When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, educators quickly asked whether students would use artificial intelligence to cheat, learn or simply get through homework more efficiently. Evidence is beginning to point toward a troubling answer: Many students appear to be completing assignments faster while learning less from them.

This conclusion comes from one of the largest studies of how generative AI is changing student behavior and academic skills. Sina Rismanchian, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, partnered with researchers at McGraw Hill to analyze millions of student interactions with ALEKS, an online math platform used by more than four million students a year, from fifth grade through college. Because ALEKS includes both low-stakes practice problems and college placement tests, the researchers were able to compare how students behaved and performed before and after ChatGPT’s arrival.

To isolate AI’s effects, the researchers compared two kinds of math problems that differ in how easily students can outsource them to AI: word problems and graphing problems.

Word problems can be copied and pasted directly into AI chatbots for instant answers. Graphing problems are far more cumbersome. A student would need to upload a screenshot and still recreate the graph inside ALEKS using its tools.

After ChatGPT’s launch, student behavior and performance on the two types of problems began to diverge. 

Beginning in early 2023, students started spending less time on word problems while continuing to spend about the same amount of time on graphing problems. The gap widened every quarter. By the end of the study period, near the end of 2025, average time spent on word problems had fallen 31 percent among high school students and 27 percent among college students — from about four minutes per word problem to less than three. (Middle school students showed only a modest decline of 9 percent, and fifth graders showed essentially none.)

The researchers believe those averages are being pulled downward by some students who spend only seconds on word problems because they’re using AI to answer them.

The same pattern appeared in college placement tests. When the exams were taken without supervision, students spent much less time on word problems after ChatGPT’s release. During proctored exams, the time spent on word problems returned to historical norms.

But time is only half the story. The more troubling finding is what happened to learning.

Many colleges allow incoming students to retake placement tests after practicing more math in ALEKS, giving them a chance to qualify for a higher-level course. Before ChatGPT, that practice generally paid off. After ChatGPT, students answered more word problems correctly during unsupervised practice sessions but performed substantially worse on those same kinds of problems when they later took a proctored placement test.

Historically, students answered about 80 percent of these word problems correctly on supervised placement tests. After ChatGPT’s introduction, that fell to about 60 percent — a roughly 25 percent reduction in the odds of answering a word problem correctly. 

Performance on graphing problems, by contrast, did not decline.

After ChatGPT’s release, students performed worse on word problems (AI-susceptible) during proctored exams, but answer more word problems correctly in nonproctored settings

If students’ math skills had generally deteriorated because of pandemic learning loss, weaker high school preparation or digital distraction, graphing performance should have deteriorated too. It didn’t.

The study cannot definitively prove that students were using AI. The researchers couldn’t see what else was happening on students’ screens outside of ALEKS. But it’s difficult to think of another explanation. The changes appeared only in problems that are easy to outsource to AI, disappeared under supervision and grew steadily over nearly three years.

“What makes me nervous is that it’s not only about the word problems,” Rismanchian told me. “This cognitive surrender might be going on in writing, science, everything.”

The paper, “Faster Completion, Less Learning,” was released in June 2026 as a working paper and has not yet been peer reviewed. Like any single study, it doesn’t settle the questions of how much students are using AI in their schoolwork, whether it’s harming learning and by how much. But it joins a growing body of evidence that generative AI is causing students to skip the brain work that leads to learning, and that this “cognitive surrender” is becoming commonplace.

A randomized experiment in Turkey found that high school students who used AI to help them study math ultimately learned less than students who practiced without it. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has separately reported that many college students appear to use AI to obtain answers and offload cognitive work. Rismanchian’s earlier research, released in March 2026, documented troubling patterns of AI usage in short response essays among undergraduate students at a large California research university.

That doesn’t mean AI always undermines learning. Carefully designed AI tutors have improved student achievement in controlled experiments by asking questions, personalizing instruction and withholding answers until students reason their way through a problem. But using AI this way should increase the time students spend on a problem, Rismanchian said. The ALEKS data show the opposite.

Rismanchian doesn’t believe the answer is simply banning AI. Instead, he argues, students need to value learning enough to resist the temptation to outsource it.

A recent RAND survey suggests many already recognize the threat to their brains. Students report worrying that AI is weakening their critical-thinking skills while more of them admit using it for schoolwork.

Students are not entirely to blame. Even as many professors have warned students not to use AI to complete classwork, universities themselves have embraced the technology, often giving students free access to premium chatbots. 

“I think we need to communicate to students that you should value your learning,” Rismanchian said. “If ChatGPT does it for you, then you haven’t learned it.”

Rismanchian understands the temptation.

An international student, Rismanchian began using ChatGPT to help polish the English in his papers. The ideas were still his own. But after several months, he said, he noticed something unsettling.

“I realized that I cannot write anymore,” he said. “I was losing my writing abilities.”

So he stopped using AI to write.

He still uses it to code.

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

This story about AI use eroding math skills 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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As a former teacher and now school leader, I know nothing is worse than missing the mark with your students. It is both disillusioning and frustrating to know that you are failing to provide them with the necessary tools to drive their own learning. 

It was this realization that convinced me that something needed to change. We needed to do high school differently.

In 2017, the staff and I examined the model and curriculum of our alternative public high school to try to understand why a significant number of our students were failing to graduate or to engage in further learning afterward. 

We discovered that it wasn’t necessarily the students who were failing, but rather the model that was failing the students. Our students were actually asking for more rigorous and relevant lessons. 

We chose to listen, and we provided project-based, real-world learning that mattered to them. As a result, they became immersed in “figuring out” rather than “finding out” the answers to questions. The latter approach sometimes alienates learners in traditional courses. 

I believe there are lessons from our high school in southeastern Massachusetts that could be useful across the U.S., where too many high school students are simply “getting across the finish line” to graduation.

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

Our transformation involved designing and opening a different alternative school model, one that centers instruction on experiential, project-based units built on real-world scenarios. Known as TLEs, or transformative learning experiences, these units ground students in the question of “why this matters” for their learning, so engagement happens naturally. They challenge students to think critically and shift their perspectives about issues and dilemmas in their own lives and communities.

With the support of our technical partner, the nonprofit Springpoint, our school now offers 25 TLE units; students particularly love one called “Does College Make Cents?” in which they use math to evaluate what type of postsecondary learning might best support their future goals. 

Students who never imagined themselves graduating from high school said they had gained a far clearer image of a path forward, backed by their own research. Many decided that a two- or four-year college was indeed the most prudent and accessible path for them. 

Others discovered technical apprenticeships that supported their talents and interests. It was both affirming and powerful to hear students articulate how their school experiences changed their belief systems.

In our eighth year of using this curriculum, we can say with confidence that this is not only a different way to do high school, it is a meaningful and relevant way that better serves all students and particularly reengages students who had previously been off-track. 

Our internal data supports that belief. Our attendance rose from 50 percent to 85 percent, and our graduation rate increased from 60 to 84 percent. In a student focus group, our newly engaged students raved about their relationships with their teachers and credited their learning experiences with providing purpose and helping them reimagine and alter their trajectories for the future. They told us they love learning again, just like they did when they were in elementary school. 

Data collected by Springpoint from all its partner schools is helping us reimagine our work; it shows that 92 percent of students make connections between what they learn in TLEs and their lives. 

When students are offered more choice in how they are learning and more opportunities to showcase critical thinking in the classroom, transformation happens.

As part of this approach, we look for teachers who want to uplift student voices, and who see their roles as facilitators of rich academic discourse. 

Related: OPINION: Don’t make students choose between college or career — preparation for both is crucial

Transformative learning experiences help rewrite the narrative in the classroom and convey to students that lifelong learning is the goal. Transforming the learning experience works best with a technical partner working alongside teachers to help prepare lessons and build momentum early on in the process. 

If we, as school leaders and policymakers, want to adopt policies that will have a lasting impact on our students, we need to place students at the center of that policy shift. The work we put in front of our students conveys our beliefs about them.

Give students an opportunity that honors their abilities and helps them reach their fullest potential and postsecondary goals. Provide them with a curriculum that empowers, uplifts and transforms them, and build frameworks that support freedom in the classroom to explore locally and engage critically.

Again: Too many high school students in our country are simply “getting across the finish line” to graduation. Transformative learning experiences challenge our students to see graduation as the “starting line” and ignite their passions and interests for future learning and meaningful careers.

Here’s my advice: Start small, incubate success and orchestrate larger-scale change through transformative learning experiences. I’ve seen this work in Massachusetts; I believe it can work everywhere.

Janet Schweizer is the director of Evolve Academy in Fall River, Massachusetts. 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Ask parent Janina Matuszeski what she has valued most about her twins’ experience in the Cambridge Public Schools to this point, and she is quick to cite the diversity and teacher quality.

If there is one area in which the schools have performed less well in serving her children, who just completed eighth grade, it has been math.

