When Imperial Valley College launched a new program training students to become plant operators and technicians in the emerging lithium industry, Corban Dillon enrolled in the inaugural class.

He’d spent the first part of his career working for his family’s courier business in this part of southeastern California, but it faltered after the pandemic and the death of his father. Dillon hoped the new certificate program would give him a leg up as the industry grew to meet demand for lithium, a key mineral in the country’s clean energy transition.

But when he completed his certificate in spring 2024, lithium jobs weren’t available yet. So when the community college launched a second certificate option the following year, Dillon joined the first class of that program too. He finished that certificate last year — but the lithium industry still hadn’t caught up. Now, he’s enrolled in his third lithium certificate and will finish in December. Hundreds of anticipated jobs related to lithium extraction likely still won’t be available by then. 

“A lot of us already have jobs or have families and are trying to juggle all that and trying to get a certification,” said Dillon, 41. “And not having actual potential employment as of right now, it’s hard for one person to sit there and say, ‘You know what? Let’s continue with this.’” 

The situation speaks to a conundrum faced by local colleges when a new industry promises to come to town: Local residents want the new jobs. Companies say they want to hire local residents, but they’d need additional skills and training. In the middle are schools like Imperial Valley College, left to figure out the best timing to launch a new program that will prepare students for the new industry: soon enough that they can apply for jobs before they’re filled by skilled out-of-towners, but not so soon that students are left waiting for jobs. 

Imperial Valley College — which says it is now temporarily scaling back its lithium programs because of the job market uncertainty — offers a case study in the pitfalls of trying to prepare students for emerging fields. It’s an “incredibly common” challenge, said Betony Jones, a senior researcher in the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center’s green economy program and a former Biden administration official. Other fields that have faced similar uncertainty because of political and economic factors include solar and manufacturing. 

“There’s this fine calibration required where employers need the workers for the projects, they can’t start training the workers when they need them,” said Jones. “But workers can’t train and then wait around.” 

Related: Apprenticeships are bringing new workers to heritage industries 

In Imperial County, an agricultural area that has among the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the state, the stakes are particularly high. In March, its unemployment rate was 16.9 percent, more than triple that of neighboring counties.

Priscilla Lopez, the county’s director of workforce and economic development, sums up the need for jobs with a single anecdote: Last year, a new hotel opened in the county, creating 50 positions. The hotel offered in-person applications at the workforce development office, and in a single day, nearly 1,500 people arrived to apply. 

“The mentality that we see today here is: If we want a future, we need to leave the valley,” said Lopez. “But wouldn’t it be great to have these opportunities so that your kids can see the opportunities here, and maybe we keep our talent.”

When three companies began eyeing the region for its lithium reserves, attention quickly turned to jobs. The region was rechristened “Lithium Valley”; California Gov. Gavin Newsom called it “the Saudi Arabia of lithium”; and Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables, one of the companies vying to extract lithium from the region, announced it could launch commercial operations by 2026. 

The reality has been different. BHE Renewables only just completed construction on its demonstration plant, Christina Fleming, senior vice president of mineral development, wrote in an email.

Controlled Thermal Resources, another company active in the region, is in the “money-raising” stage, according to Jim Turner, the company’s president. Lithium extraction jobs are at least about two years away, he said.

Lithium batteries are currently the most common way to store wind and solar energy and power electric vehicles. An estimated 18 million metric tons of lithium carbonate is embedded in the hot brine deep beneath the Salton Sea, enough to power 375 million electric car batteries.

Calls for more education opportunities in Imperial Valley intensified as news of a potential lithium boom spread. The area’s two main higher education institutions — Imperial Valley College and a San Diego State University satellite campus acted fast.

San Diego State used $80 million in state funding to build a new STEM campus prioritizing science, technology, engineering and math.

This fall, the classrooms will open for students in the school’s new undergraduate degree programs in electrical engineering and chemistry, both chosen to support local industry needs in the geothermal and lithium sectors. As of mid-April, the campus had received nearly 100 eligible applications for the two programs, according to Daniella Rodiles, a media relations officer at the university.

Imperial Valley College received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for its Lithium Industry Force Training program. The program’s three certificates — plant operator, chemical lab technician and instrumentation technician — can each be completed in two semesters, and courses include chemistry, math, hazmat training, water treatment plant operation and plant operation.

The community college has touted the certificate programs as a fast track into the lithium industry. “Are you ready to launch your career in the booming lithium industry? Imperial Valley College’s new chemical lab technician certificate program is your ticket in,” states a voiceover in a 2024 promotional video for one of the certificate programs. 

And Imperial Valley residents, hungry for stable jobs close to home, have responded.

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

For George Prieto, the plant operator certificate is his first foray into higher education. On a recent Monday before class, he showed off his newly issued badge for an internship at the local water and power utility, which will fulfill the program’s work experience requirements. Prieto, 48, previously worked in retail merchandising and deejays on the weekends. 

“Usually, when they have these jobs, people from all over the world come; this gives us a chance with this being our backyard,” said Prieto. “We don’t have to go and sacrifice and go somewhere else [for a job].”

Prieto’s classmate, Alberto Curiel, was initially looking into an electrician certificate when he heard “how much of a demand” there will be for plant operators. Curiel, 24, wants a job with benefits in Imperial Valley that pays better than roofing, which is what he’s done since high school for around $23 an hour, “while breaking my back in the heat.”

“I kind of want a better trade-off,” said Curiel. 

Industry representatives and the county blame the delayed timelines on a 2024 lawsuit by environmental groups. The lawsuit alleges Imperial County officials underestimated future environmental impacts — such as water potential pollution and health effects — of a project proposed by Controlled Thermal Resources. A court rejected the legal challenge last year, and the environmental justice groups have appealed.  

But there are other factors at play too. The Trump administration eliminated electric vehicle incentives last year, and both industry and the federal government have turned more attention to lithium projects in other parts of the country. In late 2024, the U.S. Geological Survey announced between 5 million and 19 million tons of lithium reserves located beneath southwestern Arkansas, rivaling the vast reserve near the Salton Sea. 

One project in Arkansas received a $225 million Department of Energy grant, and Chevron opened up a pilot well in the area. In Nevada, the Trump administration has taken an equity stake in a different lithium project. Near the Salton Sea, one of the three main companies working on lithium recently shifted some of its attention to data centers. 

In late 2024, a member of the California Energy Commission warned Imperial County residents that “the Lithium Valley is not a sure thing,” citing the trend of federal funding from the Department of Energy going toward other states.

Last August, SDSU President Adela de la Torre was more blunt, writing in a commentary piece that “unless progress in Lithium Valley accelerates rapidly, these students will graduate into an empty local job market.”

“The timing thing has been something that’s out of our control,” John McMillan, SDSU’s assistant vice president of economic development, said in an interview. “What we can control is two things: One is being collaborative with the companies, trying to see if we can cobuild opportunity.”

“The other thing that we can control is the students that we train,” said McMillan. “What we can guarantee is that the students will have a quality engineering and chemistry education that can make them effective in many of the industries out here.”

And, since SDSU is starting out with only freshmen in its first year offering new STEM degrees, it will be another four years before the campus starts producing graduates.

Imperial Valley College will soon graduate its third year of industry-trained students.

“The original plan was to time all of these programs sequential to once the industry comes up to speed,” said Lennor Johnson, who leads the Imperial Community College District. By now, he said, “we thought we would be 100% in full operation with Lithium Valley.”

A total of 173 students have enrolled in certification programs since fall 2023; 42 have completed their certificates and 57 are currently enrolled. As of Fall 2025, a total of 16 students had found jobs directly related to their certificates, Johnson said.

Imperial Valley College has reduced the number of students in each cohort and will not offer two of the certificates next year. The plan is to bring those programs back in the 2027-2028 academic year, if that timing lines up with the industry’s projections on jobs.

Related: States bet big on career education, but struggle to show it works 

Prieto is hopeful that his certificate will be transferable to other industries, while Dillon believes the huge amount of lithium under Imperial County means the industry will come to full fruition eventually. In April, he started a new full-time job with a mining company, with good pay, benefits, room and board while on-site, and a company car.

There’s just one catch: The job isn’t in Imperial County. 

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

This story about Imperial Valley 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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For generations, we’ve been told that higher education is the surest path to a better life. But too many students don’t feel that way, and often with good reason: They are graduating with mountains of debt and few career prospects.  

Last summer, Congress wisely ushered in a new era of accountability in higher education when it passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Along with streamlined repayment options for student borrowers, the law includes overdue benchmarks for earnings, designed to ensure that higher education degrees leave students financially better off than if they had stuck to a high school diploma alone.  

These are important steps toward protecting students and taxpayers alike. Yet there is still one glaring carve-out to the “do no harm” standard: certificate programs that often don’t pay off.

