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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally, a conversation about education reform and some of its shortfalls.

It is the subject of a new book by a familiar face, who joins Jeffrey Brown for tonight’s Making the Grade.

JEFFREY BROWN: For close to two decades now, or even longer, depending on your perspective, education reform has been on the agenda of Democrats and Republicans alike, school leaders around the country and major philanthropists who have influenced the debate.

It’s all led to big changes, new laws and programs, tougher requirements and additional funding, lots more testing, and occasional school closings and teacher layoffs. But what has it all brought?

Our former education correspondent John Merrow chronicled these efforts for our program for many years. He now looks back and into the future with a critique and with prescriptions in his new book, “Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education.”

And, first, hello again, John.

JOHN MERROW, Author, “Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education”: Nice to see you, Jeff.

JEFFREY BROWN: Nice to see you.

Addicted to reform means what?

JOHN MERROW: Well, reform are attempts at changing that really don’t change things.

What I’m saying is, for many, many years now, we have been tackling small problems which are really symptoms, not the real issues.

I can give you a quick example.

JEFFREY BROWN: Go ahead.

JOHN MERROW: The Obama administration focus was on raising graduation rates, to get it from 70 percent way up.

Four things happened. One was good. People came in and tutored. They identified failing kids. They gave them help. And those kids did well.

Three other things happened, all of which were bad.

One was credit recovery, which is basically a computer scam. You sit in front of a computer for a week and you get a semester’s credit. And almost every school district in the country relied heavily on computer — on credit recovery to get kids to graduate.

The second thing that happened, schools, officials would say, Jeff, I think you could do well if you got a GED. Why don’t — you don’t have to — just go get a GED.

And so you or I, not doing well, would be helped out the door. We wouldn’t be dropouts. But the graduation rate would go up, because I’m gone, but the school wouldn’t see that I did the GED.

The third bad thing, adults cheated. They gave kids answers. They had erasure parties, all to get kids over the bar.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

JOHN MERROW: That’s a superficial reform, because the problem wasn’t graduation rate. The problem was much deeper.

JEFFREY BROWN: I mentioned Republicans, Democrats alike, so many different players involved in this.

And I was wondering, as I was looking at the book, is it even agreed upon what we’re after anymore? Do people kind of go back to first principles like that?

Do we know what we’re trying to do?

JOHN MERROW: No, we don’t have that conversation. We needed that conversation.

And I thought Barack Obama would lead us down that road, but it didn’t happen. I mean, look, the fundamental purpose of school is to help grow adults.

And if you look at the three words, help is — it’s a team effort. And grow, it’s a process. You can’t just take a test score and say we’re done.

And then adults, that’s the key issue. What do we want adults to be — what do we want our kids to be capable of doing as adults? Fill in bubbles or engage in debate and so on and so forth?

JEFFREY BROWN: So, take one big issue that you have covered a lot, testing, right?

It does look as though there’s been some — even some of the people who have been pushing that over the years, the Gates Foundation, Arne Duncan, the former secretary, they’re perhaps stepping back a little bit, or feeling like perhaps it was overemphasized?

JOHN MERROW: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: What do you see there?

JOHN MERROW: I think they have pulled back little bit, but nowhere near enough.

We’re still basically the only country in the world that says let’s use test scores to judge teachers. Most countries test kids to see how the kids are doing.

So, we have a kind of test and punish. What we should do is assess to improve.

JEFFREY BROWN: You have got 12 prescriptions, which we can’t go through all of them.

But what is the main idea?

JOHN MERROW: It’s a paradigm shift.

Right now, schools — we think of school, where the teacher is the worker and the kid, the student, is the product.

I’m saying, no, no, no, students are the workers, and knowledge is the product, which means they will work on real projects, they will work — they will create knowledge. They will learn, figure out stuff that they don’t know, that the teacher may not even know the answer to.

The second goes back to Aristotle. And I’m not an original thinker. I have stolen a lot from Maria Montessori and Aristotle and so on.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, stealing from Aristotle is allowed, right?

(LAUGHTER)

JOHN MERROW: But we are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. So, what do our kids repeated do in school? Well, in an awful lot of poor schools, kids do test prep. But if kids are actually the workers, creating knowledge, that’s what they — and they repeatedly do that, they will be ready for life in a democracy.

They will be ready to be workers, to participate, be good citizens.

JEFFREY BROWN: But how practical is that? That sounds great, but how do you do it economically strapped schools?

JOHN MERROW: I don’t think this will cost more money.