“Both my kids have been bored in math for many years,” said Matuszeski, a consultant and former lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “They’ll learn a concept in a day or a day and a half, and then the class will cover it for another two weeks.”

So Matuszeski and her husband were thrilled when Cambridge announced that it would place all eighth graders in Algebra I. Before the change, which went into effect this past fall, Cambridge middle schools did not offer Algebra I, though parents of advanced students who could afford it frequently enrolled their children in algebra classes outside of school, giving their own kids a boost but widening the educational gaps between poor and middle-class students. 

In certain school districts and corners of higher education, few issues have stirred more passionate debate in recent years than how fast middle and high schoolers should be allowed to progress in math — and, specifically, when they should be able to take algebra. Completing Algebra I in eighth grade puts students on a path to take Calculus by senior year, which many see as an unspoken requirement for getting into a selective college and a prerequisite for certain careers in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math. 

But since not all kids may be ready for Algebra I in middle school, giving some students that opportunity often leads to tracking, or separating kids by perceived academic ability. Critics say that can harm students placed in the lower track and worsen socioeconomic and racial divides in education.  

Many districts have responded to those concerns by eliminating algebra in eighth grade altogether. Most notably, San Francisco did so in 2014, generating backlash from parents that recently led the city to reverse itself. Cambridge, by contrast, is trying to satisfy the demands of parents who want their children to be able to move faster in math without sacrificing its ideal of mixed-level, racially integrated classes. If it succeeds, it will suggest that, with sufficient resources and will, other districts can also offer advanced coursework in middle school without introducing tracking. 

To be sure, to some experts, this experiment looks a little like the triumph of hope over experience: Other districts and at least two states have tried offering Algebra I to all or most eighth graders, and studies of those efforts have found negative results for less well-prepared students. 

Already, there have been bumps: In interviews, several middle school math educators in Cambridge said that this year’s rollout felt rushed and poorly planned. More broadly, early signs suggest that Cambridge will have to raise math achievement significantly in earlier grades if it wants all eighth graders to be prepared to succeed in algebra. More than 60 percent of rising ninth graders will retake Algebra I again next year because they did not do well enough in it this year, according to data the district shared last week with the school board. 

Cambridge administrators said in an email that they held several conversations with teachers to monitor the rollout. “The work of identifying the best possible academic trajectory for all students is never finished,” the superintendent, David Murphy, said in a statement. 

Thurston Domina, an associate dean for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Education who has studied the results of California’s algebra-for-all policies, said the question of when students should take the class is “a really hard problem.” “There are only so many options, and none of them are satisfying.”

Related: One state tried algebra for all eighth graders. It hasn’t gone well 

When the Cambridge school system — an economically and racially diverse district of about 7,000 students — created standalone middle schools in 2012, those schools did not offer algebra. But two years later — partly in response to parent demand for algebra and partly in response to teachers who said they were struggling to teach the wide range of levels in math classes — the district introduced two tracks for seventh and eighth graders, a “grade-level” track, which did not include algebra, and an “accelerated” track, which did.

Students were assigned to the tracks based on tests and teacher recommendations, but parents could also advocate for their children to be placed in the upper track. In part as a result, racial and socioeconomic divides in accelerated math classes were stark: In the 2015-16 school year, for example, among seventh graders, only about 33 percent of Hispanic students, 25 percent of Black students and 26 percent of economically disadvantaged students were in accelerated math, according to a district presentation; the shares for white, Asian and wealthier students were 70, 56 and 69 percent, respectively. 

A backlash quickly grew among principals, teachers and a small number of parents. Some educators felt that concentrating all the high-needs students, and those who disliked math, into certain classes held those students back. Indeed, data from state tests showed that students in the accelerated track learned more than those in the grade-level track, a common trend in studies of tracking. Meanwhile, because of the middle schools’ scheduling constraints, students in the two tracks weren’t separated just for math, but often for other classes as well. 

Educators and parents also worried that being placed in the lower track undermined students’ self-confidence. 

“No matter what I said to her, she read it as, ‘Because I’m dumb,’” recalled a mother whose daughter was put in the grade-level track and who did not want to be identified talking about her daughter’s experience. “And she probably would still now.” 

In 2019, the district ended the tracks, with the intention that all students would get the accelerated curriculum. But the pandemic derailed that effort, and instead the middle schools reverted to the grade-level curriculum. Over the next few years, parents of advanced students grew increasingly frustrated, especially when the district announced in early 2023 that it would no longer allow students who’d taken Algebra I classes outside of school to automatically skip the course at the high school. 

Algebra became an issue in elections that year for school board: A tech entrepreneur and mother of three, Elizabeth Hudson, whose flyers proclaimed “MISSING: Advanced Math in Cambridge Public Schools” over a picture of a sad little boy holding an algebra textbook, won election by a landslide. Shortly before the election, the district announced that it would accelerate the middle school curriculum so that all students were prepared to take Algebra I in eighth grade in the 2025-26 school year. But Cambridge then appeared to drag its feet until January 2025, when, under pressure from parents not to miss the deadline, it instructed all seventh grade math teachers to change their pacing midyear in order to cram some of the eighth grade material into seventh grade. 

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

Research on districts that have successfully put low-performing students in more advanced math classes has found they have generally done so by offering extra support to students, such as a “double dose” (two periods of math) or tutoring, or extra support to teachers, in the form of professional development, coaching and extra planning time.

Cambridge implemented some extra support: The district required that every eighth grade algebra class have a second teacher in the room, like a special educator or math interventionist. And at one middle school, the Cambridge Street Upper School, it put eighth graders this year in two math classes simultaneously — Algebra I and the regular eighth grade math course. (In others, algebra teachers had to also cover the eighth grade math units that the seventh grade teachers weren’t able to get to last spring.) 

In an algebra class at Cambridge Street in April, a teacher was trying hard to get all students — not just the more confident students, or what school staff refer to as “first talkers” — to participate. (The district allowed a reporter to visit the classroom on the condition that the teacher was not named.)

When only a few students raised their hands to answer her question about calculating an interest rate, she said: “You know I’m going to wait for seven. One, two, three, four … ” — she counted the number of hands up. “I’m waiting for three more people. Five … six … seven — there it is,” she said, before calling on one of the students.

While the eighth graders worked on problems, the math interventionist circulated among them, prompting students to get started if they hadn’t or checking answers.

Despite efforts like these, given the wide range of skill levels in Cambridge classrooms, many eighth graders have found their Algebra I classes difficult, even overwhelming. (Others, including Matuszeski’s twins, have found them too easy.) 

Related: Eliminating advanced math ‘tracks’ often prompts outrage. A few districts buck the trend

A mother of a student who just finished eighth grade at Rindge Avenue Upper School, who asked not to be named to avoid identifying her son, said she felt that the rushed pace had created unnecessary stress and frustration for him. While she had supported in theory the district’s decision to reintroduce algebra in eighth grade, she said she had expected it to make some accommodations for students like her son, who struggles in math and receives special education services. His special educators told her that they didn’t think that the accelerated curriculum was appropriate for him and students with similar challenges, she said.

“We’re being pulled along on the coattails of these gifted kids, or the families of these gifted kids,” she said, “and the school district did not figure out a way to do this so that both sets of kids, and all of the ones in between, would be well served.”

By contrast, Oxana Shevel said that her daughter, Isabella Montana, who also just completed eighth grade at Rindge Avenue, had also found the accelerated pace hard but that she’d received a lot of support, including working twice a week in a small group with a math interventionist (which she had done before the algebra rollout, as well). She was also allowed to retake tests to improve her grades. Over the course of this year, Shevel said, Isabella got more confident.

“At the beginning of the year, it was much harder,” Isabella said, adding that she wished students had had more time to catch up on some of the seventh or eighth grade material they had missed or had to race through last year.

In March, when eighth graders had to register for their classes next year at the high school, math teachers recommended, based on their scores on end-of-unit tests and other factors, whether they should go into Geometry or take Algebra I again. 

For some students, being told they needed to take algebra again was a blow. An eighth grade math teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the teacher was not authorized by the district to speak, described meeting individually with every student to tell them which course the teacher was recommending for next year and said some students cried when they learned they would repeat algebra. 

Others aren’t taking having to repeat the course as a sign of failure, however. The district’s high school offers two options for Algebra I — a yearlong course and a semester-long honors class that is faster paced and gives students the chance to take Calculus by their senior year as long as they “double up” on math at some point. 

Isabella plans to take the honors course, something she and her mother said they would not have considered had she not been exposed to algebra in eighth grade. 

“I’m glad in hindsight that they did accelerated, because she now has more options for the high school than she would have otherwise,” Shevel said.

Three educators who spoke for this article said that, while they were not against offering algebra in eighth grade, the district’s rushed and haphazard approach bothered them. 

The district never said what exactly it was hoping to achieve — more students taking honors or Advanced Placement math classes at the high school? Something else? — and it had not invited teachers to reflect on how this year had gone.

“No one’s asking those questions,” said the eighth grade math teacher.  