Certificate programs may not get a lot of attention, but they are the fastest growing sector in higher education. Today, more than 1,280 programs enroll upward of 220,000 students every year, about 80 percent of them at for-profit institutions. Yet, despite longstanding concerns of predatory practices among many of these programs, Congress has continued to shield them from meaningful oversight.    

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

Take cosmetology schools, which account for 45 percent of certificate programs. For-profit cosmetology schools first sprang up in the 1920s, as Hollywood gave rise to the first “it girls,” and along with them, new makeup and hair trends. After World War II, federal policies like the GI Bill and the Higher Education Act created expansive financial aid programs intended to lift more Americans into the middle class.

They also paved the way for predatory for-profit schools to game the system. Cosmetology schools needlessly raised tuition to rake in more financial aid dollars.  

By the 1970s, bank regulators were sounding the alarm: cosmetology schools had become major sources of waste and abuse. In 1971, a loan officer testifying to Congress confirmed that the largest increases in loans had been among “trade schools and so-called beauty or barber schools.”

The loan officer noted that while cosmetology schools made up only a small, but growing, volume of the loan portfolio, they generated a significant portion of loan defaults. “Who is benefiting from these programs?” he asked. “Are the students benefiting, or are the school operators benefiting?” 

We’re still asking that question 50 years later. Today, cosmetology schools market themselves to women and working parents as a pathway to better pay and flexible hours. But research shows that most  cosmetology students enrolled today will likely earn less than someone who only has a high school diploma. 

Related: Congress exempted beauty schools from rules about how much graduates should earn

Tuition at some cosmetology programs can reach $20,000 a year, yet graduates from certain schools often leave for jobs earning just over $17,000 a year, while burdened by a median student loan debt of $11,000. At the same time, many schools use exploitative business practices under the guise of training programs.

For example, it’s common for cosmetology schools to have paying students “work the floor,” essentially making students cut hair and paint nails for no pay, while the school pockets the proceeds.

If any career education program was in need of reform, it was cosmetology schools. So that begs the question: why did they get a pass?  

The answer lies, unsurprisingly, in Washington, D.C. As cosmetology schools grew in popularity, their powerful lobbying arm grew alongside them. At every turn, the American Association of Cosmetology Schools  has pushed against the basic accountability measures that other certificate programs are held to in this country.  

In 2023, when the Department of Education mandated that all career-oriented programs meet minimum earnings and debt-to-earnings standards, the AACS sued to stop the rule from being put in place. They claimed that unreported tips account for a significant portion of a cosmetology graduate’s earnings, making the “minimum earnings requirement” an unfair burden for these schools.

Yet research shows that nearly 90 percent of salons do, in fact, report tips on W-2 forms. So, it turns out the burden was fair after all. 

And what’s worse is that these schools often prey on low-income women and women of color, exacerbating cycles of poverty for the very students they purport to help.  

The “One Big Beautiful Bill” was a chance for Congress to end the legal battle over reforming a wasteful industry. Instead, it handed certificate programs, and thus cosmetology schools, an exception. 

Related: How cosmetology schools mire students in debt

Helpfully, the Department of Education’s “do no harm” proposal would use existing authority to hold all programs accountable for their earnings. With a final rule on the bill’s provisions anticipated by July 1, public debate continues, especially as cosmetology schools lobby to influence the outcome.

Congress needs to revise the underlying statute to make clear their intent to hold all programs – including certificate programs – to the earnings standard. In the meantime, the U.S. Department of Education must continue to stand firm and enforce regulations that can keep low performers in check.  

If a program consistently leaves its graduates worse off, it should lose access to federal student loans, just as an associate or bachelor’s degree program would. That way, schools that deliver real value will survive, while others will be forced to reform or go out of business.

It’s time for cosmetology schools—and other certificate programs like them—to prove that behind the glitter of big promises, there can be gold. 

Kelly McManus is executive vice-president of education at Arnold Ventures. The Arnold Ventures has been among the numerous funders of The Hechinger Report.

 Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about certificate programs 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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This story was published by The 19th and reprinted with permission. 

Tucked in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s sprawling universal childcare plan is a little-talked-about milestone: In September, the city will open what appears to be the first free daycare for municipal workers in the country. 

The center, called The Little Apple, is a pilot program that could prove to be a model for cities across the country that are childcare curious, but not ready to take the big universal swing. 

Housed in a renovated space on the first floor of the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building in Manhattan, home base for more than 2,000 city workers, the Little Apple will offer free care to the kids of full-time staff. All workers in the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), a city government support agency, can also take advantage of it regardless of their work location.

The center will be small — just 40 seats for children ages six weeks to 3 years old. To pay for it, the city budgeted about $1.5 million, or $35,000 per child.

“This is what Wall Street could call a good investment,” Mamdani said in a press conference announcing the new center. “We know that after housing, the cost of childcare is what is pushing working families out of this city.” 

DCAS Commissioner Yume Kitasei told The 19th said the solution came about as a retention strategy, responding to the needs workers shared. In surveys, workers enthusiastically embraced the idea. One worker described access to free childcare as “life-changing.”

That’s probably not hyperbole. Childcare affordability is a national problem that has only grown more acute. Childcare costs an average of more than $13,000 annually nationwide; in New York for an infant at a center it’s closer to $21,000 on average. Paying for a daycare now vies with housing costs as the top constraint on family budgets, so much so that some parents have had to move or drop out of the workforce. 

Cities, meanwhile, have been struggling to retain their workers since the pandemic. Benefits like childcare, which some cities and private companies have dabbled with, can help address the quality-of-life issues that are pushing workers out of jobs. 

“This is a great time for us to sort of be thinking about: How can we make our jobs even more attractive to people and also retain the city workers that we have?” Kitasei said. “This is one piece of that puzzle.” 

Kitasei added that a “healthy” number of staffers applied for The Little Apple and the department expects to fill its 40 childcare seats. Anyone who doesn’t get a spot will be put on a waitlist.

There is an appetite across the country for childcare solutions that could help bring down costs for certain workers, and cities are already taking on creative fixes. 

Several already have childcare centers in municipal buildings or for city employees, including Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Grand Junction, Colorado, though none of them are free like New York’s. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the county school district and a local childcare center known nationally for creating stable childcare models have partnered to provide childcare for the children of teachers inside unused classrooms in schools. Boone County, Missouri, is building a childcare center exclusively for children of first responders. 

In the private sector, Google, General Mills and Siemens closed longstanding childcare centers they operated on their campuses in recent years, but efforts continue elsewhere. Patagonia has operated a childcare center at its California headquarters since the 1980s, a move it argues has lowered turnover from employees who use the site by 25 percent. Overstock.com also has an onsite childcare center at its Utah headquarters. Both are subsidized, not free. 

“As cities in every region of the country compete with the private sector and other municipalities to attract and retain workers and elected officials, ensuring access to childcare offers an opportunity for local governments to build a representative workforce and invest in the future of their communities,” said Quincy Midthun, an outreach specialist with the Mayors Innovation Project at the High Road Strategy Center, a think tank focused on solutions to social problems.

The Little Apple, and New York City broadly, reflect a changing political tide when it comes to childcare. 

The announcements of universal childcare in New York City and in New Mexico in the last year received an enormous amount of attention across the country. Both places took an idea that for many years was floated as a pipe dream — treating childcare similarly to public education — and turned it into reality. In New York, it’s one of the few issues that Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat, can agree on. 

Voters are also hungry for more solutions: In poll after poll, they assert that spending money on childcare is a good investment. 

Emmy Liss, who heads Mamdani’s childcare office, said childcare is at a “political tipping point.” 

“We’re in this moment where folks across all political, socioeconomic, demographic spectrums recognize that childcare is essential, that childcare is something families are struggling to access, and know that the market economics of childcare don’t work without public investment,” Liss said. “We see recognition of that.”

With Little Apple, New York is testing what it looks like to commit to its promises of free care for all, but doing it first for its own employees. 

“If we are asking folks to report to work in person in parts of the city where childcare is expensive, as it is all over the city, I think that we have to recognize that childcare is an important part of how we keep people in the workforce,” Liss said. 

Mamdani and Hochul have been working to make childcare universally available to children in the city through a phased rollout set to conclude in four years. For 2-year olds, the mayor announced that 2,000 free seats will be available in the fall in four largely low-income areas of the city. Another 12,000 are planned for 2027. For 3-year-olds, about 2,000 new seats will be added in the fall, as well. The city has an existing universal childcare program for 4-year-olds. 

Universal childcare as Mamdani envisions it will cover kids ages 6 weeks to 5 years with a price tag of about $6 billion annually, making it the most expensive pillar of his affordability agenda. Mamdani is expected to push to fund the program with a tax increase on the wealthy, a strategy Hochul has not been on board for, though the state is chipping in $4.5 billion. Mamdani has not yet unveiled what his universal childcare program would look like for infants and young toddlers.

How New York City’s program rolls out and its sustainability are being closely watched by proponents of universal care, who argue it’s also an anti-poverty measure.

