal the high interest rates behind the loans they list or that families might not qualify for them. This can leave students on the hook for a lot more money — or deeper in debt — than they expected.

For over a decade, student advocates have lobbied Congress for a fix, and last year a bipartisan bill gained momentum. It required colleges to use a uniform financial aid offer letter and uniform definitions for costs, so families could know what they would owe — and which school offered the best deal. Student advocates liken the requirement to nutrition labels — the federal government would step in to ensure consumers understand what they are getting.

But what seemed like a straightforward effort to simplify comparing college costs — one that initially drew rare agreement from politicians and advocates on the right and left — was changed this week in ways that frustrated student advocates. A revised bill, introduced Wednesday, requires that colleges use the same definitions for loans, grants and total cost. But after college associations lobbied against the standard letter, politicians who had previously supported the requirement stripped it away. In fact, the new bill specifically prevents the Education Department from requiring a standard offer letter and allows colleges to provide links to websites for some information, rather than including full details in the letter itself. In addition, student advocates worry that the revised bill would make it easier for colleges to offer private loans, which provide students with fewer protections. 

“They made a lot of changes that didn’t center students and instead went in favor of the industry and the higher ed associations,” said Rachel Fishman, director of higher education at the liberal policy group New America. “There could have been some kind of compromise, but it went way too far in the direction of the institutions.”

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

The attempt to change the original bill, known as “Understanding the True Cost of College Act,” puzzled student advocates because Congress and members of the Trump administration have both argued that colleges need to be held to account. Last summer, Congress limited student loan eligibility, so colleges could lose federal funding if their graduates don’t earn enough. Many advocates believed that standardizing financial aid letters was the best way to protect students and were surprised when Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, proposed an amendment to alter it. Over a dozen student advocacy groups wrote a letter protesting the changes, while college associations praised Cassidy’s version, the Improving Financial Aid Offers for Students Act. 

Cassidy’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Aides to Sen. Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who sponsored the original bill, said he would support the new version since it maintains requirements that colleges use the same definitions for key terms and that all up-front costs be listed on offers. 

Some conservative advocates supported keeping the uniform offer letter.

“I am 100 percent in favor of using a formal standard letter. This is what we do for mortgages; if you are getting money from the federal government, they should be able to dictate what that looks like,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “There are very serious abuses and ways of listing prices and loans that are deceptive.”

College associations, meanwhile, say they agree that offer letters should use the same terminology but that a uniform approach would prevent their members from crafting offer letters that cater to particular students they’re enrolling. For example, community colleges usually don’t require loans, while research universities often do. They support the new bill and point to an initiative they are leading that promotes standards for offer letters and helps schools make the letters clear to families. More than 750 of the nation’s roughly 4,000 colleges are using the initiative’s principles so far, according to Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and leads the transparency initiative.

“Every institution is different. They don’t offer the same programs, they don’t have the same mission, they’re not the same size, they don’t serve the same students,” said Guillory. “So how are you going to have one mandatory offer letter that’s the exact same when institutions offer different types of aid?”

Related: How much will that college cost you? Good luck figuring it out

Advocates argue that the difference between institutions is one reason why the letters should be uniform, since that lack of clarity can put students in a bind. Jean Aimable applied to more than a dozen colleges last year, looking for a school with quality academic programs and where he wouldn’t end up in debt. Brandeis University seemed to fit the bill: The offer letter he received showed that he wouldn’t need loans, though he would need a work-study job.

But when he arrived on the Waltham, Massachusetts, campus and applied to more than half a dozen work-study positions, none was available. “I couldn’t get one,” said Aimable, who graduated from high school in the commonwealth. “Even though it shows up on your federal aid letter, it’s not money that you’re necessarily going to have.”

Last fall, he had to scramble to secure a loan to cover the gap.

A Brandeis spokesperson said it participates in the college association’s transparency initiative and that its letters provide hyperlinks with information about its work-study program. The university’s website does say that work-study jobs aren’t guaranteed, but it’s on a page within a drop-down menu.* Student advocates argue that all information related to how much a student will owe should be on the letter itself clearly displayed.