Related: After fights over social studies standards, conservative activists come for math

In an interview in February, the superintendent, Murphy, also seemed uncertain if algebra-for-all was the right policy for Cambridge in the long run. Murphy, who was previously the district’s chief operating officer, became the interim superintendent in 2024 — after the adoption of the algebra plan — and the permanent superintendent last October. He appeared to express openness to reintroducing some kind of tracking in middle school math. 

“At some point, we have to have a larger conversation about why is it that we are so concerned about deleveling at the K-8 level, and then all of a sudden they get to the high school and we are immediately sorting students into specific math classes with different names,” he said. “I think there’s an obvious incongruence there.” 

As for Matuszeski, she said that she supported Cambridge’s policy of detracked math classes in middle school and the teachers’ focus “on getting the weakest learners up to the middle, which I think is really important.” 

But she is looking forward to her twins going to high school. This spring, she and her husband encouraged them to take an online geometry class, so that they could start ninth grade in Algebra II honors, then proceed to Precalculus.

“We presented it to them as: ‘If you do this math class, you can get into math classes in high school where you can move faster and do more and possibly have more kids who are more focused in math,’” she said.

Nothing about her choices — or the district’s — was black and white, she said: “Trying to balance what’s best for the community and what’s best for every child in the community with what your child needs is hard.”

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

This story about 8th grade math 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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Glass doors lead to the light-filled lobby of a redbrick and limestone chapel at one end of a grassy quad, where lectures and receptions were held and students testified about their faith.

Original artwork hangs on the walls on the way to the music department, chaplain’s office and recital hall, along with brass “leaves” listing the names of past financial boosters formed into the shape of a tree.

This visit to Trinity Christian College, in Palos Heights, Illinois, isn’t real. It’s virtual, captured just before the college closed in May so students and alumni could remember the campus, which is being sold off to repay more than $26 million worth of debt and other liabilities. 

“Instead of being wiped off the map, this is a way to honor the legacy” of the college, said Shalom Nwaokolo, who, with his wife, Ashley, is creating the permanent digital preservation of it. 

Memorializing colleges and universities in virtual reality is among the more sentimental responses to the accelerating pace at which they’re closing and projected to close. 

So pronounced has this trend become, however, that it’s also resulting in more consequential steps that speak to the intensifying threat of plummeting enrollments, rising debt and other problems.

The federal government is promising to streamline the process through which struggling colleges are taken over by healthier competitors, for instance. States are ramping up protections for consumers when campuses close anyway, and there is a proposal to do the same thing at the federal level. Lawsuits are multiplying, brought by students and employees against schools that closed. And institutions are trying to identify new sources of revenue.

Twenty-two states now make private higher education institutions pay into “tuition recovery” funds, typically requiring that a percentage of tuition collected be put aside in state accounts from which students could be compensated if the colleges close. While many of these funds were started to protect students at for-profit schools, nearly half have been extended to nonprofit degree-granting colleges. 

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

“This is an opportunity for states to protect students in the event of these closures, because we’re probably going to see more of them,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute who has called for the federal government to do the same thing.

In Massachusetts, where 26 colleges have shut down since 2014 and a 27th has announced that it will close at the end of this year, a state law now requires private colleges and universities to provide financial reports to anyone who wants to see them. Regulators have begun conducting annual reviews to determine and publicly disclose whether institutions are at imminent likelihood of failing.

To save some schools from that fate, officials at the U.S. Department of Education are pledging to speed up the process that can lead to mergers between healthier and troubled institutions, which officials say now take so long that one or the other party often gives up.

Meanwhile, legal firms have started filing lawsuits on behalf of students, faculty and staff of colleges that have already closed, generally accusing them of fraud and breach of contract. Three class-action federal lawsuits have been brought against the University of the Arts in Philadelphia alone, which shut down abruptly in 2024.

More than 440 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, or about a quarter of the total, are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years, according to an estimate by the Huron Consulting Group; of those, more than 120 are at the highest risk, based on their enrollment, assets, debt, cash on hand and other characteristics. 

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

So much attention has begun to be focused on college closures that the Education Department has produced instructions for students about what to do if it happens to them. “Try not to panic,” it advises.

That might be hard, considering that fewer than half of students at colleges that close continue their educations, according to the most comprehensive study of this, by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Many of those who do continue lose credits they’ve already earned and paid for, and fewer than half ultimately earn degrees. The 442 colleges Huron projects to be endangered have a collective enrollment of 670,000 students.

Consumers whose colleges close can at least apply to get their federal loans forgiven through two existing routes: the Borrower Defense to Repayment and the Closed School Discharge programs. But that shifts the debt onto taxpayers, who have already had to cover billions of dollars in loans that will never be repaid.

There are growing calls for institutions to put aside money for these costs.

“We do need to think about how students are protected, so when they have invested time and money in their degrees, they can get refunds and discharges of their college loans, and so those costs can be paid for by colleges rather than taxpayers,” Cooper said.

Related: Faster, thinner: Colleges are swiftly trimming a B.A. degree to three years

In his proposed federal version of state tuition recovery funds, schools’ contributions would be based on how much federal student loan money they receive. Institutions at higher risk would pay a larger fee. Cooper calculates that this would raise $9.5 billion over 12 years to cover the cost of loans that might be forgiven if the colleges close; critics counter that such a fee would only further squeeze already cash-strapped colleges.

Despite mounting pressure to prepare for the worst, many vulnerable colleges remain slow to take action themselves, said Brian Weinblatt, founder and principal of Higher Ed Consolidation Solutions, one of a growing number of firms that help imperiled schools fix their financial problems, merge or close.

“Almost every institution waits until it’s too late to engage in this process,” said Weinblatt, who said working with colleges that have finally decided to shut down is the fastest-growing proportion of his business.

The company has developed its own “merger runway index,” a calculation of how much time a university or college has left before it has to merge or close, he said.

“They wait until it’s too late, so they’re no longer attractive to potential merger partners because their enrollment has dwindled too much, they have too much deferred maintenance, there’s too much debt. People have been burying their heads in the sand, both administrators and trustees.”

Even if they do decide to merge with a healthier competitor, federal government red tape makes the process so time-consuming that they run out of runway. “The school that’s in the better financial position says, ‘If it takes another year, we can’t keep subsidizing this other school that’s struggling,’ ” Weinblatt said.

The Department of Education is working to fix that, Nicholas Kent, under secretary for higher education, told a conference at George Mason University.

“Depending on how you count them, we have 6,000 institutions of higher education in this country, and not all of them are going to make it out of the next decade,” Kent said. “And quite honestly, not all of them need to make it out of the next decade, or should. And the ones that do are going to be the ones that adapt in a variety of ways.” 

Related: Behind ideological attacks on higher ed, surprising bipartisan reforms are happening

Some are taking at least small steps to balance the books, finding new sources of badly needed revenue.

Agnes Scott College in Georgia started in June to rent out three historic homes it owns. Sweet Briar College in Virginia sells hydroponic lettuce grown in its greenhouses. The University of California, Davis, has launched a line of products from the olives it cultivates for research. The University of Alaska sells permits to harvest firewood from forests it owns. New Mexico State University has licensed its brand for coffee, whiskey and tequila; Mississippi State University for cigars; and the University of Nevada, Reno, for beef jerky.

The Nwaokolos, who are producing the virtual-reality tours of Trinity Christian, see potential for a business doing that more widely as colleges continue to close. “It’s possible that other people will want this as well,” Ashley Nwaokolo said.

They’ve already built a platform for it, called Perduras — Spanish for “you endure.” 

“There’s so much life that happens at college,” she said. “It’s a crossroads of maturity. You have a community around you going through similar experiences. That creates, most of the time, good memories and attachments to that college.”

With digital re-creations, Ashley Nwaokolo said, “people can have some history to go back to.”

After all, she said, “What do you do for a homecoming when there’s no place to come home to?” 

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.

This story about college closures 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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For years, policymakers, educators and employers have debated whether career pathways — programs that connect high school students to postsecondary education and careers — actually work. 

We’ve framed the conversation as apprenticeship versus college, workforce training versus liberal arts and careers versus academics.

While new findings from Rodel and RTI International — in one of the most detailed studies yet examining pathways-participating students’ outcomes after high school — are encouraging, they also expose how little we still understand. 

We need more detailed information about what actually happens to pathways students after high school. We also need to understand how internships, apprenticeships and other immersive workplace learning experiences affect those outcomes. Without this evidence, we are often measuring indicators of success rather than success itself — the programs’ success rather than the students’.

Until we can answer these questions, we will continue debating whether career pathways work without knowing whether they are helping students achieve goals that are meaningful to them.

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

As a country, we have spent billions of dollars building career pathways, expanding dual enrollment, promoting apprenticeships and redesigning high schools around workforce alignment. 

But we have invested far less in understanding whether students actually move into postsecondary programs and careers connected to what they studied in high school.