“We know that other places are watching as we try different things out, including the work at the Little Apple,” Liss said.

In New York City, 21 percent of working parents experienced some kind of childcare hardship in 2024 that forced them to forgo care or use inadequate care, particularly families living in poverty, single mothers and Black parents, according to a recent report from Robin Hood, an anti-poverty organization, and Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. 

An average of 3,400 2- and 3-year-olds were pushed into poverty between 2022 and 2024 specifically due to the cost of childcare, a separate report from the same organizations found. An estimated 4,100 2- and 3-year-olds would be lifted out of poverty each year if they had access to universal 2-K and 3-K education. That would reduce poverty for this age group by 9 percent. 

Rebecca Bailin, the executive director of the parent organizing group New Yorkers United for Child Care, said the problem has reached such a fever pitch that thousands of parents started to organize around the issue in 2023 and helped push the agenda that was central to Mamdani’s election. 

Bailin, who has a 1-year-old, said she can now depend on a 3-K program when her child turns 3 and likely a 2-K program, as well — a savings of about $100,000. The 2-K program Mamdani is rolling out will also be full-day care rather than partial-day care that wraps up around 2 p.m. like the existing 3-K program, addressing a top ask from parents.

“People are stoked,” Bailin said. “People feel like they can stay in the city.” 

The Little Apple is a small part of the larger effort, but, “if we want to retain people, we have to do this,” Bailin said. 

“This is something we want to see scaled. If city workers can’t afford to live here, that’s a real problem,” she continued. “This is really critical and we need this for everybody.” 

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As young sisters growing up in Las Vegas, we didn’t have the language to define our fascination with science. For Angel, it was an early obsession with questions about health and fairness: Why do some people get sick and others don’t? Why do some communities struggle more than others? Why isn’t there always a solution? 

For Lisa, it was Marvel’s comic-book character Iron Man on our computer screen, planting the seed of invention and helping others. 

At that point, our interests were drastically removed from a reality where much of our day-to-day life was in a state of pandemic flux. In 2021, when Lisa was 13 and Angel was 17, shifting dynamics in our family created uncertainty and instability in our lives. Through it all, our love of science became an anchor. 

Not only did science embody our passions and dreams, it became one of the few spaces where effort, curiosity and persistence actually led somewhere. Later on, immersive STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) experiences opened doors for us, and we want to help open those same doors for others. That’s why we wish more students had the opportunity to do “real science” early, the way that we did by attending the nation’s oldest summer STEM program.

Angel attended virtually during the pandemic, studying biochemistry. Lisa studied biochemistry in person at Purdue University. Being part of these programs gave both of us real access to serious research for the first time, working with U.S. and international students from all over the world. 

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

We weren’t just following instructions. We were designing experiments and troubleshooting with our peers. When we did research, it didn’t just teach us lab skills. It taught us that our background and circumstances don’t disqualify us from doing our own world-class research. Not enough people realize that STEM is more than just learning facts. It’s much broader. Working in STEM relies on communication, cooperative learning and other dynamic skills.

The confidence Angel got from researching traumatic brain injury and cardiovascular health boosted her application to Princeton, from which she graduated in May with a degree in molecular biology. 

STEM gave Lisa the confidence to create her own advocacy and awareness organizations, including one focused on empowering young Nigerian women through mentorship and education and another that aims to teach teens about diabetes prevention and management.

Related: OPINION: Pathways for future scientists are becoming scarce, threatening a strong and innovative workforce

Real science, we both learned, almost never works perfectly the first time. Most of the time, when things go wrong, what helps is taking a step back and realizing the problem isn’t with your equations or your math, but with your assumptions. 

Being stuck on a problem isn’t a sign of failing. It’s a sign that you’re actually doing real research. STEM teaches more than just biology or chemistry or engineering; it teaches students how to work with people and how to function in the real world.

When people talk about the need for “soft skills” in addition to technical expertise, they mean habits we both developed as high school students, thanks to the opportunity to conduct actual research. Working with peers to do hands-on science for its own sake, instead of for just a grade or a competition, made us better students, better colleagues and better people.

Meaningful change can happen before college when students have the chance to really explore STEM outside of a textbook. It spurs understanding, innovation and humanity. 

Related: Just 3% of scientists and engineers are Black or Latina women. Here’s what teachers are doing about it.

The momentum that started from our initial experiences with “real science” is now propelling us toward change and advocacy. Our curiosity turned into the study of biology and chemistry because we realized that these are tools that allow you to intervene, not just observe.

We both have an interest in public health and medicine, because medicine is applied science. Every diagnosis, every medication, every lab result is rooted in biology, chemistry and data. If we’re treating a patient, we don’t just want to know what the guidelines say. We want to understand what’s happening at a molecular level and why a treatment works — or doesn’t. And that’s why we both have chosen to pursue a STEM education. 

Lisa plans to study pre-med at Princeton next fall in the hopes of pursuing biomedical innovation. Postgraduation, Angel is planning to study for an advanced degree in public health and medicine at Yale. She recently founded and is now president of the Global Health Reform Initiative (GHRI), a U.S.-based nonprofit advancing health equity for underserved communities through global health research, policy and technology-enabled health care access.

Giving students the chance to tackle real-world problems, allowing them to fail and regroup, and prioritizing learning through access doesn’t only lead to results, but to better humans.

Angel Ndubisi has recently completed a bachelor’s of arts (AB) in molecular biology at Princeton University. She is the founder of Global Health Reform Initiative, a nonprofit public health organization. Lisa Ndubisi will attend Princeton University in fall 2026 to study pre-med.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.This story about Summer STEM 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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Algebra I is known as a gateway class: Students who pass the course are more likely to take advanced math courses, graduate from college and earn more money as adults.

But for many children, their path to success in Algebra I is formed years before they take the class. Third grade math scores can strongly predict which students will go on to pass Algebra I and which ones may struggle.

A recent working paper analyzing test scores of over 1.7 million Texas students explored the phenomenon. It found that the gaps in Algebra I pass rates between low-income, Black and Hispanic students and these students’ more affluent, white and Asian peers can largely be traced to how well students master early, foundational math skills.

Third grade math scores are the first point when researchers can capture how well children are learning early math, said Ben Backes, a principal economist at the American Institutes for Research and one of the authors of the working paper. But “education doesn’t start in third grade,” he said — those foundational skills are built much earlier. 

Other research has shown the connection between early achievement and later school success, but this study, conducted by AIR and the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or CALDER, explored Algebra I specifically because that course is so pivotal for students. 

The study also captured how the pandemic derailed the academic growth of some students. For example, low-income students who had the same test scores as more affluent peers fell further behind. Students with already low test scores saw a steeper decline in their math skills compared to students with higher scores.

Policy makers have tried other ways to boost Algebra I pass rates, such as delaying the class until ninth grade, or enrolling all students in the course. But those policies might not be getting at the root of the problem, the authors concluded: “Our results underscore the importance of targeting resources to early elementary math instruction, especially for low-achieving students.” 

That message, however, still has to get through to school leaders, said Deborah Stipek, the faculty director for Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education, a network of scholars focused on improving math instruction for young children. 

In California, for example, education majors take two or three courses on teaching reading, compared to one course on math education, said Stipek, a professor emerita at Stanford University. And, in a recent survey of nearly 100 California superintendents, the majority ranked English language arts as their top instructional priority; math was third. 

There are instructional tools to help teachers who might have a handful of students who are behind their peers. But “in places where you have a very large group of kids that are living in poverty or learning English, you have classrooms where the majority of kids by first grade are way behind,” Stipek said. “We need more and better teaching, in general.”

This story about early 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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At a time when polls show two-thirds of Americans think a higher education is no longer worth the price, Forsyth Technical Community College has a message for them.

“College,” it says, “could cost you nothing.”

The planned marketing slogan is a reference to the most dramatic expansion in more than 50 years of federal grants for education after high school — and the reality that few consumers know they could benefit from the kinds of programs for which hundreds of millions of dollars will be available as soon as this summer. 

The lack of awareness is made worse by the fact that many states whose job it is to put the policy into place aren’t yet ready, meaning only a comparatively limited number of consumers will initially be able to use the money for a relatively small number of programs.

“There’s a huge awareness gap with people not understanding what it is, what programs are eligible and how much they can get,” said Devin Purgason, associate vice president of student experience, marketing and outreach at Forsyth Tech, which is in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

The new policy, known as Workforce Pell, widens the scope of federal Pell Grants by helping lower-income learners pay not just for associate or bachelor’s degrees, but for nondegree job training as short as eight weeks, which was previously not covered, in high-demand fields including nursing, phlebotomy, child care, truck-driving, welding, car repair and HVAC. This at a time when two-thirds of registered voters think a four-year degree is no longer worth the cost.

Passed less than a year ago as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Workforce Pell has had to be set up so quickly that the National Governors Association calls it “one of the most consequential near-term policy challenges” states have faced. 