“We are constantly refining our letters and outreach to ensure students have the most accurate and helpful information possible,” the Brandeis spokesperson, Michelle Gaseau, wrote in an email.

In 2022, the federal government issued a damning report about college offer letters, finding 91 percent of schools understate or don’t include the net price families will pay in their offer letters. This could lead students to “make uninformed and costly decisions, such as enrolling in an unaffordable college,” the Government Accountability Office declared, adding that “further congressional action would be necessary to ensure that all students receive the information they need in their financial aid offers.”

A report released in December by uAspire, a nonprofit that advocates for college affordability, found 11 different ways that colleges calculated the final cost to a student. Some subtracted grants and scholarships from tuition, while others subtracted grants and loans from the entire cost of attendance (which includes housing and meals). While the authors found some improvements since a 2018 report they helped write on the subject, they concluded that the lack of a uniform way to calculate and present costs was causing significant problems for students.

“There’s a need to be able to make a comparison between institutions so students can weigh the pros and cons of the schools with a clear sense of the finances,” said Anika Van Eaton, vice president of policy at uAspire and one of the report’s authors.

Related: Why are prices rising more for low-income students than their higher-income peers? 

The burden of decoding letters can be greatest for students who are the first in their families to go to college. For Aliah Ramos, like many students, the choice for college came down to affordability, and it was difficult to figure that out on her own.

“Not coming from a family that knows really what the FAFSA was, not knowing how to analyze financial aid offers or even how to apply for college — I needed to find people to help me with the letters,” said Ramos, a freshman at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, referring to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

The associations say they worry that enshrining a uniform letter in law could make any future changes, whether due to technological advancements or new loan programs, very difficult.

The original bill appears unlikely to advance in this Congress. If Sen. Cassidy’s bill passes, it will have to be reconciled with a separate effort to reform offer letters that is advancing in the House.

It remains to be seen whether next spring, families of graduating high schoolers will still be stuck puzzling over offer letters and wondering which college they can afford. 

*Clarification: An earlier version of this sentence, based on information from a Brandeis spokesperson, said that work-study job information appeared on an FAQ page on the university’s website within one of 16 drop-down menus. After publication, the spokesperson clarified that offer letters include a hyperlink to two drop-down menus with work-study job information.

Contact senior investigative reporter Meredith Kolodner at kolodner@hechingerreport.org or on Signal: @merkolodner.04.

This story about financial aid 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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A teacher in Wisconsin recently got a call with an intriguing offer: a promise to have 80 percent of her federal student loans forgiven — for a fee. The teacher, Lauren, owes about $60,000 in debt more than a decade after graduation, so she was more than happy to hear the company out. 

Lauren said she pressed the caller for details about how the offer would work. The agent abruptly hung up.

Lauren said she receives calls like this about once a week these days, from companies purporting they can help erase her student debt. (She requested her full name not be used out of fear of getting targeted by more scams.) “They always claim that they’re with some federal agency,” she said, noting that the company name “usually has the word ‘federal’ in it.” 

Many companies like these are scams, and changes to the student loan program are providing more opportunities for these firms to target the roughly 40 million adults in the U.S. with student loan debt. The Hechinger Report found more than two dozen companies promising to help win loan forgiveness, many of which take fees of hundreds of dollars for doing nothing or for filling out paperwork that the borrower could easily complete themselves — and experts say there are likely many more. 

Student loan scams have been operating for years and they’ve eluded multiple efforts by regulators to quash them. They often become particularly active during periods of significant change to the student loan program. Now, as student loan repayment rules shift and the Trump administration reduces oversight of the student loan system, these companies see an opportunity to capitalize on borrowers’ confusion, experts say. 

“There’s a lot of chaos in the industry right now,” said Betsy Mayotte, president and founder of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit that advocates for student loan borrowers. “It’s a great time if you’re in the scam business, because people are vulnerable.”