However, the new findings begin to give us a clearer picture of how students navigate life beyond high school, and that is important. The researchers followed more than 5,000 Delaware high school students across three graduating cohorts, representing more than half of Delaware’s school districts and charter schools in rural, suburban and urban communities. 

Among Delaware students who completed a career pathway, 74 percent enrolled in postsecondary education within six months of graduation — well above the national average of 62 percent — and roughly 45 percent enrolled in a major aligned to their pathway; 55 percent were employed within six months, many while also attending college. 

By 18 months, 69 percent were employed overall, and the share of students balancing both work and postsecondary education had grown from 35 percent to 48 percent.

Perhaps most striking: Only about 6 percent of pathways graduates were neither employed nor enrolled within six months, declining to roughly 2 percent by 18 months. 

Related: Do career pathways work? Delaware offers early clues

These findings suggest that well-designed pathways can help students transition into postsecondary education and the workforce. 

They also reinforce something practitioners have understood for years: Today’s students increasingly work while enrolled in college. And our federal and state accountability systems largely fail to capture this reality.

Under both the federal Strengthening Career & Technical Education for the 21st Century Act (known as the Perkins Act) and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, states typically report a broad “placement” measure, which is intended to show whether learners successfully transition into education or the workforce. But in practice, “placement” often combines the numbers of students entering employment, postsecondary education, military service and training into a single metric.

A student enrolled full-time in nursing is counted similarly to a student working part-time in retail. A student entering a registered apprenticeship may appear indistinguishable from a student taking unrelated coursework with no connection to their long-term career goals.

These are not the same outcomes. But our data systems often treat them as if they are.

The Perkins Act itself recognized this problem in 2018 by calling for the collection of more nuanced data on whether students enroll in postsecondary education, advanced training, military service or employment. But the caveat in the law — “to the extent such data are available” — reveals the real issue. In most states, the more detailed data simply does not exist.

The recent study, however, in addition to capturing more nuanced data on outcomes, hints at some meaningful distinctions. 

In Delaware, for example, high school pathways in health care, education and the skilled trades showed particularly strong postsecondary alignment. Within 18 months of graduation, 58 percent of health care pathway students enrolled in aligned majors, compared with 44 percent of education pathway students and 48 percent of architecture and construction pathways grads.

Those numbers are not perfect. But they begin to answer a question most states have not yet asked: Are students pursuing futures connected to the pathways we created for them?

This type of data allows us to identify barriers and create solutions that better connect students to opportunities by showing how postsecondary and workforce systems — not just K-12 systems — shape student outcomes. For example, Delaware’s registered apprenticeship system currently has a waitlist for enrollment, which the state is seeking to address through its next budget. That may not affect every student pursuing the skilled trades, but it almost certainly influences how and when some young people transition into aligned careers. 

The economy that students are entering has fundamentally changed. Young people are navigating a labor market in which education and employment increasingly overlap, skills matter as much as credentials and career progression is rarely linear. At the same time, employers continue to say they need workers with both skills and experience.

The future of career pathways cannot simply be about participation. It cannot simply be about whether students are “placed” somewhere after high school. If we want education and workforce systems to truly align, then we need to ask better questions and be accountable for what we find, so we can make sure students are navigating toward opportunity, mobility and long-term economic value.

Luke Rhine is vice president for postsecondary success at Rodel, whose mission is to strengthen Delaware’s public education and workforce systems by connecting partners to help advance and implement sustainable solutions. 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about career pathways 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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Harrison Keller was starting only his second year as president of the University of North Texas last fall when he was abruptly confronted with a big problem. 

Enrollment was down. And the source of the crisis made it much worse: In the wake of Trump administration moves to deny and revoke visas, deport international students and impose travel bans, 2,800 students from abroad who the university expected to show up had stayed away. 

Full-tuition-paying international students — especially graduate students, who Keller said bring $20,000 to $25,000 each to his bottom line — are critical to balancing the budget, underwriting services and keeping costs lower for their domestic classmates. 

The loss of so many of them pushed the university $45 million into the red, Keller said, forcing it to eliminate 71 academic programs. And a continuing decline in the number of international students will mean a hit of another $47 million in lost revenue in the next academic year, according to university budget projections. (Keller said he expects the loss to be closer to $25 million thanks to ongoing spending cuts.)

“I picked a hell of a time to become a college president,” he said. 

And the problem isn’t letting up. New federal figures show that international enrollment is continuing to fall, with the number of student arrivals down by 5 percent in March, almost 8 percent in April and 1 percent in May, compared to the same months last year. That’s on top of a drop of nearly 22 percent in the number who arrived last summer versus the summer before.

“It leaves a really big hole in the budget, which has to get filled one way or another, either by increasing tuition or cutting services,” said Dick Startz, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara — where, he noted, international students pay more than three times what California students do, and subsidize financial aid for their American classmates.

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

Many American students and their families may not have realized how important full-tuition-paying international students are to university finances, said Domenico Ferraro, an associate professor of economics at Arizona State University who has studied this. 

“Unfortunately, I think that many people don’t have a clear perception of what international students contribute” financially, Ferraro said. 

Now the consequences are becoming clear.

Nationwide, international students make up 6 percent of enrollment but account for 12 percent of revenue at colleges and universities, research conducted at Princeton University found — and at institutions particularly dependent on them, more than 30 percent. Those figures are from 2016, before international student numbers rose even more, meaning the revenue impact is likely higher now.

The money from international students has kept tuition and fees lower for domestic students while enabling higher spending on services, the Princeton study found. It also concluded that, contrary to assertions by critics, international students aren’t crowding out American ones. This, too, has become even more true since the period covered by the study, as fewer U.S. high school graduates choose to go to college, leaving seats in classrooms empty.

“We have a great opportunity, which we’re engaged in blowing,” Startz said of the potential for international students to close both those enrollment and financial gaps.

Instead, Moody’s bond-rating agency warns, the ongoing drop in the number of international students is causing “significant financial stress” and creating a credit risk for universities and colleges — especially the 15 percent with the largest international enrollments. 

“It definitely hurts. There’s no question,” said Ruth Johnston, vice president of the consulting arm of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. “You’re not bringing revenue in, and there are so few revenue sources for higher education in the first place.”

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

Since January of 2024, there have been more than 300 instances of universities and colleges eliminating programs, closing departments and laying off faculty and staff, according to the tracking database CollegeCuts. A growing number of schools cite international enrollment declines among the triggers. Many have also announced tuition increases.

Northwestern University said a projected international enrollment drop was among the reasons it eliminated 425 positions, froze hiring and put off building projects, for example. The University of Southern California cut nearly 1,000 jobs, including some for academic advisers, after listing expected declines in the number of international students — applications from whom fell 23 percent at USC — among its financial problems. 

DePaul University laid off 114 employees after its number of students from abroad fell 30 percent overall, and international graduate student enrollment by two-thirds. Falling international graduate student enrollment was also given as a cause of budget cuts and buyouts at Boston University, and declining international enrollment in general for a rare budget deficit at Syracuse University and deficits and layoffs at New York’s New School, the University of Texas at Arlington, Niagara College and the Stevens Institute of Technology. 

Among other universities that cited international enrollment drops as a factor behind deficits, budget cuts and layoffs: the University of Michigan School of Public Health, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Eastern Illinois University, The College of Wooster and Kent State University. And the president of the California College of the Arts blamed Trump administration pressure on international students for worsening an enrollment decline and budget deficit so bad that the college will close.

Related: The biggest expansion of federal scholarship money in 50 years is at hand — and almost nobody is ready for it

Most of these institutions have also raised tuition — Syracuse by nearly 4 percent, for the upcoming academic year, to a total cost of attendance of about $96,000 for students living on campus, for example; Northwestern by 3.5 percent, also to $96,000; USC by about 3 percent, to $103,162; and The New School by 3.5 percent, to a total cost of about $93,000.

With international education having become as much a political as economic issue, none of these universities responded to repeated requests for comment, including about how much of the tuition increases could be attributed to the drop in the number of international students.

Johnston points out that most universities are trying to avoid tuition hikes at a time when surveys show that two-thirds of Americans think a four-year degree is no longer worth the cost. 

“A lot of it is because there are issues around perceived value of higher education,” she said. “We know there’s a concern about that.”

That leaves institutions to cut spending by eliminating majors, departments and employees, said Ferraro, of Arizona State.

“If you can’t increase the revenues from tuition, there is not much left other than cutting spending,” he said.

Universities’ vulnerability to the decline in the number of international students is a problem partly of their own making. As domestic enrollment has fallen — down by about 2 million students since 2010 — colleges and universities increasingly recruited from abroad. The number of international students in the United States rose during that period by more than 60 percent, to nearly 1.2 million, according to the Institute of International Education.

Increasing their numbers of international students was also many universities’ response to financial pressures. For every 10 percent cut in state appropriations for public research universities, for example, those universities recruited 16 percent more international students, research by scholars at the University of Michigan and elsewhere found. 