I think a judicious use of technology will help. I think there are 100 schools doing this. We have 10,000 schools — 100,000 schools. So, we have a long way to go.

But it’s not going to be easy. But there are 12 steps. You have to acknowledge that these reform efforts have been superficial. You have to say — look at each kid and say, how is this child smart? What can we do to bring out that kid’s strengths?

We have to measure what matters.

JEFFREY BROWN: Let me just ask you finally a more personal question, because you covered these things for so long. Right?

So when you went back to look, are these things that — these are things you were feeling at the time? Did you — did it kind of bubble up for you to look at, you know, I want to now take a big-picture look at all the problems I have seen?

JOHN MERROW: I think it bubbled up toward the end of, you know, the 41 years, most of which were with you guys.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

JOHN MERROW: I don’t think I — I was committed to hearing everybody, and giving everybody — even if I had had strong feelings, the “NewsHour” would never have let me put them on the air.

But I don’t think I really had them until I started toward the end thinking about all the marvelous people who have worked so hard to try to change things, and then seeing things had not really hadn’t changed.

Why was that? And then I started analyzing, well, maybe we’re just going at superficial problems, you know, raising test scores. That shouldn’t be the end of schooling.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

JOHN MERROW: You know, people talk about the achievement gap.

Well, first, we should say, wait a minute, there’s an expectations gap. There is also an opportunity gap. If you close those two gaps, the outcomes will take care of themselves.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, the new book is “Addicted to Reform.”

John Merrow, thanks very much.

JOHN MERROW: Thank you very much, Jeff.

The post Why education reform keeps failing students appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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This is part of an ongoing series of reports called ‘Chasing the Dream,’ which reports on poverty and opportunity in America.

By Megan Thompson and Mori Rothman

MEGAN THOMPSON: Nancy Kukay works at a community college in Maryland, coordinating technical education programs. She’s worked in education most of her career and loves her job. But at 65-years-old, she had imagined retiring by now.

NANCY KUKAY: I can’t afford to retire. I could never make the payments.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Payments for student loans she took out for her son Andrew about a decade ago. She pays around $500 a month on the nearly $75,000 she owes on loans she took out, and others she co-signed with her son. By her math, she’ll probably be paying on her loans alone for another 11 years.

NANCY KUKAY: Even if I started drawing on my retirement and Social Security together, I still wouldn’t have enough monthly to make those payments.

It’s certainly not where I hoped to be at this stage in life.

MEGAN THOMPSON: The number of Americans age 60 and older with student loan debt quadrupled between 2005 and 2015 to nearly 3 million. And the average amount they owe has nearly doubled from 12-thousand dollars to almost 24-thousand.

PERSIS YU: There’s a number of factors that contribute to why the number of older borrowers is increasing.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Attorney Persis Yu directs the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project at the National Consumer Law Center in Boston.

PERSIS YU: Student loans are structured to be paid over a very long period of time. They have no statute of limitations, which means that they follow you. They can follow you till you die, literally. And so there are a lot of borrowers who are out there who still have their own student loan debts from the ’70s, from the ’80s.

ANNETTE PELAEZ: I think originally it was, like, 27,000 dollars…

MEGAN THOMPSON: 64-year-old Annette Pelaez of Boston is still paying about 300 dollars a month for the loan she took out 20 years ago to pursue graduate degrees in American Studies, a loan she expects to be paying for another 10 years. She worked for nonprofits serving children and the elderly, but her income never reached the level she had hoped.

ANNETTE PELAEZ: I’m making now what I made in the ’80s. I’m making about $42,000 a year.

MEGAN THOMPSON: So when you went back to grad school, you assumed you’d be making a lot more money than that?

ANNETTE PELAEZ: Oh, yes. Absolutely. I mean if I was making that money with a bachelor’s degree in the ’80s, I assumed that, you know, with a Master’s I’d do a little bit better.

PERSIS YU: Folks with student loan debt typically save less than folks without student loan debt. And then, once they’re in retirement, if they are repaying loans, certainly that is a liability that they wouldn’t otherwise have to pay for when they’re on a fixed and limited income.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Because of her debt and the high cost of living in Boston, Pelaez says, she has little retirement savings. She recently retired but can’t afford to keep living in Boston – so she moved New Mexico, where it’s cheaper to live. But even still, her expected 1,000 dollar a month social security check won’t cover her expenses.

ANNETTE PELAEZ: Rent will be $620 plus utilities, and then there is the school loan, and there goes the $1,000. So I will be doing some part-time work.