Related: 5 big questions to help you understand the current state of student loans

Student loan borrowers enjoyed a long reprieve from making payments during the pandemic. But the requirement to make regular payments resumed in October 2023, and in May 2025 the U.S. Department of Education said it was restarting collections on defaulted student loans, but ultimately backed off earlier this year. Then, this March, a federal judge’s ruling effectively ended an income-driven repayment program called SAVE, which more than 7 million people had enrolled in to help make their loan payments more manageable. 

Yet borrowers often find it difficult to get clear answers about repayment options from the companies that administer their loans. 

“The reason there’s such a big market for debt relief scams is because the actual student loan servicers who often the federal government pays to provide servicing to borrowers are not doing their job,” said Samuel Levine, who led the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission during the Biden administration. “They’re understaffed, they provide poor customer service, they’re hard to contact, they steer people into high-cost lending products.” 

Plus, cuts at the Department of Education have meant fewer staff overseeing those servicers. And federal officials recently announced that they will shift oversight of student loan servicing and collection from the Department of Education to the Department of the Treasury, which experts worry will bring more confusion.

Under President Donald Trump, the federal government has also scaled back its efforts to go after scammers. Last April, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published a memo stating that the agency was deprioritizing student loan scam enforcement. The administration has also mounted a larger effort to dismantle the CFPB entirely, despite the fact that since its founding in 2011 the agency has recovered more than $21 billion for consumers from a wide range of companies, including student loan scammers.

For their part, the companies who service student loans say they are doing the best they can with the resources the government gives them — and that being vilified by nonprofits just adds to confusion among borrowers. “When consumer advocates basically say all this stuff that is running down servicers very loudly on social media, that really discourages borrowers from talking to us,” said Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, a nonprofit trade group representing student loan servicers. “And instead they turn to anyone who promises unicorns and rainbows.” He added fraudsters see opportunity anytime there is a change in the student loan system, including those that happened under the Biden administration.   

Officials at the CFPB did not respond to a request for comment. 

Ellen Keast, the Department of Education press secretary for higher education, did not answer questions about loan repayment scams, but said in an email that the administration has increased the ways borrowers can get needed information rather than having to turn to other sources for help. She listed a range of tools, including “data quality assessments, cross-system assessment data validation” and “daily and weekly performance reporting from servicers,” the department uses to stay on top of servicers and “improve the customer service.”

Many advocates for student loan borrowers disagree. “Across the board, this administration really has turned its back on people who are buried in student loan debt,” said Levine, now the commissioner of New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. “I think there’s a perception that they’re all liberals, which is not true. I know there are many Trump supporters who have student loan debt, too. This is a struggle that cuts across red states and blue states.”

Borrowers who fall for scams promising loan forgiveness can find themselves in a deeper financial hole.

Bonnie Latreille heard from many victims of these scams while working as the student loan ombudsman at the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office during the Biden administration. 

One popular model: Scammers promising loan forgiveness charge a large up-front fee and enroll victims in auto-payment for monthly fees as well, which the companies say are loan payments. “Really they’re just collecting that money,” said Latreille, who is now a senior fellow at Princeton University’s Debt Collection Lab. 

The scammers ask clients for login information for their servicer and then place the loans in forbearance, meaning payments are temporarily paused even though interest is still accumulating, she said. They change the settings so the borrowers no longer receive any communication regarding the loan. When the loan becomes active again, the borrowers are unaware and miss payments until they go into default. By the time victims realize they’ve been scammed, the company has often shut down that operation and moved on to using a different name.

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

Defaulting on student loans brings more consequences than failing to make payments for other types of credit.

“When you default on a student loan, the entire weight of the federal government comes to collect,” said Latreille. Wages can be garnished without a court order. Government benefits can be reduced. Security clearances can be denied. 

“And there’s no statute of limitations,” she added. “It’s a lifetime harm.”

The scams are proliferating at a time when borrowers, many of whom haven’t made payments for years because of the pandemic pause, are struggling to manage their loans and are looking for help. Student loan delinquency has grown to a record high, with 7.7 million borrowers now in default, according to recent Education Department data.