The strategy wasn’t only about filling seats. It was to keep money coming in at a time when American families were chafing at the cost of higher education and demanding more financial aid. As colleges gave deeper discounts to domestic undergraduates, the proportion being charged the full listed price fell to 16 percent, while more than 80 percent of their international classmates paid the full tuition. Several institutions actually charge international students higher tuition than even out-of-state domestic ones, or add fees for them ranging from $874 to $5,218 a year, according to the American Council on Education, the principal association of U.S. colleges and universities. 

Related: As more rural students apply to college, attention turns to helping them succeed there

Yet even as colleges and universities grew more dependent on this money — and before the Trump-era crackdowns — threats emerged to the continued supply of students from abroad. There was more competition from other countries, and the U.S. share of the market for international students began to fall. 

A dramatic example of what’s beginning to happen in the United States is well under way in Canada, where the number of international students is down by 73 percent since the government set a limit on them in 2024 in response to anti-immigration sentiment and complaints that international students in some cities were driving up housing costs.

Before then, more than a fifth of students at Canadian two- and four-year colleges and universities were coming from other countries, a proportion that had grown as government funding for higher education fell. International undergraduates pay almost six times as much as their Canadian classmates in tuition, according to the government agency Statistics Canada. 

“Institutions were making net surpluses off these international students and using it to sustain services for domestic students,” said Alex Usher, president of the Canadian consulting firm Higher Education Strategy Associates, or HESA.

Three-quarters of tuition revenue in Ontario, the most populous province, came from international students, HESA estimated. Now that the international student numbers have plummeted, Ontario universities will have lost $1.5 billion in income by the end of this year, in U.S. dollars, according to the Council of Ontario Universities, resulting in significant cuts to programs and services. Sixty percent of universities and colleges in Canada were planning budget cuts, a survey found. At least one, the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology, blamed declining international student numbers for forcing it to close.

Tuition fees in Canada haven’t gone up, Usher said. But while domestic students “aren’t necessarily paying more, they’re getting less.” 

In the United States, declining international enrollment only worsens the many other financial problems faced by universities and colleges, Ferraro said.

“If you don’t compensate for this with international students,” he said, “the future of higher education is going to be a bunch of empty buildings.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.

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

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OAKLAND, Calif. — It’s a Friday morning at Oakland Unity Middle School, a public charter school nestled between residential buildings in East Oakland, and Austin Razavi is announcing the morning advisory prompt.

“I’ll give you 10, 15 seconds to think about it,” Razavi said to the group of 15 mixed-grade middle school boys who had arranged desks into a messy circle. “Then each of you share something most people don’t know about you.”

There was some shuffling and silence. Several boys asked for more time, then one piped up.

“I like to play videos,” he said.

Then another: “I like to play with my little siblings.”

And then: “A little-known fact about me is that half of my lung is missing.”

In other classrooms on campus, girls-only and all-gender advisories are meeting too; students choose which type they are assigned to. During these trust circles, students can’t opt out of sharing, because this first period sets the tone for the day. Students will rely on each other for support to complete missing assignments by the end of the day, and teachers and administrators like Razavi want students to feel safe being vulnerable with each other.

Immediately after sharing time, each boy tells the group about class assignments he needs to finish. Their classmates offer advice, encouragement or just acknowledgement.

“That’s where growth happens,” said Razavi, a humanities teacher and assistant principal of the school. “Growth happens through risk. That’s where kids feel like they’re in community and an indicator of kids feeling a sense of belonging.”

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

Experts agree that a sense of belonging — meaning that students feel accepted, respected and supported in school — is crucial for academic success. This is perhaps even more true for boys, who are more likely than girls to repeat kindergarten and lag in reading and writing skills and less likely to graduate from high school.

But this safety eludes many boys who get the message early in life that they’re not good students. 

“Something happens over time so by the time they get to high school, boys don’t feel like they belong in academic settings,” said Ioakim Boutakidis, a professor of child and adolescent studies at California State University, Fullerton, and a research fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonprofit research and policy group. “And then that hurts academic belonging, the sense that you’re good enough to be successful in these academic spaces.” (Rise Together, a fund established by American Institute for Boys and Men founder Richard Reeves, is one of The Hechinger Report’s many donors.)  

At Oakland Unity Middle School, teachers are trying to break that cycle through the relationship-building program, which is designed to normalize male vulnerability and support boys to be themselves, instead of what they feel is expected of them. Just over 140 sixth, seventh and eighth graders attend the school, nearly all of them from East Oakland — one of the most ethnically diverse and socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the Bay Area.

The program, Ever Forward, was founded in 2004 by Ashanti Branch, then a first-year teacher in nearby San Lorenzo, to embrace a philosophy of “radical positivity.” Since 2021, according to Branch, it has led more than 300 workshops, mostly in Northern California, reaching upwards of 30,000 teachers and educators. 

“I feel like this school is kind of my second home,” said Unity eighth grader Adrian Polanco, who wants to study business in college. “We always have someone we can look up to, who has our back, which I think is really good and really important for school to have.”

No one claims that social-emotional support for boys alone will help them do better academically, but experts say that programming to boost belonging may be key to closing the academic gender gap.

Warmth and connection matter a lot to boys, even if they don’t always demonstrate these needs by being responsive to questions and expectations the way girls often do, Boutakidis said. Boys may appear not to care about what adults think of them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t crave connection. 

This can make it hard for some teachers to connect with boys in the classroom and even read boys’ behavior as so disengaged as to be antagonistic, said Matt Englar-Carlson, a professor of counseling and the co-director of the Center for Boys and Men at Cal State Fullerton. This may be particularly true with adolescent boys.

“When you think what’s happening is disrespect in the classroom, the reality is that it typically isn’t, because they’re not performing for you,” Englar-Carlson said. “They’re performing for their peers around them. He can ridicule you and save face in front of his friends and act like he doesn’t care.” 

Once teachers begin to realize when this is happening, they can make adaptations to their teaching, he said, like asking boys questions in a different way. Instead of calling out a male student in front of the class, teachers might come up next to him while walking around the classroom and talk to him softly, at his level.

“So now it’s actually a private conversation between the two of you,” he said, “and you don’t actually have to call out bad behavior.”

Related: Many boys aren’t interested in school. Can opening more career-focused high schools help? 

Ashanti Branch learned early the challenges faced by male students. A wrestler and football player while attending East Oakland public schools, he now wears his hair in long braids and has an easy, warm smile and laugh. After graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Branch worked as a civil engineer before going into teaching. 

As one of just a few male teachers at San Lorenzo High School about 20 miles south of Oakland, Branch soon discovered that male students vented their anger and frustration at him.

“I saw young men who were brilliant, but the way they were acting in front of class was really difficult,” he said. “I would tell them, ‘Young man, you want to fight with me because it looks good with your peers? I’m not here to fight you. I’m not your enemy. You’re a high schooler. I’m an adult with a job. What are we arguing about? I want you to succeed.’”

He invited some male students to have lunch with him once a week and asked them how he could be a better teacher. What they told him was that their lives were too difficult for school to be a priority. Students described “crashing out” — sudden outbursts of rage and emotion — after dealing with one emotional “land mine” after another.

“A kid getting pushed down the hall, he ignores it, ignores it, and then all of a sudden he turns around and boom,” Branch said, making an explosion gesture with both hands. “And then he gets in trouble, right?”

Branch recalled that as a teacher he was encouraged to leave his own problems “in the glove compartment” before coming to work. 

“I tried to do that, but I realized I was so fake,” he said. Instead, he was honest with his students about how he was doing. “I would tell them, ‘I had a rough weekend. A lot of drama happened in my life. Today’s not a good day.” He calls this approach “normalizing vulnerability” — an essential step for young men to be themselves as people and as students. 

Branch turned the weekly lunches with students into a club, the Ever Forward Club, where young men could gather to process emotions. He spent a decade developing the program and expanding to more schools, eventually leaving his job to build the program and provide professional development for educators.

At the heart of the Ever Forward Club is a project-based tool Branch calls Masks, Emotions and Math. During workshops, Branch guides young men to explore the ways they present themselves to the world while hiding their difficult emotions from view. 

Since the club started in 2004, every participating student has graduated from high school and 93 percent have transitioned to college, the military or a trade school, Branch said. He expanded the work to include professional development for educators, calling it the Million Mask Movement. 

Tony Farrell, head of Stuart Hall High School — the boys’ segment of a school in San Francisco affiliated with Schools of the Sacred Heart* — recalls an event Branch led at his school ten years ago. Two hundred male high school students sat in a big circle in the school’s gymnasium, Farrell said, and Branch handed out pens and paper. He instructed students to write on one side of the paper how they appear to the world. On the other side, he said, write the stuff the world doesn’t know about them.

Then they crumpled the papers up and threw them at each other. 

“It was a snowball fight,” Farrell said. “We had a perfectly, wonderfully randomized pile of crumpled paper.”