MEGAN THOMPSON: How do you feel about that? I mean, is this what you pictured retirement being?

ANNETTE PELAEZ: Well, you know, at this point, I’m not so terribly concerned, because I’m still young enough to do so. What concerns me is that when I’m in my 70s or 80s, hopefully, if I get there, I may not be able to do that.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Like Pelaez, 27 percent of older Americans with student loans borrowed for their own education. But most, more than 70 percent, borrowed for their children’s or grandchildren’s education. People like Nancy Kukay. Kukay, who’s divorced, took out about $46,000 in her name and co-signed for around $34,000 more with her son Andrew, who graduated from the University of South Carolina in 2008.

NANCY KUKAY: I entered into that, now as I, in hindsight, without nearly enough information. And didn’t know what I didn’t know about– financial aid. It’s vastly different from when I went to school. I didn’t have to borrow to go to school.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Kukay obtained about half of the 46-thousand dollars she borrowed for her son’s education through a federal loan program called “Parent Plus.” The number of Parent Plus borrowers has grown by 60 percent since 2005 to three-and-half million Americans.

The National Consumer Law Center says some families can borrow more than they can afford under parent plus because the program lets them borrow as much as a college says they need without verifying their income.

PERSIS YU: At no point is the school or the federal government seeing if the family can afford to repay this loan.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Is anyone along the way saying, ‘Hey, if you take out this amount of money, this is what it’s gonna mean for you.’ Is anybody kind of giving a warning to families?

PERSIS YU: So, you know, there is some very minimal counseling that is required– when folks take out federal loans. The other component is a lot of these families don’t have a lot of other options. Because education is expensive. So a lot of families feel trapped, and they feel like they have to take out this, because they want to provide for their kids. And they want their kids to have a better future.

MEGAN THOMPSON: And that’s exactly what Nancy Kukay wanted for her son. Kukay says she wasn’t too worried about his ability to pay off his loans once he graduated.

NANCY KUKAY: I kept telling him, and I thought this would be true, is, “This degree will give you a career that you can pay that off. Turns out not to be the case. He graduated in 2008 in the depths of the Great Recession. And jobs were hard to come by.

MEGAN THOMPSON: After graduating with a degree in sports management, Andrew has worked steadily — even taking on second jobs at night and on the weekends. But his earnings haven’t been enough to keep up with the 4-and 5 hundred dollar payments on the roughly 45-thousand dollars he took out, so Nancy’s been paying the loans she co-signed. I spoke to Andrew over Google Hangout.

ANDREW KUKAY: I did not think that you would be this hard to pay student loans. I definitely went in to school thinking I’ll get a decent paying job.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Andrew recently landed a higher-paying job and wants to help pay the loans his mom co-signed.

ANDREW KUKAY: I don’t want her to be suffering for any longer than she has to just for doing the nice thing and cosigning on a loan. Would I do it all over again? No. I would not do it again. I would stick around and stay home for a couple of years. And go to a community college. Near my house.

MEGAN THOMPSON: In the meantime, Nancy says, the loan payments are weighing her down.

NANCY KUKAY: It governs everything I do, every decision I make. It all revolves around making sure that I have that money to make that payment every single month.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Nancy has consolidated, and has gotten slightly lower interest rates, on some of the loans. But she expects she’ll need to work part-time after she retires. And she’s also considering moving to Montana, where the cost of living is cheaper.

NANCY KUKAY: My life isn’t going to be the way that I’d hoped that it would be. It just simply isn’t going to be.

MEGAN THOMPSON: There’s also this catch with federal loans, and older borrowers who can’t pay them off. The U.S. treasury can garnish their Social Security benefits.

In fact, between 2002 and 2015, the number of Americans having social security disability and retirements garnished because of unpaid loans increased almost 500 percent to 173-thousand.

MANUEL ROBERTS: Who do I go and get this money back from?

MEGAN THOMPSON: It happened to 55-year-old Manuel Roberts of Brooklyn, New York.
He paid off most all of the 13,000 dollars he borrowed to attend the University of Southern California in the 1980’s. But after losing a job, he defaulted on the last three thousand dollars and then sustained a severe head injury in 2002.

MANUEL ROBERTS: Then I was injured- street violence. I was a victim of a violent crime. I was in a coma for two weeks or so.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Roberts received Social Security disability checks for 1,300 dollars every month. But the government began deducting 200 dollars from every check for the defaulted loan.