While the provisions formally take effect July 20, states and institutions are allowed to get started as early as July 1. But most are still scrambling to figure out which training programs will satisfy the dozens of pages of eligibility requirements. The governors association has counseled members to approve only a limited number of the highest-quality programs at first.

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

“I don’t know that this is going to be a ribbon-cutting kind of moment on July 1,” said Autumn Rivera, senior policy specialist for state and federal education and workforce at the National Conference of State Legislatures. “It’s one of those things where the states are trying to wrap their heads around this still.”

One result is that, as significant of a change as Workforce Pell might seem, it is almost certain to start small. As few as several hundred out of the tens of thousands of nondegree programs on the market are likely at the beginning to meet the eligibility criteria — which include the requirements that at least 70 percent of learners successfully graduate and get jobs within six months that pay enough to justify the cost — the U.S. Department of Education has said. 

As many as 28,000 may eventually qualify, Nicholas Kent, undersecretary of education, told a conference of education journalists. 

More than half of nondegree programs in the trades and in business and about half in health are expected to be covered, but as few as 4 percent will make the cut in “public service and consumer” fields, which include such subjects as early childhood education, retail and culinary fields, fashion and interior design, the department estimates. In one state, North Carolina, a consultant hired to compare all kinds of community college nondegree programs with the requirements of Workforce Pell found that only about 4 percent were eligible.

While more than 4 million students a year take nondegree courses at community colleges alone, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, the Department of Education expects between 184,000 and 188,000 per year to benefit from Workforce Pell. The Congressional Budget Office projects the number will be closer to 100,000. That compares to 7.4 million recipients who get Pell Grants annually for bachelor’s and associate degrees.

Related: Five big changes coming to higher education July 1

Still, payouts averaging about $2,200 each will become available beginning this summer to learners in nondegree programs who previously didn’t have access to federal Pell Grants. These include courses leading to certificates, occupational licenses and certifications.

“It’s a way that learners can really think about, ‘Hey, I can go back and get that critical credential of value to become upwardly mobile,’ ” said Priscilla Camacho, chief legislative, industry and external relations officer at the Alamo Colleges District in San Antonio, Texas.

Like Forsyth Tech, Alamo is gearing up to promote its Workforce Pell-eligible programs — in its case, with a one-minute video that avoids complex insider lingo. “Your fast path to in-demand careers,” it calls them, simply.

“Even though we offer these opportunities for short-term learning, the folks we talk to in focus groups don’t see themselves as students,” said Kristi Wyatt, Alamo’s vice chancellor for strategic communications, marketing and brand experience. “Many of them are working adults with families, and they are looking for the quickest way of upskilling themselves.”

The average age of people traditionally enrolled in nondegree courses is 38, according to research based on data from occupational training in Texas, which makes them harder to find and recruit than, say, students in high schools.

Surveys show that fewer than half of people who could most benefit from these nondegree programs know about them. 

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

Not even college counselors and career advisers are prepared to advise consumers about the kinds of programs covered by Workforce Pell, a survey by the National College Attainment Network found. Fewer than one in 10 said they felt very confident about explaining the programs, while 40 percent said they were not very or not at all confident.

“A lot of these populations don’t know this exists,” said Rivera, of the association of state legislatures. “That’s one of the main concerns our membership has raised.”

There are other hurdles. The legislation left it mostly up to states to determine what fields are in highest demand and which programs meet the requirements, including graduates getting jobs and earning salaries that justify the cost of the training. At least a quarter of states haven’t previously collected this data, research shows.

Where such information is available, it often is divided among different agencies, is incomplete and limited and excludes people who work for themselves or for the government or military, which are not part of the unemployment insurance system commonly used to track employment histories, an analysis by the consulting firm HCM Strategists found.

Without solid reporting about outcomes, advocates fear that the sudden infusion of federal cash could lead to the deceptive recruiting tactics and other risks to consumers that have historically characterized some nondegree programs.

In the past, “short-term programs were attractive to abusive colleges because they could churn a lot of students through in a short amount of time,” said James Kvaal, undersecretary of education during the Biden administration and now vice president of the National Program at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. 

Navigating the huge number of credential programs of all kinds has only gotten harder. There are nearly 1.9 million such programs offered in the United States, by 134,491 providers, including both degree and nondegree, according to the nonprofit Counting Credentials project.

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

Returns vary widely. One study by researchers at the University of Michigan and the Strada Education Foundation found that graduates from nondegree programs at community colleges in Texas earned about 4 percent more, two years after finishing, than they made before enrolling. But the increase for those trained in transportation and engineering technologies was two to four times higher, while learners who studied business, marketing, information sciences, communication and design saw essentially no gain at all.

A separate study of 23,000 nondegree credentials by the American Enterprise Institute and the Burning Glass Institute found that slightly more than one in 10 resulted in a 10 percent or higher increase in pay.

Still, there is pushback from providers — many of them for-profit schools — that teach programs almost sure to be disqualified from Workforce Pell. Eighty-three percent of the objections to it during a comment period were in defense of schools that teach those subjects, an analysis by higher education consultant Phil Hill and Associates found. Nearly 93 percent of cosmetology programs won’t meet the requirements, for example, Hill has calculated.

Those with programs that likely will qualify, meanwhile, said they are eager to get started.

“The opportunity is going to be great,” said Purgason, at Forsyth Tech. “I just think we’re going to be very slow at this.”

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

This story about Pell Grants for job training 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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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Like many families, Jessica and Adrian Garcia, who live in the mountain resort town of Ruidoso, had to cobble together different child care options for their son when they returned to work after his birth in 2023.

In August 2021, New Mexico expanded subsidized free child care to households earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line — at the time, $87,840 for a family of three. The Garcias earned too much to qualify.

Jessica, who works at the local branch of Eastern New Mexico University, and Adrian, a police officer, settled for a part-time day care schedule two days a week that cost $300 a month for their son to attend daycare two days a week because they couldn’t afford full-time hours. Jessica’s mother also pitched in to help. At the time, Adrian had to bargain constantly with his boss to juggle graveyard shifts and child care, and if his schedule changed, his wife and mother-in-law both had to rearrange their own work on short notice to accommodate his.

Before long, Jessica received an ultimatum from her job: If she couldn’t work full-time hours consistently, she would be demoted to a part-time position and lose the family’s health insurance benefits.

Their luck turned last November when New Mexico became the first state in the country to launch free, universal child care for children from birth through age 13, regardless of household income. The expansion to a truly universal program “was just a big blessing to us,” said Jessica, who was able to enroll her son in full-time care. “It’s been a huge help.”

New Mexico garnered a wave of attention when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced in September that all of the state’s families would be eligible for child care assistance. “Child care is essential to family stability, workforce participation, and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” she said at the time. 

In March 2026,  requirements for the program shifted. Families earning up to 600 percent of the federal poverty line are now eligible for free child care without copays, the equivalent of a four-person family earning $198,000 annually. Copays beyond that threshold are also contingent on if the price of oil decreases.  Participating families can choose from a wide range of options, including center-based care, home-based providers, before- and after-school care, and faith-based centers. On average, the universal program is expected to save participating families $12,000 a year. (Private providers still have the option to not serve families receiving child care assistance and continue to charge tuition.) 

What has received less attention outside New Mexico, however, is the state’s attempt to fairly compensate the long underappreciated and underpaid early childhood workforce.

Because the state is now in charge of early education through the universal program, it has also stepped into the role of being responsible for child care wages. It has had to decide questions such as how to weigh experience against education in child care wages, how to financially incentivize centers to adopt rigorous measures of quality and a whole host of issues that have typically been left to the market. 

But the child care “market,” as it currently exists in other states, has primarily produced poverty wages for workers and exorbitant costs for families. There’s a hope that if New Mexico can iron out these issues, it can lead the way for other places that might want to implement a universal program, such as New York City. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced earlier this year that the city will create 2,000 free child care slots for 2-year-olds in the city on its way to scaling up a universal and free program for all young children, but the city would need 30,000 new child care workers to make that work. 

New Mexico has currently set aside $60 million for increased wages for the state’s child care workforce. A working group is now refining a “wage scale and career lattice framework” intended to support experience, education and quality. 

“It’s so exciting to see New Mexico grapple with these questions,” said Lena Bilik, a senior program manager at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank that advocates for universal child care. “Other countries have realized this is a place where the government has to step in. If you’re going to expand your system, you can’t do it without increasing wages. That’s starting to be a bigger conversation.”

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

Child care providers and advocates in the state have different opinions about the efforts thus far. 

Barbara Luna Tedrow, a child care center owner in Farmington, first opened her business, A Gold Star Academy, over 25 years ago with 60 children and 10 staff members. Farmington is oil and gas country surrounded by badlands and grayish sands. It’s also just outside of Navajo Nation, making it a border town with a significant Native American population. 