Then each boy picked a paper ball, smoothed it out and, one at a time, read what another boy had written.

Farrell recalled boys reading, “You wouldn’t know from looking at me that my parents are getting a divorce’’ and “You wouldn’t know from looking at me that my grandma’s really sick.”

“Not to get woo-woo, but it was like an electric field,” he said. “It was really powerful.”

Two years ago, Branch led a Masks, Emotions and Math event at Oakland Unity Middle School. Since then, teachers at the school have integrated elements of Branch’s work into routine practices, including how the school manages disciplinary issues. That’s also where Razavi got the idea to offer single-sex advisory periods.

Some boys need a space where they can open up to other boys, he said, without the social dynamics that can come with all-gender groups.

“If you know that belonging matters, and you know that there’s this very evident drop in sense of belonging over time for boys, then we need to work on making boys feel like they belong,” he said. “And we need to work on that earlier.”

Related: Women far outnumber men in law school, med school, vet school, and other professional programs 

Eighth grader Fierre Hill transferred to Oakland Unity after his old middle school closed. He wants to go to college and study something health-related. He describes the support he gets from his teachers at the school as “warming.” 

“You’re able to tell them stuff that you couldn’t tell other people,” he said, “and they just have this different energy that makes you comfortable.”

“I get with that,” seventh grader Jubran Sulaiman agreed. “We can all, what’s the word? Express ourselves.”

On Wednesdays, Hill and other students go to the school’s Learning Lab, where they get help completing any work they haven’t turned in. Chris Bibbens Williams is the teacher in charge of the Learning Lab. He said that the Masks, Emotions and Math event that Branch led at the school helped otherwise shy students engage more deeply with their peers.

“You’re gonna have some kids who are more confident in talking in front of everyone, but even the kids who weren’t confident, it just seemed like because the space was positive, it was a chance for them to say how they felt in the moment,” he said. “That’s one thing that I love about this school is that we really allow kids to be themselves, and we build those deep relationships.”

When he isn’t in the Learning Lab, Williams can be found all over campus — playing basketball with students and hanging out with them in the cafeteria.  

​​”When you build those relationships, kids come to you,” he said.  

Recently, Williams approached an eighth grader who hadn’t been completing his language arts assignments. Was he not doing the work because it was too hard, or  because he lacked confidence?

“I had him come over and read the passage to me,” Williams said, “and I discovered it was truly just him not being confident in his reading.”

With Williams sitting with him, the student made his way through the passage and read words he wasn’t familiar with. Since then, Williams has noticed a change in the boy’s confidence level.

“He’s attempting more,” he said, “and that’s all I could ask for.”

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct affiliation for Stuart Hall High School.

Contact editor Christina Samuels at (212) 678-3635 or samuels@hechingerreport.org.

This story about the gender gap 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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BENZONIA, Mich. — Maggie Bacon is seeking men. 

On a recent Friday, she attached flyers about an upcoming education and training fair to more than 500 pizza boxes, one of the ways she’s tried to persuade men in this northern Michigan town to enroll in college, a certificate program or even just a single course. 

“On a Friday night when somebody wants to watch a basketball game or some other sporting event, they’re probably gonna order pizza,” said Bacon. “Part of that target was those working-age adult men.”

Bacon runs BEST Benzie County, a local group that works to support education from pre-K to college, part of a statewide network committed to building a college-going culture. 

Michigan, like many other states, says it has a shortage of skilled workers, a gap that risks hurting its economy. Only 51.6 percent of working-age adults over 25 have a degree or other training beyond high school, state data shows, the lowest of any Midwestern state. The number of men in particular who are going to college has been falling steadily, despite evidence that people with postsecondary credentials tend to earn more than their peers with only a high school diploma and are more likely to be employed.

Seven years ago, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer launched an effort to boost the proportion of adult state residents with education past high school to 60 percent by 2030. In 2021, she launched Michigan Reconnect to help residents 25 and older cover the cost of community college tuition. But the number of women signing up for the program has far outpaced the number of men. 

About 35 percent more Michigan women than men earn a degree or certificate, according to 2024-25 state data. Nationally, more than 1.9 million women completed a credential, such as a degree or certificate, during the 2024-25 school year, compared with 1.4 million men, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.

So last April, Whitmer issued an executive order to focus more attention and resources on getting men into certificate programs and college, including by boosting support for groups like Bacon’s. “I always will continue to be a strong supporter of women’s rights and freedoms, but that’s never going to stop me from caring about and fighting for men, too,” she said in announcing the order. 

Whitmer’s plan has been slow to get off the ground, in part because of a delayed state budget, and overall the state is not on pace to meet its 2030 goal. But advocates like Bacon are hopeful that added attention and funding could help move more men into higher education.  

The Michigan governor is one of a small but growing number of state leaders to concentrate on male success. In Maryland, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore launched an initiative to recruit and retain male teachers. In Utah, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox is centering on male mental health and educational opportunities.

College has lost favor among some men in part because popular notions of masculinity today — including those advanced in the “manosphere,” the digital movement that subscribes to patriarchal beliefs — do not tend to emphasize or value learning beyond high school, said Ryan Wells, director of the Center for Student Success Research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“The idea of being a man is more about getting a job and supporting your family,” Wells said. “It’s sort of rational and logical to see why college could — in many cases, should — play a part, but that’s not the way it gets portrayed.” State and local efforts to attract men back to school could start to move the dial, he said, but they are up against years of a “societal attitude structure that is really hard to change.” 

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

Tyler Kniss is exactly the kind of student whom groups like Bacon’s are hoping to attract. 

Kniss struggled during his teenage years and didn’t finish high school. He spent time in prison and in a boot camp for nonviolent offenses he committed as a minor. Around the same time, he became a father. 

Once he finished serving his time, Kniss was motivated by his young family to secure a job in manufacturing. He also earned his GED along the way. 

But Kniss, now 33 and a manufacturing operations manager at a Traverse City-based injection molding company, eventually began to want more opportunities for advancement. He realized that to achieve that future, he had to earn a college degree.

“I have a wealth of experience, and I’ve got these certifications,” he said. “But even I really had to kind of fight, in a sense, to even get where I’m at. I really had to be well-versed in everything.”

In 2024, at the suggestion of his employer, Kniss connected with a business instructor at nearby Northwestern Michigan College who helped him build a career plan. The college also told him about the Reconnect scholarship. Now, he’s enrolled in a degree program for business administration while continuing to work full-time, and hopes to transfer to the University of Michigan for a bachelor’s degree. The scholarship covers tuition for his two-year degree, and his employer’s education policy would cover the bachelor’s, he said.

Like Kniss, many other men are taking time to decide how to further their education — and now state officials are trying to provide them with answers. 

There’s “urgency and ambition to act on this,” Jason Wilson, deputy director of strategic talent preparation at the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential, said at an event on male success organized by state officials in December. The state has held private focus groups with men across Michigan, as well as job training fairs and career pathway events for high schoolers and other outreach efforts. The state will analyze what has worked so far and release findings soon, said Aundreana Jones-Poole, a spokesperson for MiLEAP, Michigan’s lifelong education office. 

Whitmer is seeking to lower the age requirement for the Michigan Reconnect Program from 25 to 21 to help more people qualify. She has also partnered with the Michigan College Access Network, a nonprofit focused on college access for all students, and regional leaders to connect men and others to work-based learning opportunities such as apprenticeships, which combine classroom and on-the-job training.  

So far, more than 200,000 Michiganders have applied to the Michigan Reconnect program. But that isn’t nearly enough for the state to meet Whitmer’s 2030 goal. 

State data shows that between 2018 and 2024, the share of adults with a degree or credential rose by just 2.7 percentage points. 

Just 54.6 percent of the Class of 2025 enrolled in college within six months, a decade-long low. 

The trends are similar in other states, which have also seen a slight improvement in college-going rates over the last few years following a pandemic drop. Overall, public four-year undergraduate enrollment grew by 1.4 percent in fall 2025, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Wells of the University of Massachusetts said that while states want to reach men, policies designed specifically for males can be unpopular or even politically problematic. President Donald Trump, for example, has included gender among the categories it does not want colleges to consider in admissions. 

“They’re really in a tricky bind, because your goal is to have a specific kind of gendered outcome for a policy or program, and you’re unwilling or it’s just unfeasible to actually incentivize or build gender into it,” Wells said. 

In Benzie, about 45 percent of residents have degrees, on par with other nearby counties. To work toward Whitmer’s goal of 60 percent, local leaders say, they set their own goal of more than 2,000 people earning a degree or credential by 2030. Currently, some 400 have earned a certificate since last June, said Traverse City Mayor Amy Shamroe, who runs the industry-focused arm for the Northern Michigan Attainment Collaborative, a 10-county campaign that started last year with funding from the state. 