Many of the loan forgiveness schemes are clearly illegal, said Latreille, especially when companies misrepresent themselves as affiliated with the government. When the government does investigate them, it can result in fines of up to $20,000 as well as up to five years in prison, as well as recovery of ill-gotten fees. Last summer the Federal Trade Commission announced it would distribute $256,900 in refunds from seized assets to customers who had been scammed by SL Finance, a company run by two brothers who claimed to work for the Department of Education and charged junk fees for a loan forgiveness program that did not exist. The refunds were the result of a case the agency brought back in 2023. 

In its review, The Hechinger Report found other companies that similarly allude to fictitious government programs. One called FSLA RELIEF, for instance, until recently promised on its website to help borrowers enroll in the “American Student Loan Forgiveness Program,” which is not the name of any government program. The site features a graphic that says “USA Forgive Sponsored by DOGE,” referring to the Department of Government Efficiency, established by Trump. 

A disclaimer in smaller print at the bottom states that the company “is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education or any government agency.” When The Hechinger Report reached out to the company with questions, a representative immediately hung up, and the company did not respond to a follow-up email. The link to the website later stopped working.

Related: Student loan borrowers misled by colleges were about to get relief. Trump fired the people poised to help

To make matters worse, misinformation about student loans has been circulating on social media, stirring confusion about what programs are available for borrowers struggling to make payments and suggesting unusual ways to get out from under student debt.

One TikTok post last year shared by hundreds of thousands of users, for instance, wrongly stated that borrowers could file a claim to have their loans forgiven because DOGE had accessed a student loan database in violation of federal student privacy laws. “I’m about to get all my loans forgiven, and so are you,” says the woman in the video. Though a federal judge ruled that DOGE must stop accessing the records, the law doesn’t entitle borrowers to forgiveness.

Popular AI tools like ChatGPT also do a bad job of answering questions about student loans, research has found.

Meanwhile, predatory loan forgiveness companies often make a hard sell to potential customers, said Levine, who listened to recorded scam calls while at the FTC.

“The scammer says, ‘I am from the U.S. Department of Education. We wanted to let you know that this is the last month that you can lower your payments,’” he recalled. “‘Some students are paying as little as $0 a month and seeing their loans forgiven after 10 years. If you share your information with me now, I can talk through whether you’re eligible for these programs. Again, I’m with the Department of Education, and these programs expire in one month.’”

Other types of student loan repayment companies offer services that are legal but operate in a moral gray area, experts say.

Companies known as document prep companies, for instance, promise a service that experts say brings little benefit.

“We’ll handle the detailed process so you can focus on what’s important. Leave the headache and sea of confusing paperwork to us!” says the website for one such company, called Alumni Counseling Service. An agent named Jasmine who answered the phone there on a recent afternoon said of the service, “I guess it’s as if you’re hiring a tax preparer to represent you when filing your taxes.” She referred further questions to a supervisor, who did not return a call for comment, and the company did not reply to follow-up questions sent by email.

Related: The Hechinger Report’s Tuition Tracker helps reveal the real cost of college

Mayotte, of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, however, said that unlike filling out tax forms, applying to most student loan repayment programs is straightforward. “The amount of information borrowers have to send to the document prep company is the same amount of work as if they do it themselves,” she said. And she added that the costs can exceed that of using an outside tax prep service, with flat fees of up to $1,200. 

Mayotte is pushing to educate consumers so that they don’t need the services these companies are selling. “We need to first of all create awareness that people don’t need to pay for help with their student loans,” she said, noting that there are plenty of free resources where borrowers can find information, including student loan ombudsman offices that have been set up in at least 14 states and the District of Columbia.

Levine agreed that consumer awareness is important, but said that scammers are savvier in how they reach borrowers than “the good guys” are. The best approach, he argued, is for state and federal governments to focus on vigorous enforcement.

That is especially true, he said, now that new tools allow scammers to have AI voice agents make calls so they can reach even more potential victims. “It has never been easier to scam people.”

Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at butrymowicz@hechingerreport.org or on Signal: @sbutry.04.

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

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If you have student loan debt, you might receive calls or see targeted social media ads promising to help reduce, or even eliminate, your balance — for a fee. 