Around 2012, Tedrow was approached by an oil field worker — New Mexico is the nation’s second-largest producer of oil — who offered to finance the construction of a second child care center. Over the next decade, grant funding and solid relationships with city officials helped her expand to five branches. Now, her team cares for 700 children, with 400 of those slots opened up in the past three years alone. Part of her success, she said, is because she worked to advocate for child care as a means of complementing oil and gas jobs.

“If you want cities to flourish, they need high-quality child care,” she said. “All of these new employees want to go to work, but they can’t without it.”

Tedrow’s employees receive medical, vision and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) retirement program, which together cost $15,000 per employee on top of their salary. Therefore, Tedrow said she worries about what might happen if state reimbursement rates decline in the future or if the state increases the minimum wage for employees without increasing the state reimbursement along with it. 

“We’re dependent on the state for wages, benefits and everything else to run a high-quality child care center,” she said. 

Mirna Polendo, the director of Imagination Station, a Christian preschool in the mountain resort town of Ruidoso, made some changes to her program when the state moved to a universal system. New Mexico pays enhanced rates to centers that are open at least 10 hours a day and that pay increased wages to teachers. Polendo extended her hours from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and bumped employee wages to $17 an hour to qualify for more state reimbursement. 

In return, Polendo receives $1,400 per month from the state to care for an 18-month-old infant, $1,075 for a toddler and $890 for kids ages 3 to 5. Across the board, the state reimburses more for care than private tuition ever did. 

If her center meets certain quality measures, the state reimbursements could be even higher. But one of those quality measures would require her to bump staff wages up to $18 an hour. That is right on the borderline of what Polendo can afford to pay staff while remaining in the black, she said — “I can’t do higher than that.” 

Olga Grays, a home daycare provider in Las Cruces, has worked as an early childhood educator for 20 years and is licensed to care for up to 12 kids at a time in her home. In her backyard and garden area, vibrant streams of papel picado — colored paper with intricate perforated designs — are taped up across the shaded patio. Colorful play structures and swings are a few steps away. The setup feels so personal, which Grays credits to the nature of the business. 

“Home daycares have this connection with parents that a lot of centers can’t,” she said. Some days, Grays opens up at 4 a.m. to accommodate a family, and closes as late as 11 p.m. 

Grays has to pay her employees $16 an hour to accept state subsidies and has chosen at this time not to make the changes to her business that would unlock larger reimbursement from the state. 

“I’d rather spend my time in daycare with children providing the services they need,” she said. “I don’t believe that taking the time out to do that paperwork will help them.”

But that means that any of her employees could leave for another center that is paying more, she said. She supports linking wages to years of experience and educational attainments instead of focusing solely on a center’s quality metrics.  

While the work that remains is complex, that should not overshadow the years of effort and advocacy that it took for the state to reach this point, said Jacob Vigil, the chief legislative officer for New Mexico Voices for Children, a state advocacy group. 

“It took over a decade for us to get here,” Vigil said. “It was a campaign that was broad based and that had a diverse base of folks that really understood and coalesced around the messaging of why early childhood is important.” 

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

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

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Higher education is under siege, with many students and parents balking at high costs. In a series of op-eds, university leaders lay out their efforts to keep college affordable. This is the second in the series.

Here are some recent conclusions about higher education that are drawing national attention: College is unaffordable and overpriced, highly selective and inequitable, biased and conformist. 

A recent Yale report highlights these as some of the main public perceptions and concerns driving declining trust in higher education. 

And yet, as the report correctly notes, elite private institutions like Yale represent only a sliver of American colleges and universities. America’s regional public universities (RPUs) — which we represent — enroll 70 percent of the nation’s 7 million undergraduates at public four-year institutions and produce two-thirds of the baccalaureate and master’s degrees earned at those schools, according to our analysis of federal data. Our institutions tell a very different story of higher education than elite schools do — and it is a story we believe must be told.

Yale deserves credit for addressing the issue of trust. Although it and other elite schools hold an outsized place in the public imagination of what college is and who it serves, some of the concerns the report raises are well-founded and broadly felt: Cost is a real barrier to enrollment and completion for many students. And skepticism about the value of a degree is understandable as recent graduates try to launch their careers amid a tough entry-level job market.

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

The reality of RPUs, however, challenges other aspects of the Yale report’s conclusions. 

Take affordability. Families understandably question whether college is within reach when they hear about tuition topping $70,000 a year at elite universities. According to an AASCU analysis of the College Scorecard and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, however, the average in-state tuition and fees at RPUs are about $10,000 a year, and 97 percent of our financially dependent students graduate with a median debt below $20,000.

Cost is a key reason we disproportionately enroll Pell Grant recipients and low-income students. Regional public universities are often an affordable gateway to a college degree.

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

RPUs focus on ensuring that every student has an opportunity to succeed. We extend opportunity by making access, not exclusion, core to our mission. Our admissions policies are designed not to earn prestige but to improve lives. We make transferring from community colleges easy by establishing close relationships with those institutions. We also offer flexible degree pathways, including part-time and online programs, because many of our students commute and are balancing work and family responsibilities. As a result, RPUs are more reflective of the broader public that higher education is meant to serve, enrolling larger shares of students of color, first-generation students, working adults, transfer students and veterans than non-RPUs.

And, although our institutions are not immune to challenges around free speech, conformity and self-censorship, the breadth of RPU students’ experiences often supports viewpoint diversity, and RPUs recognize the need to do more to embed the principles of civil discourse and free expression in campus life. 

In Michigan, for example, Grand Valley State University has a Center for Civil Discourse, while Oakland University has expanded opportunities for students to engage across differences through its Center for Civic Engagement. Another such effort is a recently launched pilot program at Oakland University, where students read “The Civility Book” by journalists Nolan Finley (a conservative) and Stephen Henderson (a progressive). Through facilitated dialogue, these students learn to question their assumptions, listen more carefully and return to difficult conversations with greater openness and empathy.

Like many RPUs, Oakland University delivers strong outcomes: OU graduates have median earnings 27 percent higher than those of alumni from comparable Michigan public institutions and 32 percent higher than those of workers without a college degree. Graduates build meaningful careers in fields ranging from health care to teaching to the local automotive industry.

The Yale report highlights widespread uncertainty about the fundamental mission of higher education. But that mission comes into clearer focus when we turn to the universities that educate and uplift far more students. 

RPUs keep faith with the American dream by offering affordable and accessible pathways to lives of purpose, success and engaged citizenship. 

That is a mission worthy of the public’s trust. 

Charles L. Welch is president and CEO of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a first-generation student.

Ora Hirsch Pescovitz is president of Oakland University and chair of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities Board of Directors.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about regional public universities 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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Harvard faculty have approved a controversial plan to overhaul the college’s grading system, including new limits on how many A’s professors can award. The goal: make an A mean something again.

But the debate goes beyond transcripts and GPAs. At a moment of deep skepticism toward elite higher education, some supporters say tougher grading could also help restore trust in institutions like Harvard.

In this episode of College Uncovered, GBH’s Kirk Carapezza heads to Harvard Yard, where high-achieving students worried about their futures are pushing back. And we hear from professors divided over a broader question: What are grades actually used for?

Economist Jeff Denning of the University of Texas at Austin explains why easier grading may weaken students’ incentives to study and to truly learn the material.

Meanwhile, a faculty report from Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education argues that grades at elite universities often no longer do what they’re supposed to do: measure and communicate learning. We hear from two of the report’s authors, sociologist Julia Adams and law professor Sarath Sanga.

And finally, The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay explains why, in the age of the easy A, parents may be getting a misleading picture of how their kids are actually doing.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Massachusetts Avenue at Johnston D, Harvard Square.

Harvard is known for handing out a lot of A’s, more than half of all grades issued to undergraduates here. So is that a problem? Well, some faculty want to restore the idea that an A represents extraordinary distinction by capping the number of A’s.

And many of the high achieving students here inside Harvard Yard are not happy about it.

This might sound egotistic, but I think everybody I know here works extremely hard.

If you do well enough to reach a certain threshold, I don’t think you should be curved down because other people also do well.

That’s sophomore Nayeen Das. He’s a physics major from Lexington, Massachusetts and senior Alexandria Westwright, a government major from Pittsburgh. I met them in Harvard Yard as they left class and as a tourist flocked to the John Harvard statue to rub its bronze foot.

Both Das and Westray say great inflation is real, but they worry limiting A’s could hurt students after graduation, when GPAs can matter in competitive job markets and grad school admissions.

Because you’re being compared to these students from other schools.

It’s a farce to say that there’s nothing distinguishing Harvard students just because we all have A’s.

This is College Uncovered, a podcast from GBH News that pulls back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza. Today on the show, higher eds deflate gate.

Harvard faculty have overwhelmingly passed a controversial plan to overhaul the college’s grading system and limit how many A’s they can give out. The stated goal? Make A’s meaningful again.