Related: Trump’s attacks on DEI might hurt men in college admissions 

It took Jose Lujano, who lives near Grand Rapids, years to even consider college. His parents wanted him to pursue a degree but lacked money to cover the costs, and they frequently reminded him he would need good grades to earn a scholarship. Lujano struggled in his early high school years, so he thought college was out of reach.

Still, he took a couple of community college classes after graduating from high school in 2018, but quickly ran out of money. Then he tried retail and factory roles, before starting work at a preschool in 2021. Now a paraprofessional at a Wyoming, Michigan, charter school, he wants to go back to school to become a teacher. 

This past October, he started talking to officials at Grand Rapids Community College about obtaining a teacher certification. The 26-year-old learned last year that he qualified for the Reconnect Program and that it would cover most of his tuition. But he hesitated, wondering if he could balance school and work, as well as planning for his wedding this May. 

Ultimately, he decided the scholarship was too great an opportunity to pass up. He enrolled at Grand Rapids for the summer session and hopes to get his associate’s degree within two years, then possibly transfer to Grand Valley State University.

Lujano said he believes the temptation of a paycheck draws many men directly into the workforce. “I wanted the money,” he said, “and that’s truly why I decided to pursue just hopping from job to job. That’s really what it was my first few years, until I just got so sick and tired of it.”

Related: College Uncovered: The Missing Men

Every region is coming up with its own approach to falling college enrollment and sharing what works, said Shamroe, the mayor.

In this part of northern Michigan, she said, strategies include bringing in students — mostly men — for noncredit classes at Northwestern Michigan College with hopes they will pivot later to a credit program or degree.

Elizabeth Sonnabend, program coordinator for extended education and training at Northwestern Michigan College, said the college tries to figure out what might draw men into higher education — often it’s hands-on, work-based learning — and then helps them identify an academic path that allows them to get credit for prior learning in the workforce. 

Shamroe recruits businesses willing to create a pathway to education or apprenticeship for employees — which she notes can help employers as well as their workers.

“It’s all part of this reimagining or revisioning of what college or a degree or certification actually looks like,” Shamroe said. “We want to meet people where they are, their work experience counts.”

She said the collaborative tries to capitalize on the area’s “small-town feel.” 

“Somebody knows somebody, and they’re going to recommend them,” Shamroe said. “We have so many partners already. We continue to add them. It only makes us stronger, a stronger resource for businesses and industries.” 

Still, there are barriers. For Shirl Martin, the collaborative’s student navigator, a big challenge is being ghosted by people she’s trying to recruit as they weigh their options.

“I’ll call and check in and then crickets,” Martin said. “Then three months later, they resurface.”

Another barrier — one that affects many rural students — is that the Reconnect program only covers a portion of tuition for those who attend a community college that isn’t local to them. That can lead to stopouts, or temporary withdrawals, Bacon says. 

And there’s the challenge of simply getting people to show up. At the job fair in March, only five male job seekers did. 

In a meeting the next day, collaborative members noted that the local plumbing union, with its job fair sign detailing potential pay of $41 an hour for a new apprentice, attracted the most attention. Shamroe suggested being more direct about the potential financial payoff of taking college classes or joining a credential program.

“If we can get them in a classroom and see that it’s not as daunting, I think that’s our best bet,” Sonnabend said. 

Men, she added, often think they aren’t ready for further learning. “But they’re capable of doing the work,” she said. “They just don’t know it yet.”

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or preston@hechingerreport.org.

This story about men in college 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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In James Bell’s math class at Chapman High School, sophomores are trying to pinpoint exactly where two lines cross.

The students in this rural Kansas high school already solved for that meeting point in previous lessons, using graphs and other techniques. But this recent lesson shows them how to use a matrix — a box made up of rows and columns representing a system of equations. Matrices are often used in engineering or video game design to calculate the locations of two objects moving through space. 

Traditionally, this kind of complex linear algebra would be taught in the third year of high school math, when many students would take Algebra II. But a decade ago, the Chapman Unified School District, a rural district about 80 miles west of Topeka, Kansas, decided to drop the traditional high school math pathway — Algebra I for a year, followed by a year of geometry and then a year of Algebra II — in favor of what is called “integrated math.”  

Integrated math takes concepts from both algebras and geometry, plus a little from trigonometry — the study of triangles and angles — and blends them over multiple years instead of teaching them separately, a year at a time. That means students can move from lessons in geometry to algebra and back again within the same year. 

Bell, who helped write the math curriculum that Chapman High School uses, said he has seen how practicing both algebra and geometry throughout the year keeps them fresh in students’ minds.

“You’re going to have the opportunity to change course and change direction and see different things,” Bell said. “Students even do a little trig — which is a scary word for kids, but when it’s integrated into every year of math, it doesn’t sound as scary. It doesn’t make it as overwhelming.”

He added: “This is better for students. This is the best of both worlds.”

Chapman is part of a small group of districts and states moving to integrated math — all part of a larger movement to reimagine secondary math, give high schoolers more choice in courses, and modernize what some say are outdated ideas about what constitutes rigorous, college-level math by expanding course options beyond just calculus to include data science and statistics. 

Some experts say blending algebra and geometry gives more students a shot at learning high-level math later on in high school and college, touting high-achieving European and Asian countries that have taught integrated math for decades.

But others say the integrated approach creates new problems. Some teachers have objected, saying they prefer to focus solely on algebra or geometry: Georgia mandated an integrated math approach in 2008 but made it optional in 2015 after teachers and parents complained. Others worry that integrated courses sometimes have to drop concepts that would be taught in the traditional math progression of Algebra I, geometry and Algebra II. That might leave some students unprepared for college calculus, because the integrated approach doesn’t stick with one subject for long enough for students to fully digest it. 

In Chapman, where integrated math was installed along with other reforms, students went from 11 percent proficient to 41 percent proficient on the state math test the first year it was introduced, in 2015. In 2025, 67 percent scored proficient.

Kate Thornton, Chapman High’s principal, said the decision to move to integrated math had a lot to do with the Kansas state high school math test, which is administered in 10th grade. Many of the test questions were based on concepts from both Algebra I and II. 

Related: This state tried to overhaul math instruction. It didn’t go as planned

Advanced students who took Algebra I in 8th grade and geometry the following year did well on the test, she said, but “regular students were not getting those concepts because they were taking geometry as sophomores. So they were having a whole year with no algebraic involvement.” 

Integrated math still makes up only a fraction of high school math courses nationwide. A 2023 report from the Center for Education Market Dynamics noted that  about 16 percent of districts offer integrated math either alone or as an option alongside the traditional Algebra I-geometry-Algebra II progression, often referred to as “AGA.” California and other Western states were seeing the most growth at the time of the report, based on the organization’s sample of over 900 districts around the country.

But more districts have adopted integrated math since the time of that report, said Lora Kaiser, the executive director of the center. “From 22-23 to 25-26, we’ve seen growth in every region outside of the Midwest, which showed a very modest decline. The West region, and California specifically, show most growth,” said Lora Kaiser, the executive director of the center. She also noted that fewer districts are offering a choice between the AGA and integrated models — instead, they are only offering integrated math to their students.  

One factor driving the move to integrated math is the nationwide push to update high school mathematics for postsecondary education and the modern workforce. The Launch Years Initiative at the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, is helping 27 states rework their transition from high school to postsecondary mathematics, mainly through offering more math options to students than the algebra, geometry, precalculus and calculus courses that have dominated high school math for decades. 

Blending algebra and geometry courses can give students more room in their schedules to take other courses like data science or statistics, concepts that are very present in people’s everyday lives.  Students take integrated math in ninth and 10th grade and then have the option of pursuing different math paths in 11th and 12th grades. 

Lya Snell, director of building capacity for innovation at the Dana Center, said the AGA sequence is familiar to many and people are used to that framework. However, “where we are right now with tech and innovation is a lot different than where we’ve been before. We have to look at how we are preparing students for life today and in the future, and it requires us to create a more relevant experience.” 

Maryland, one of the states working with the Dana Center, is rolling out a two-year course of integrated algebra and geometry that will be required statewide beginning in the fall of 2027. State leaders hope integrated math bolsters student achievement — only 30 percent of high schoolers scored proficient in math on the most recent state exam. 

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

Lyndsey Brightful, the director of mathematics in the division of instructional programs at the Maryland State Department of Education, said the previous math progression didn’t align with the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the 2021 state law providing extra funding to accelerate flagging student achievement. 

Maryland now expects students to be ready for college-level math by 11th grade, which means condensing “the most essential content and concepts” from Algebra I, geometry and Algebra II into the first two years of high school, she said.

“We had sort of a mismatch in our math progression,” Brightful said. “If we wanted students to be ready for an entry-level college math course by grade 11, then we needed students to be finished with their foundational math skills by the end of 10th grade. With the traditional Algebra I-geometry-Algebra I progression, that was not true for on-grade-level students. It required acceleration.” 