The problem is, many of these offers are fraudulent, in some cases the companies trick people into paying fees, but don’t put any of that money toward the loans themselves. Other companies operate legally, but charge for completing simple paperwork that you could just as easily do yourself. 

It doesn’t help that the student loan landscape keeps changing at a rapid pace. As repayment rules shift and the Trump administration reduces oversight of the student loan system, these companies see an opportunity to capitalize on borrowers’ confusion, experts say. 

The Hechinger Report talked to student loan experts to find out what borrowers should know about loan forgiveness and repayment — and how to spot a scam. 

What red flags indicate an offer to help with loans might be a scam?

Watch out for companies asking for your student loan password or verification code so they can confirm your information. Fraudsters often use such access to lock borrowers out of their own loan portals or make changes without the borrower’s knowledge.

Some scammers secretly reset the borrower’s password while on the phone. They log into the borrower’s account and request a password change, which will send a two-factor authentication code to the borrower. The scammer, meanwhile, will say something like, “We’re going to send you a code to verify your identity,” and ask the borrower to share it.

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

If you receive a call from a company promising a generous loan repayment program that you must enroll in today because it’s about to end, beware. Authorized repayment programs don’t use high-pressure tactics, experts say.

And be wary of promises that seem too good to be true. Some companies guarantee they will get your loan forgiven — but experts say that’s not a promise any legitimate company can deliver on. 

You should also be skeptical of any pitch that charges for student loan help. Borrowers can access all of the benefits of the federal student loan program for free. 

What should I do if I’ve fallen for a scam?

If you signed up for something and realize it may be fraudulent, you’ll want to make a couple of phone calls. First, contact the Department of Education and your loan servicer and revoke any authorization you granted to a third party related to your loan. Call your bank and disable any recurring payment you set up. If you shared your password, change it immediately.

You should report the incident to the Federal Trade Commission using this form, and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau online or at 855-411-2372. It’s also a good idea to let your state attorney general’s office know.

Are document prep companies a legitimate way to handle student loan repayment?

Some companies will charge an up-front fee of hundreds of dollars and then a monthly fee to enroll you in a loan repayment plan and maintain that status. These companies sometimes liken themselves to tax prep companies, helping you navigate government paperwork. 

But experts say that the amount of work it will take you to provide them with the information they need is the same as it would be to fill out the forms yourself.

What are my official options for reducing student loan payments or getting loans forgiven?

If your student loan payments are too high to manage, there are ways to reduce monthly installments and even limit the amount you’ll have to pay off. The federal government offers several plans, including income-based repayment options that cap payments at 10 to 15 percent of your income. After 20 to 25 years, depending on the plan, any remaining balance is forgiven. 

There is also a program for public service employees, like teachers, that forgives any remaining balance after 10 years.

The Department of Education offers an online simulator to help borrowers sort through their options. Experts also recommend using an online calculator by the Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program to explore your options. 

I was enrolled in the SAVE plan, and I heard that it was recently eliminated. What now?

In March, a federal judge issued a ruling that effectively ended the SAVE plan, a Biden-era income-driven repayment program. The 7.5 million borrowers enrolled in SAVE now must switch to another plan, and if they don’t, the government will choose one for them. 

Importantly, if your participation in the SAVE plan allowed you to pause payments on your loan, you now have to start paying again.

If you were in the SAVE program, you will receive notice from the federal Department of Education in July that you need to switch plans. The note might refer to SAVE as an “illegal” program, as the department has said repeatedly, but you did nothing wrong if you enrolled in this program when it was available.

Where can I go if I have specific questions about my student loan?

The best first stop is studentaid.gov, experts say. Your loan servicer, the company that manages your loan, is also a good source.

Bonnie Latreille, student loan ombudsman at the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office during the Biden administration, recommends being aware of other free options, as well, including experts at nonprofit organizations. One group to try is the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, which says it helps 20,000 student loan borrowers each year.

“Borrowers should never, ever pay for help with their student loans,” Latreille said.

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

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