MANUEL ROBERTS: I was already in a bad situation. It’s plain to see they just made it worse.

MEGAN THOMPSON: The Social Security deductions pushed Roberts to the verge of the federal poverty line. It turns out, there’s a program for people disabled like Roberts to get their loans eliminated. But many people don’t know about it.

MEGAN THOMPSON: So no one ever said, ‘Hey, we notice you’re getting disability income. You might be also eligible for a disability discharge. This could stop.’

MANUEL ROBERTS: No, that never- that was never brought to me by anybody.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Roberts’ attorney helped him get the disability discharge…and is also helping him and six people with similar stories sue the heads of the federal Department of Education, Treasury, and the Social Security Administration- alleging that they don’t do enough to let people know about the Disability Discharge program.

The federal Department of Education declined an on-camera interview with PBS NewsHour Weekend and did not respond to written questions. The Social Security administration and Treasury Department also did not comment.

MEGAN THOMPSON: US senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sherrod Brown of Ohio are sponsoring legislation to eliminate the practice of garnishing social security benefits for unpaid loans… but the bill’s gone nowhere so far.

Nancy Kukay’s Social Security checks are not at risk, because she keeps kept up with her monthly student loan payments. For other parents trying to figure out how to pay for college now, she has this advice.

NANCY KUKAY: I would strongly encourage them to become educated in the– in every aspect of financial aid. Talk to the college financial aid people. I didn’t do that. That’s a huge mistake. I made assumptions that turned out not to be true. And mine is a cautionary tale.

Chasing the Dream: Poverty and Opportunity in America is a multi-platform public media initiative that provides a deeper understanding of the impact of poverty on American society. Major funding for this initiative is provided by The JPB Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Ford Foundation.

The post More older Americans than ever are struggling with student debt appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Dimitri Johnson, a freshman at Morehouse College, studies in the Joseph W. Woodruff Library, which is shared among four Atlanta colleges and universities. Higher-education institutions increasingly are pooling their resources to cut costs. Photo: Jesse Pratt Lopez for The Hechinger Report

ATLANTA — A business major at Clark Atlanta University, Delaina Mims said she spends at least eight hours a day at the Robert W. Woodruff Library.

“It’s a good space and it’s better than being by yourself,” said Mims, who had just met up with three of her friends near the library’s outdoor promenade, which students call “Club Woody” because students sometimes play music there at night.

Mims can mingle here with fellow students not only from Clark, but also from nearby Morehouse and Spelman colleges and the Interdenominational Theological Center. That’s because all four schools share the library.

Three of the four belong to the Atlanta University Consortium, a nearly 90-year-old alliance under which these neighboring colleges and universities, plus the Morehouse School of Medicine, jointly offer services and space. It’s a model other schools are increasingly considering, to help reduce the rising costs of doing business by leveraging purchasing power and collectively operating everything from shuttle buses to security and from course offerings to classroom space.

“Working together, we can raise productivity and lower out-of-pocket expenses,” said Ronald Johnson, Clark Atlanta’s president.

Efforts to build alliances like this are especially growing among smaller private colleges that are heavily dependent on tuition and whose revenues and enrollment have stalled.

READ MORE: In-demand graduate programs become a cash cow for colleges in financial distress

The Higher Education Systems and Services Consortium, which encourages collaboration among private colleges to reduce costs, has grown from five members to nearly 100 in the three years since its founding, said Keith Fowlkes, the consortium’s cofounder and vice president.

“Smaller, private institutions have long thought they could do things on their own,” Fowlkes said. “Now that many are seeing deep budget cuts, they’re seeing sharing resources differently.”

More than half of small, private colleges lost or failed to gain students last year, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. The number of private, nonprofit colleges eligible to award federal financial aid declined last year by 33, the U.S. Department of Education reports.

Doing such things as purchasing collectively can save these institutions up to 25 percent on such pricey goods as energy and software, Fowlkes said.

He said many still resist abandoning their independence. But for some, money problems have become so critical that they may no longer have the choice. Three or four have dropped out of his consortium because they couldn’t even afford the $500 membership fee, Fowlkes said.

Clark Atlanta University students Destiny Rudolph, Delaina Mims, Charles Finch and Jewel Cannon meet on the steps of the Joseph W. Woodruff Library, which is shared among four Atlanta colleges and universities. Higher-education institutions increasingly are pooling their resources to cut costs. Photo: Jesse Pratt Lopez for The Hechinger Report

Such financial struggle is the major reason Michael Thomas, president of the New England Board of Higher Education, said he expects to see far more schools begin exploring such collaborations.