After students have completed two years of integrated math, Maryland will offer them multiple pathways of what it calls rigorous, college-level math courses beginning in 11th grade, including calculus, college algebra, data science and statistics. Students will also have access to high school data science, discrete mathematics, and AP and IB math courses. For decades, the calculus pathway was considered the only choice for advanced and STEM students, but even top universities are now saying it’s “not the only advanced math,” she said.

Related: One state tried algebra for all eighth graders. It hasn’t gone well

“Higher-level statistics is advanced math, data science is advanced math,” Brightful said. “For students who are going into humanities majors, or even in some cases students who are going into nursing or business majors, they need to have strong math application skills or statistics skills, so pursuing other math pathways is still advanced.”

Brightful said the state is currently working with community colleges and the University of Maryland system to align admission requirements with the revised pathways. Currently, the state system requires four years of math for admissions, including Algebra I, geometry and Algebra II. Ideally, the state’s university system would accept the two-year integrated math course in place of the three years of AGA, Brightful said. 

Because integrated math can cover a range of math topics over different time frames — states like Maryland are only offering two years, while districts like Chapman offer three or four years, depending on whether students choose to take calculus — it’s hard to determine whether the approach makes a difference in student achievement or helps more students with other goals, like succeeding at college-level math. 

Related: Proof Points: Talk nerdy to me: Teachers who use math vocabulary help students do better in math

Some states have seen gains they believe are tied to the integrated approach. Mike Spencer, secondary math specialist at the Utah State Board of Education, cites the state’s move to three years of integrated math a decade ago as one factor among many contributing to Utah students’ consistently strong math performance on both the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the ACT. 

“Some of the value in integrated math is you see things come up each year, versus having gaps in some of that content knowledge,” Spencer said. “And when it’s done well, you make connections” between topics.

California, on the other hand, hasn’t seen the same testing improvement. Even after more than a decade of districts using integrated math, only 37 percent of California students are proficient in math, lagging behind most states.

Research on implementing integrated math — at least in the complicated U.S. context — is relatively limited, said University of Florida education policy researcher Elizabeth Huffaker. A 2015 study, for example, showed that teacher effectiveness may improve while teaching integrated math. 

Huffaker recently examined California districts to compare students who took integrated math to students in the traditional math pathway. Her just-published study showed a “small and positive” effect on 11th grade test scores among students who took integrated math, but she said this has to be taken with a grain of salt: Districts were also implementing Common Core math at the same time. The gains were equivalent to two to three months of high school math learning, about the same effect as Common Core implementation, Huffaker’s study showed. 

“I would not make this change expecting giant, transformative, high-impact-tutoring-type impacts,” Huffaker said. The costs of switching to integrated math may well outweigh the benefits, she said, “but I do think that the idea of creating more coherence and more opportunities to revisit key topics is sensible.” 

But many educators find aspects of integrated math frustrating. Students may not be getting the message that higher-level traditional math like trigonometry and calculus is still essential for college STEM majors, especially at selective schools. David Merryman, a professor of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, said the handful of students he’s advised over the years who arrived at Vanderbilt without high school calculus were completely lost in their first-year math courses. 

And even if integrated math courses promise they are covering trigonometry woven in with geometry and algebra concepts, Merryman is not sure it’s enough to really prepare students for the rigors of college engineering courses. 

“The kids who come to my class and are weak in trig, they struggle,” Merryman said. “For the non-STEM students, integrated math is probably great, you get a better understanding of how everything relates to each other. I don’t think it serves kids who’re going into STEM.” 

Ben Kitchl, a first-year global studies major at Loyola University in Chicago, briefly thought about being a STEM major early in high school. But his eighth grade Algebra I credit wouldn’t transfer to his new high school that only offered integrated math, and he had to start over, putting him behind. 

“I had to take Integrated Math II and III, even though I already knew a lot of it,” he said. He would have had to take two math courses in one year in order to make it to calculus his senior year.

It’s some of these tensions that are causing some states, including high-performing Utah, to revisit their integrated math requirement. Even some teachers are questioning it. “A lot of our veteran teachers, they’re the ones who say, ‘Oh, I miss teaching the AGA format, of being compartmentalized a little bit,” Spencer said. The state education agency plans to survey secondary teachers for their thoughts on the integrated model compared to the traditional math sequence and report back to the board of education on its findings.

In North Carolina, which like Utah has a three-year progression, the state board of education is also revisiting integrated math, looking into a possible two years of choice like Maryland to make more time for statistics and data science. Emily Hare, the director of pre-K-12 math at Guilford County Schools, said attitudes are slowly shifting away from what she called the “race to calculus.”* 

“I think that we have proven that the integrated pathway can work. I also think that sometimes folks think that it’s a little more different than what it is,” Hare said. “Sometimes, yes, you have the opportunity to mix algebra and geometry, but it’s not like we’re teaching different math. It’s just teaching it in a different order.” 

*Correction: This sentence has been updated with Emily Hare’s correct title.

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Imagine a student who starts taking college courses while still in high school through a dual-enrollment program. By the time they arrive on campus as a first-year student, they already have credits completed.

They are the first in their family to attend a four-year institution. Focused. Capable. Working part-time to help support things at home. They make it through their first year. Then their second.

Somewhere along the way, things shift. An unexpected expense. A change in work hours. A delay in financial aid. Nothing dramatic on its own, but enough. They stop out. They plan to come back the next semester.

But then, they don’t. 

If you spend time in any enrollment meeting at a college today, you’ll hear the same concerns: fewer students in the pipeline, more competition, the looming demographic cliff. Institutions are scrambling to figure out how to bring more students in. But that’s only part of the story, and not the most urgent one. 

More than 43 million Americans have started college and left without a degree. They enrolled. They showed up. And somewhere along the way, they slipped through.

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National completion rates have improved over time, with six-year completion rates now exceeding 60 percent. Yet nearly four out of every ten students who begin college do not complete a degree within six years. In most sectors, a success rate of just over 60 percent would not be considered acceptable; it would be viewed as a warning sign.

Yet we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that a large share of students simply won’t finish. That’s not a reality we should accept. We have normalized incompletion as a structural feature of American higher education, and in doing so, we have made peace with a moral and economic catastrophe. 

The 43 million Americans with some college and no credential are not failures. They are living evidence of an infrastructure never designed to see them through. They enrolled during a moment of hope and left during a moment of hardship. Their outcomes reflect systems built for a traditional student population that no longer represents the majority of today’s learners.

We have not rebuilt our systems to serve them.

Higher education systems were largely designed around the full-time, residential 18-year-old entering directly from high school with family financial support. Yet today’s students increasingly balance work, family responsibilities, financial pressures and other obligations alongside their education. Flexibility, rather than conformity to a traditional model, has become essential.

Across the United States, Black and Hispanic students continue to complete bachelor’s degrees at lower rates than their white and Asian peers. These disparities are often linked to differences in financial resources, educational opportunities and the ways students experience institutional environments and support systems. These are not marginal differences. They represent a nearly 30-point completion gap between groups who were promised access to the same credential and the economic mobility it is supposed to provide. 

Students who stop out without a credential are frequently worse off economically than if they had never enrolled at all. They often carry debt without realizing the earnings benefits associated with degree completion, and they are significantly more likely to default on student loans. 

They enroll for the promise of a better life and too often emerge with a financial burden and no credential to show for it.

In 2012, Georgia State launched GPS Advising, a predictive analytics platform that updates student records nightly and continuously analyzes more than 800 academic and financial risk indicators for each student. Advisers receive real-time alerts and intervene within days, not semesters — allowing them to provide help before students stop out. They also created Panther Retention Grants, proactively identifying students facing modest financial barriers and reaching out with targeted emergency assistance before those students stop out.

The school has demonstrated what is possible when institutions redesign themselves around student completion rather than student sorting. Through these efforts, Georgia State increased the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded annually by approximately 28 percent between 2010 and 2021. Bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students increased by 57 percent, while bachelor’s degrees awarded to Hispanic students increased by more than 120 percent. Most notably, for several consecutive years, Black, Hispanic, first-generation and low-income students graduated at rates at or above the university average.

Georgia State did not do this by recruiting different students. It did it by building systems that met the students it already had. The students were always capable. The infrastructure was not. 

Proactive advising, emergency financial aid that moves fast and data systems that surface who is struggling before they are already gone have made a huge difference. 

Related: As more rural students apply to college, attention turns to helping them succeed there

Colleges need to develop programs that reflect how students live and work and that hold institutions accountable for whether students finish, not just whether they enroll. Colleges must also reconnect with students who left but are close to finishing. Many are only a course or two away.

The enrollment crisis is real. But the completion crisis is larger, older, quieter and more devastating. We have spent a decade debating the front door of American higher education. It is past time to look at the millions of students who have already walked out, receipts in hand, without the credential they came for.

They needed us to meet them where they were. In too many cases, we did not. 

Emmanuel Lalande is senior vice president of enrollment strategy and student success at Columbia College Chicago, a private, nonprofit school for creatives that offers a curriculum that blends creative and media arts, liberal arts, and business. 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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