So let’s just call it MAMA or maybe MAMA. Whatever they end up calling the new policy, comedian and Harvard graduate Conan O’Brien noted it in his commencement speech.

Welcome trustees, deans, faculty, alumni, graduates, families, my fellow honorands, Justice Department spies, and that Uber Eats driver delivering mimosas.

Conan congratulated Harvard president Alan Garber for stewarding the class of 2026.

Fantastic job, sir. Really nice. Really nice.

Normally, I would give you an A plus, but in keeping with upcoming Harvard policy, I’m adjusting your grade to a C minus.

Trust me, it’s for the good of the school.

Well, whether it’s good for the school or not, another unstated goal might be restoring some public trust, or at least tamp down public resentment towards selective higher ed institutions like Harvard. More on that later. Other universities have tried similar policies, only to abandon them under pressure from students and their tuition-paying parents.

So will the Harvard Plan work? For years, Harvard and other selective or highly rejective colleges have been known for handing out a lot of A’s. At Harvard, more than half of all grades awarded to undergraduates last year were straight A’s, up from just a quarter 20 years ago.

Many faculty and administrators tell me those figures reveal a grading system that no longer evaluates and communicates meaningful differences in student performance. So, how exactly would this new Harvard plan work to fix that? Well, under the new policy, the number of A grades in any given course will be limited to the top 20% of students, plus four additional A’s per class.

So I wasn’t a math major, but that means in a class of 20, a professor can give no more than eight A’s. In a class of 80, the limit is 20. The new grading policy goes into effect in the fall of 2027, and administrators will then review it after three years.

Tenured government professor Stephen Lewicki says A’s have practically become the expectation on campus, and that pressure can influence professors too.

I can give an A minus and almost inevitably face a bitching, whining, complaining, entitled student in my office, or I can give an A and not have to bother, and I can get back to my work.

Lewicki hopes the new policy pushes back against a culture where more and more students expect the top grade.

All I aspire to here with this reform is getting kids used to getting A minuses. The status quo is unacceptable, and so we’ve got to experiment. Even if there are some pitfalls, even if there are problems initially, we have to try to experiment.

For Lewicki and other, shall we say, less outspoken professors, limiting A’s is also about reminding students that it’s okay to fail, or at least like me, get a B plus once in a while. Other faculty though strongly object to this plan.

So the biggest problem with talking to me is that I oppose the policy for 47 reasons, and I never know which one to start with.

Allison Frank Johnson has taught history at Harvard for more than two decades.

I teach modern European history. I also chaired the German department for seven years.

Johnson says she hates the new grading system in part because it assumes only a fixed share of her students can produce outstanding work.

For me, grades are an incentive to get students to do their very best work and to reflect on the work that they’ve done, not a way of ranking them against one another.

Johnson says the number of students in her classes who earn straight A’s has definitely crept up over the years. But as a teacher, that’s not even her top concern in the classroom.

I’m worried about AI. I’m worried about figuring out how to determine if my students are doing the work themselves. I’m worried about fairness.

Am I grading students who do their own work? Am I getting students to actually come into the classroom and engage with the ideas that I have? Am I able to keep my political views out of the classroom in a way that allows students to determine their own opinions and yet at the same time not silence myself?

Because I’m teaching about Nazis, right? That’s political. I think they’re bad.

I’m not neutral about it. So there’s a thousand things that I worry about in teaching and like, oh no, it used to be that only 15 percent of my students are getting A’s and now 40 percent of my students are getting A’s. That is not my number one worry.

And in the age of AI, she says she’s constantly thinking about what human skills she wants her students to develop over the course of a semester.

Being able to express yourself orally and in writing, to make an argument, to defend it with evidence, but also to know when what you’re reading is reliable and when it’s something that you shouldn’t necessarily trust. So evidence assessment is something I’m emphasizing more and more and more as our national ability to do that seems to be corroding. But why should somebody else tell me that the percentage of students who are going to excel at doing those things is going to be exactly 20?

If I can do better, if I can become a better teacher and convey those skills better, I still can’t give my students higher grades.

Grade inflation has been creeping up at American colleges for decades, and economists say that comes with serious consequences. When top grades become the norm, students may have less incentive to push themselves academically.

And so if you have weaker incentives to study, you’re less likely to learn the material. It turns out learning the material is helpful for you in the future.

That’s Jeff Denning, an economist at the University of Texas Austin. While some students worry lower grades could hurt their future prospects, Denning’s research suggests grade inflation may actually hurt students in the long run. Here’s how it works.

Denning identifies teachers who give out high grades relative to the average standardized test scores of their class.

We are able to categorize teachers into grade inflating and not in grade inflating teachers and compare students who have different kinds of experiences in high school and then link them to their earnings records. We find students who experienced more grade inflating teachers, they have lower earnings later in life.

The EZA phenomenon also reflects how American higher education has become increasingly transactional, tuition in exchange for jobs. And the Harvard debate comes at a time when students nationwide are reading less and increasingly relying on artificial intelligence for help. So cheating is top of mind.

Faculty at Princeton recently approved a policy requiring proctored in-person exams, changing a long-held honor system that relies on students to monitor themselves. And other institutions are increasingly experimenting with alternatives to traditional grades. So-called competency-based education, an idea first established back in the 1970s, is making a bit of a comeback.

At Brandeis University, as we’ve reported on this podcast, administrators are shifting their focus from grades to students’ competencies, adding a second transcript designed to measure skills beyond courses and GPAs.

Grades, of course, exist to evaluate and then communicate what students have learned. A faculty-produced report from Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education finds that the Ivy League University and at many peer institutions no longer do that. The report concludes decades of grade inflation have rendered the college grading system almost meaningless as an academic measure.

To restore common grading norms, the trust committee recommends capping course grade averages at a B. Sociology professor Julia Adams co-chaired the trust committee, which in its widely covered report gave a brutal assessment of academia’s role in fueling distrust and resentment toward US colleges and universities. And committee member Sarath Sanga teaches at Yale Law School and is an expert in grade inflation.

Sarath and Julia, thank you so much for speaking with College Uncovered.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

So, Sarath, from your perch there, what’s the problem with grade inflation?

Well, across higher ed, we’re seeing faculty even being reported being pressured by the structure to award higher grades than they might otherwise in order to maintain enrollment and student evaluations. So one of the problems of many is I would say that even inflation is not the most interesting feature. It’s the compression that it produces with more and more students being awarded the very top grade.

That means the way to think about the current system is that it’s essentially only identifying the bottom end of the class and not enabling the higher end to distinguish themselves.

And what are faculty there at Yale recommending?

We make two specific recommendations. The first is perhaps the big one, and that is to essentially normalize the GPA to 3.0. That is so that an average performance essentially merits a B.

That will take some buy-in and a lot of work. But in the meantime, we also recommend simply reporting more on the transcript itself to produce more contextualization for the grades themselves. And this is because an A in one class may not mean the same thing as an A in another class.

So reporting something like the average grade or the percentile is the specific thing we recommend that the student achieved within the class will help parents and students and employers and graduate admissions officers to make sense of the grade.

Julia Adams, in the context of public trust in higher ed, why do you think these kind of changes are necessary now?

Our committee was formed, of course, by President Mari McInnes at Yale to address the broad question of declining trust in higher education. Grade compression, grade inflation is one small piece of that, but it’s an important piece, particularly for the faculty whose ability to chart the performance of students in the faculty’s area of expertise is really one of the foundational aspects of faculty academic life.

How do you respond to other professors who say grading isn’t just about ranking students against themselves? Historian Allison Frank-Johnson at Harvard, for example, told me Yale and other schools are capitulating to outside criticism of higher education. Here she is.

You talk to a bunch of angry donors who think that universities are ruined by admitting first gen students and students of color and that naturally standards are going down and A’s don’t mean anything anymore. And I think that there’s a socioeconomic explanation for the kinds of people that are making these complaints. It has nothing to do with the work that our students are doing in the classroom.

I’d like to see some evidence that your granddad was doing like the Lord’s work at Harvard College because he was a super genius and got a C anyway. And yet the grandson is like a loser and all he cares about is, you know, watching beach volleyball, YouTube videos, and somehow he’s getting an A. I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

So, Sarath, what do you make of that argument?

Gee, I think it’s importing a lot of moral and political language into what is fundamentally a design question. So the question that I would ask is not what do the donors demand or what political message will this send or what angry alum could we placate? I would ask, how can we do right by our students?

Our obligation is to teach them well and to evaluate them rigorously, to give them back information about how they did relative to other peers, and even relative to their performance in other classes. So I think the way that the conversation has been framed is fundamentally wrong. The current system produces extraordinary anxiety and pervasive strategizing.

Students are choosing classes for expected grades rather than what they want to learn because there’s nothing in the system’s design that prevents it. I don’t think anyone is with a straight face actually defending the status quo, because the status quo is a very sharp, sharp trend toward all students getting A’s, which is to say toward no student being given individualized feedback.