“Nothing opens up an institution to the possibilities of change like a crisis,” said Thomas, who wrote a paper on the topic for the think tank the TIAA Institute.

There are too many universities and colleges vying for a stagnant supply of students, Thomas said. Many of those should “run and not walk” to establish partnerships.

READ MORE: Golden parachutes for public college presidents burden already thin budgets

Working together can also improve services to students, according to administrators at colleges that already do it. The Atlanta schools, for instance, get a far grander library by sharing the cost than they could afford individually, said Loretta Parham, the Woodruff Library’s director.

“For what they pay on an annual basis, each school could not have 200,000 square feet and a collection of one million items,” Parham said.

Through the consortium, members also offer cross registration, allowing students at any of them to enroll for classes at another. They run joint career fairs, share property and casualty insurance plans, and are working on a shared digital procurement system, Johnson said.

Most alliances are regional, a natural outgrowth of proximity in places such as Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley and around Amherst, Massachusetts.

In Kingsport, a city in Tennessee’s northeastern corner, four public and private higher-education institutions have together created a $12 million “academic village” in which they share space and offer degree programs. East Tennessee State University just joined the project this year, and 500 of its 14,000 students have enrolled at the site, said Rick Osborn, dean of continuing studies and academic outreach. Using the shared facility will save his school up to $18,000 this year on such costs as rent, utilities, security and janitorial services, Osborn said.

Related: Colleges say they could lower tuition if they could talk to each other about it

Other collaborations are statewide. The Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, for example, focus largely on pooling the buying power of their members for everything from power to paper.

Now alliances are going national. The TCS Education System is a nonprofit with offices in Chicago and San Diego that helps its five member colleges from different regions save on such costs as financing, marketing and legal services.

Students in the Joseph W. Woodruff Library, which is shared among four Atlanta colleges and universities. Higher-education institutions increasingly are pooling their resources to cut costs. Photo: Jesse Pratt Lopez for The Hechinger Report

This frees up funds for “student-facing services” such as new programs, which contribute to increasing enrollment, President Michael Horowitz said. Benefitting students is his organization’s main goal, he added. Pacific Oak and Saybrook colleges were both operating at deficits when they joined the alliance in 2010 and 2014, respectively, said Horowitz. They both now have growing enrollment, falling student-loan default rates and financial surpluses, he said.

“We don’t do this saying, ‘Look to this for financial success,’” said Horowitz. “But there’s a benefit for small schools to join together.”

Such results are not necessarily guaranteed. The Colleges of the Fenway — six adjoining campuses in Boston’s densely settled Fenway neighborhood — collaborate on everything from security to intramural sports and the performing arts, and vastly enhance their academic offerings by letting students cross-register. There’s even a common ID card.

Related: Universities and colleges struggle to stem big drops in enrollment

But one of them, Wheelock College, nonetheless descended into such financial straits that it sold off the president’s house, put one of its dorms up for sale, and finally agreed to be acquired in June by much larger Boston University.

As at the Higher Education Systems and Services Consortium, some schools discover the advantages of working together “when it’s too late … with a $5 million hole to plug,” said Horowitz. “We’re not made for that.”

And it’s still the case that far too many are thinking about, but not acting on the idea, he said.

“Collaborating and cooperating are talked about a lot,” Horowitz said, “but higher education institutions have not done a lot of it.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up here for our higher-education newsletter.

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Education Secretary Betsy DeVos speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, in May. Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters

WASHINGTON — Students who attended for-profit colleges were twice as likely or more to default on their loans than students who attended public educational institutions, according to a federal study published Wednesday.

The report by the National Center of Education Statistics looks at students who began their undergraduate education in 2003 and defaulted on at least one loan over the next 12 years. Fifty-two percent of the students who attended for-profit schools defaulted on their loan. That’s compared to 17 percent for those who attended a four-year public institution and 26 percent at community college.

The report also finds that the for-profit students defaulted on their federal student loans in greater numbers than their predecessors eight years before.

The report comes as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rewrites rules that had been put in place by the Obama administration to protect students who said they were defrauded by their for-profit colleges.

The study also found that this group of students is defaulting on their federal student loans in greater numbers than their predecessors eight years before.

Of the students who started college in 2003, 27 percent had defaulted on at least one loan after 12 years, the study found. For those who started their undergraduate education in 1995, the default rate was 18 percent. The rate of full repayment was 20 percent in the younger group, compared to 24 in the older group.