Sarath Sanga is a law professor at Yale, and he studies how people and organizations set their own rules. Julia Adams is a sociology professor. She co-chaired the university’s trust committee.

Julia and Sarath, thank you so much for your time and your perspective. Thank you so much. Thanks, Kirk.

Harvard and Yale are not the first to wrestle with grade inflation. Several other colleges have already tried to directly address it, including Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Amherst, and Wellesley, more than two decades ago.

Unlike Harvard, there was no quota on the number of straight A’s or any kind of letter grade.

Akila Wirapana chairs the Economics Department at Wellesley, and he studied his own college’s policy. Beginning in 2004, Wellesley strongly encouraged, but did not require, professors to aim for an average grade of B+. Wirapana found grades dropped significantly, mostly in the humanities and social sciences.

Enrollment in majors like English, History, and Philosophy also declined, and student ratings of those professors fell, too.

It became called the grade deflation policy, which immediately suggests, I’m getting a grade lower than what I deserve. Why should my daughter come to Wellesley and get lower grades, and find it harder to go to graduate schools?

After years of complaints, and as sticker prices continued to soar, the women’s college ended the practice in 2019. At Harvard, historian Allison Frank Johnson says, looking forward, she’s not concerned fewer students will major in history or other humanities.

You know, of my like 47 reasons, that’s not even one of them. If this were the right thing to do, no, if it were the right thing to do, we would have to do it, right? I’m not a person who’s going to say, oh, I know this is the right thing to do, but I don’t want fewer students to take my class because I only, people only take my class to get easy A’s.

I mean, that would be a ridiculous ground for opposing this policy. It’s not the right thing to do. Students don’t only take my class because they’re looking for easy A’s.

I think what students are going to stop taking are classes that they think other hyper talented students are in.

Internal Harvard reports produced by faculty and student journalists show many professors feel their hyper talented students do not prioritize their courses because they’re spending more time on extracurriculars, sports, internships, and even filming TV shows just to stand out from the pack. A political reporter for the New York Times, for example, says in his bio online that he graduated from Harvard, but quote, mostly skipped class to report for the campus newspaper.

In today’s world, practically what distinguishes students at Harvard right now is not necessarily great because everybody has A’s because they work very hard. It is actually seen in our extracurriculars and the whole thing that we are criticized for working for.

Alexandria Westray, the government major from Pittsburgh we heard at the top of this episode, says students feel enormous pressure to take on leadership roles outside the classroom.

Students have taken upon ourselves to actually create a system in extracurriculars and internships that does distinguish who really can handle a lot of pressure, who has a lot of responsibility.

Her classmate, Michelle Baldorama, is from Virginia and says she’s not surprised so many Harvard students get A’s.

I think my peers work extremely hard for their grades. So, like, it makes sense that that would be the outcome.

Baldorama worries the new grading system will discourage academic risk-taking, pushing students away from harder courses that might hurt their GPA. She recalls taking a tough class in which she did not get the top grade.

I did take a statistics class. It was really hard. I did not get an A in it.

Can you tell me what you did get?

A B. It was the only one, but it’s fine. But it’s like I’m glad that I took that course.

Now with Harvard limiting the number of A’s available to earn in each class, she thinks students may become even more strategic about protecting their GPAs.

Students want to succeed, of course, and so do their tuition-paying parents. In elementary, middle, and high school, parents check report cards, ask about homework assignments, and even help their kids study. If all of that fails and they have the means, well, the ends justify hiring private tutors.

Jill Barshay covers education for our partner, The Hechinger Report. She says, in the age of the easy A, it’s easy to be misled.

I think it’s because A’s are so familiar to all of us, and we associate them with excellent, right? If you’ve gotten an A, you assume you’re doing really, really well. And in an era of grade inflation, where teachers in elementary, middle, and high school are issuing way more A’s, it’s the great inflation in K to 12 is even greater than the great inflation in higher ed, which you’ve also been discussing on this show.

And you just don’t recalibrate it. You assume that the A that you’re familiar with from your own childhood represents as much excellence now as it did back then.

And you don’t buy that?

Well, we know we don’t buy it because the number of A’s is going way, way up. And it could be that maybe students are just a lot smarter these days. But what we know from other data is that test scores have gone down, down, down.

And what that means is what an eighth grader can do today is much less than what an eighth grader could do a decade ago. And so it can’t be that more students are really deserving of the highest grades.

You wrote recently about this experiment and this new study that finds parents often assume everything is fine when their kids’ report card shows mostly A’s, even when standardized test scores are slipping. And that assumption may underestimate the help and guidance that their child actually needs?

There’s a theory among scholars that parent investment is so important in kids. It’s not just what teachers do in the classroom. And the way parents get signals about what to do is they look at test scores and they look at grades.

And a fascinating experiment took place with researchers at the University of Chicago in Oregon State, where they surveyed 2,000 parents with two fictitious students named Robert and Stacey. And they gave them different scenarios for the kids. Imagine that Robert and Stacey had low grades and low test scores, and they gave the parents an imaginary $100 and asked how they wanted to spend it.

They could spend it on anything, on vacations, on tutoring, after school programs, paying bills. And when both grades and test scores were low for Robert and Stacey, the parents invested a lot more of that $100 in improving their students’ skills. And they even invested more of their own time reading to their kids, helping them with homework.

But when test scores were low and grades were high, so imagine a very low, almost failing test score and an A, the parents didn’t step in as much. And the converse, when test scores were high but grades were low, the parents were much more inclined to step in with help. So that showed that parents really placed much more value on grades.*

And in fact, there was a survey accompanying the experiment where it said that 70% of the parents said they trust grades more than tests when making decisions about their child, and fewer than 9% trusted the test scores more.

We’ve seen grade deflation efforts in the past, and often student complaints and tuition-paying parents stepping in and these practices. We saw that happen at Wellesley College here in Massachusetts. What do you make of these recent efforts by Harvard and other selective colleges to recalibrate their grading system?

It’s admirable, because what is the point of having a grading system where everyone gets an A? And a trophy, right? It’s a participation award, right?

But like you say, really hard to implement and stick with. I believe Princeton tried in the early 2000s, I think in 2004, and there was a bit of grade deflation at Princeton, but the students were really angry because they thought it was hurting their chances of getting into great law schools and medical schools and who knows, internships at Goldman Sachs. And in 2014, they abolished it and grades went back up again.

Jill, do you think great inflation contributes to public resentment and the kind of distrust of higher ed institutions like Harvard?

I think we need to distinguish between what contributes to distrust and what’s the main driver of distrust. Certainly. I mean, we can all be cynical when everyone gets a participation, a trophy, you’re like, how great are these grading systems?

Right? But I don’t think those are the main drivers of distrust in higher ed. You’ve got complaints across the political spectrum.

The far right thinks American professors are too woke and indoctrinating students. Everyone’s upset about unfair admissions policies that give extra benefits to rich potential donors and legacy students and athletes. I think the biggest problem are the costs.

Everyone is frustrated with how high tuition is and how some kids pay different prices for the same seat. It’s frustrating.

Or colleges, it’s unclear. It’s nearly impossible to figure out how much college will actually cost.

Right.

So what else should higher ed do if you’re advising a college president or a faculty senate? What should they do about that distrust? Or what can they do?

I think it’s important to address great inflation. That alone is not going to solve the trust problem with higher ed. But it’s certainly admirable to try to do it.

And Harvard does need to be the first mover because it can lead the way. In the same way that Harvard was leading a resistance to the Trump administration, it can lead a resistance to great inflation. And if Harvard finds a way to succeed with this, maybe other colleges and universities can follow.

And they’re certainly paying attention. Jill, this is a consumer-facing podcast. If I’m a student or parent, what should I know about great inflation to make sure I’m getting the most out of my education?

The first thing that parents and students need to know is that great inflation is rampant and that an A does not mean that you’ve mastered the material, that you have the skills you’re supposed to have for your grade level.

So that grade I got from Father Kiznowski, to easy A Father K. I might not have earned it completely.

Well, maybe he liked you, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are writing at an exceptionally high level, right? That you’re not above expectations and going above and beyond. Many students are getting A’s for just kind of doing the basic work that kind of like a B in our time.

Or a gentleman’s C.

Well, I don’t know that an A is a gentleman’s C. I don’t know that it’s that bad, but maybe more like a B or even a B minus.

Okay.

What parents should be looking at is also the test scores, and not just the test that the teacher is giving, but standardized test scores. Compare it with the spring assessments. Compare it with the SAT or ACT score that your child is taking in high school.

When you see a discrepancy, that’s when you need to ask questions. Now, of course, tests don’t measure everything we care about, but they do measure some basic skills, and when there’s a big gap, ask questions.

Jill Barshay covers education for our partner, The Hechinger Report, where she writes the weekly proof points column and a weekly newsletter about education research and data. Check it out and subscribe. Jill, thank you so much for your time and perspective.

Thanks for having me, Kirk.

This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH News. You can find our stories about great inflation and efforts to tamp it down and all of our higher education stories online at gbhnews.org.

You can find all of our podcast episodes wherever you enjoy audio. This episode was produced and written by me, Kirk Carapezza, and it was edited by Azita Ghahramani, Lisa Wardle, and Adeline Sear. Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

Our project manager is Isabel Hibbard. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT. Head of GBH Podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation. It’s a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX. Thank you so much for listening.

*This sentence has been updated to clarify that the speaker was referring to grades, not test scores. 

The post College Uncovered: Making A’s count appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TACOMA, Wash. — Noah Herd fell in love with computers as a kid.

He taught himself to fix his family’s desktop when it broke and, after learning a programming language, built a video game on his own.

But it wasn’t until years later, when he took notice of tech companies offering six-figure salaries to programmers during the pandemic, that he seriously considered a career in coding. 

“It’s cool to build things with software,” said Herd, a 30-year-old senior at the University of Washington Tacoma majoring in computer science. “It requires more creativity than you think.”

But as his graduation fast approaches later this week, Herd has watched as the industry he hopes to enter has undergone a bruising series of layoffs. Since the start of spring, pink slips have claimed 30,000 jobs at Oracle, another 8,000 at Meta, and — closer to home — Microsoft announced its first-ever employee buyouts.

“It’s not looking good,” Herd said after attending an April career fair at UW Tacoma, where, despite the shaky outlook, tech recruiters still drew the longest lines. “I want to be a software engineer, and I’m still pushing for that. The reality is I have to pay rent.”

Software development consistently ranks among the jobs that artificial intelligence is most likely to displace over the next decade, with customer service, graphic design, accounting and data entry also topping the vulnerability lists. Entry-level workers and those in Generation Z — people in their teens and 20s today — also could be hit hard, as experts predict AI will most easily automate the type of repetitive work they tend to do starting out. 

Last fall, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates reached its highest rate in five years, and recent labor market data shows a dip in employment for 22- to 25-year-olds in jobs “most exposed” to AI. Handshake, a recruiting and early-career platform, reported that the number of full-time jobs posted to its site fell 2 percent from last year and 12 percent below pre-pandemic levels. 

Still, students like Herd, as well as economists, hesitate to blame AI, at least not entirely, for the woeful job prospects for the class of 2026. Many students set to graduate this year already hedged their hopes for finding work in a persistently “low hire, low fire” economy, noting they will now compete with recently laid off workers and those who can’t afford to retire. Labor experts say AI hasn’t cannibalized much entry-level or white-collar work just yet, even as the technology injects more uncertainty into an already tight market.

Colleges, meanwhile, have tried to keep pace with the rapid change too. Many have built AI into their career services, and counselors regularly advise students to learn how to use the technology to increase their competitive edge. They’re also emphasizing the importance of networking and soft skills — such as communication and critical thinking — that AI can’t easily replace. 

“Technical skills may come and go, change and evolve. We’re not teaching the same things in agriculture that we did 25 years ago,” said John Woods, provost and chief academic officer at the University of Phoenix. “But we are still teaching judgment, critical thinking, teamwork.”

Some advisers and students at the same time raised worries that AI could reinforce existing inequities that allow the wealthy and well-connected to secure the best, and perhaps only, jobs left for humans to fill.

“The effects of AI on labor markets are obviously evolving as we speak,” said Steven Durlauf, a University of Chicago economist who studies human capital and wealth inequality. Young workers “lack clarity about the world they’re entering, and when you don’t know all the probabilities, people tend to assume the worst.”

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

Durlauf and other labor market experts say it’s difficult to separate AI’s impact on jobs from a dizzying number of other disruptions to the economy in recent years: the hiring spree that major tech firms led during the pandemic, only to later reverse course; the Trump administration’s deep cuts to the federal workforce and its war in Iran; and rising concerns about inflation, including high housing and health care costs.

At the UW Tacoma job fair, many computer science majors, including Herd, waited in a pair of long lines to speak with Anshul Bhandari.

Bhandari represented Infoblox, a private cloud computing firm, and was recruiting for both internship and full-time positions — including software, engineers, finance and product security. Already, the company uses AI bots in lieu of humans to conduct initial interviews with job applicants, and has shifted much of its actual programming to AI.

“I see AI as an enabler, not job killer,” he said. “A third of our code is written by AI, but we still need humans. We still need human oversight — at least for the foreseeable future.”

Students shared a range of perspectives on their job prospects. Laura Cortez, a junior studying mechanical engineering, said she couldn’t pinpoint just one reason for her hiring hurdles. She recently applied to more than 200 jobs and heard back from only a few employers — all of them rejections.

“I would blame the bad economy, and so many students versus not many jobs out there,” Cortez said.

Cortez didn’t see much threat to her line of work from AI just yet. She suspected the technology mostly helped recruiters sift through resumes, with some eliminating candidates who didn’t list certain keywords or skills. Some students, Cortez added, already discovered hacks to trick those AI scans, like using hidden or white text on their resumes.

Ibadat Sandhu, a computer science major, hopes to work in cybersecurity. At least in her planned field, the 22-year-old has noticed more recruiters who now require two to three years of experience for entry-level positions.

“Even with internships, they’re getting more specific with what they want from students,” said Sandhu. “I don’t even have four years here [at college] yet. Where do I get that experience?”

Monika Rani hopes she can find work in finance before AI eliminates most jobs in the field. The 35-year-old recently moved from Pakistan to pursue a master’s degree in accounting at UW Tacoma and has read articles about the uncertain labor market.

“I think my job is secure,” she said. “We still need humans to double check and oversee AI. It’s useful now, but still contains errors. It’s not 100 percent.”

Young workers would be excused if they are growing tired of hearing mixed messages.

Following a flat 2025, hiring for college graduates should actually increase this year — especially in the information and engineering services industries, along with trade and construction, according to a spring job outlook survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE. Manufacturing and utilities top the list of industries that will decrease hiring. A full third of employers told NACE that they will make new hires, while 11 percent plan to decrease hiring.

And although a majority of employers said they’re not looking for AI skills on resumes just yet, the respondents said an average 35 percent of their entry-level jobs do require some proficiency in the technology.

Nearly 3 in 5 employers also said they’re assigning AI-related work to interns. “We’ll continue to see a lot more of that,” said Mary Gatta, NACE’s director of research and public policy.

She also said employers will continue to move toward what’s known as skills-based hiring. The recruiting method is designed to consider a candidate’s actual abilities and competencies, rather than relying on traditional credentials like degrees, GPAs or past titles. 

Back in 2019, close to three-quarters of recruiters screened candidates or only scheduled interviews based on a minimum grade-point average in school. Now, less than half of employers use GPA as a screening tool, according to previous NACE research. Instead, 70 percent report using skills-based hiring for entry-level hires.

Gatta said it’s important for college graduates — most of whom have never heard of skills-based hiring — to translate skills they learned with faculty on research or in student clubs onto a resume.

“Employers don’t want them to list ‘critical thinking’ or ‘teamwork.’ They want candidates to explain what that means and provide examples when that was really important and useful,” Gatta said. “That’s helpful for students in all majors, even in computer science.”

Jonathan Wright, director of career services at the College of Southern Nevada, said the rapid introduction of AI in the workplace has only underlined his longtime advice that students pursue more training — whether it’s externships, certificates or formal degrees — to make their resumes stand out.

Now, though, additional education might mean training how to work with AI agents.

“Employers still need the humans to manage all these AI tools,” he said. “The human element is still there. Stop running from the technology. Embrace it, and add it to your tool belt.”

On whether AI will exacerbate the existing digital divide, Wright said he was an optimist: “Instead of trying to figure it out on your own or doing your best without a mentor, AI can give you some steps and tools. You at least have a starting point now.”

Not everyone shares his optimism. 

Amanda Figueroa, associate vice chancellor for social mobility at UW Tacoma, noted employment opportunities and outcomes are already stacked against certain workers, such as Black women. Research from NACE has shown that female, Black, Hispanic and first-generation college students are less likely to get paid internships, which can lead to well-paid entry-level positions and offer a chance to meet mentors.

If AI makes it even harder for students to get internships and entry-level work, Figueroa said, it’s very likely students will need to rely even more on social connections and interpersonal skills to secure job opportunities. “That risks reinforcing the good old boys’ network,” she said.

The weekend before finals in early June, Herd said he had mixed feelings as commencement approached, proud to earn his degree but scared about the future.

He’s set himself a deadline of six months to find a job in computer science. If that doesn’t happen, he said he will consider joining the military.

“I really don’t want to do that,” he said, “but I need to be able to feed myself.”

Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247, on Signal at nealmorton.99, or via email at morton@hechingerreport.org.

This story about AI and the job market 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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