Robert Kelchen, a professor of education at Seton Hall University, suggested that the higher rate among the 2003 freshmen might be due to them entering the labor market at the height of the Great Recession.

Default rates were higher for those students who never completed their education, the study said. “Degree completion is a key component of a student’s ability to repay their loan,” said Joshua Goodman, a professor of public policy at Harvard University. “Simply attending college without completion doesn’t really pay off.”

Among borrowers in the 2003 group, the median amount owed after 12 years was $3,700 for those who earned undergraduate certificates, $11,700 for students getting associate’s degrees and $13,800 for bachelor’s degrees or higher.

The post For-profit college students twice as likely to default on loans, report says appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: And now to our America Addicted series.

Drug use has been down among teenagers, but mortality is rising. And that is leading many to seek out new options for their children.

The “NewsHour”‘s Pamela Kirkland went to look at how one so-called recovery school in Indianapolis is giving new hope to students battling addiction.

It’s part of our weekly Making the Grade look at education.

FRANCIE WILCOX, Student, Hope Academy: I went from using downers, mixing alcohol and Xanax.

NICK SHIRKEY, Student, Hope Academy: Oxys. Percs.

FRANCIE WILCOX: Then I would use uppers like cocaine.

NICK SHIRKEY: Some meth and some heroin.

FRANCIE WILCOX: I would just use anything I could possibly use.

NICK SHIRKEY: Life just went on that downhill spiral, and I let it take me there.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Francie Wilcox and Nick Shirkey are two of about 30 students who attend Hope Academy in Indianapolis. All of them have struggled with substance abuse.

WOMAN: Thank you for taking part in today’s circle and your willingness to support the community.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Twice a week, their day starts here, in a circle modeled after the teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Students lay out their goals.

STUDENT: What can life be like when I’m clean?

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Their regrets

STUDENT: Felt bad for all the things that I have done to people.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: And their sobriety dates.

STUDENT: My clean date is July 17.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Hope Academy is one of nearly 40 recovery schools in the U.S.

When it comes to kicking a drug habit, experts say simply being young is a major hurdle. Only half of U.S. treatment centers even accept teenagers. That’s why recovery schools like these are becoming increasingly popular.

RACHELLE GARDNER, Chief Operating Officer, Hope Academy: I get a call probably once a week from somebody saying, hey, I saw your school, we really want to start a school, how did you start that, can you help us?

PAMELA KIRKLAND: In 2006, Rachelle Gardner started Hope Academy to help students who have fallen behind because of addiction.

RACHELLE GARDNER: Our young are pretty normal kids. They got the same issues. They just so happen to have this disease along with it. And we look at it as a disease, instead of just a behavioral problem.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Hope is a public charter school, meaning it’s tuition-free, and must take any student who qualifies.

The school is attached to an inpatient treatment facility, and traditional subjects like math, English, and history are offered in small classroom settings, alongside a constant emphasis on recovery.

WOMAN: Think about how drugs really did start affecting your life.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Students are randomly drug-tested, and attend 12-step meetings. They also meet one a week with Brad Trolson.

BRAD TROLSON, Recovery Coach, Hope Academy: It’s an easy thing to forget that we have control.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: He’s the school’s recovery coach and also in recovery himself. We first met Trolson in June while he was meeting with 17 year-old Francie, who had just relapsed days before at a weekend party.

FRANCIE WILCOX: You just start to get into recovery, and you like literally just sit there and think, like, who am I? What do I even like? If I am not getting high or I’m not with people that I hang out and get high with, like, you just don’t know what to with yourself.

BRAD TROLSON: Our society, our culture is really — it teaches our kids that drug use and alcohol use is really a deeply ingrained part of being a kid. And a lot of our students have fallen prey to that idea, and to such an extent that they really don’t know what the teenage is if it doesn’t include drugs and alcohol.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Francie says she’s struggled with self-harm and an eating disorder for years. She began drinking in sixth grade because she wanted to feel grown up.

FRANCIE WILCOX: It didn’t progress super fast. It just kind of — I would drink on the weekend, but, eventually, it did start to go into smoking, and pills, and other kind of things.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Before coming to Hope, Francie entered three separate residential treatment programs.

FRANCIE WILCOX: Addiction literally starts to control your entire life.

MARY ANNE WILCOX, Francie Mother: It was at the point where we would say, I think we’re going to have to get used to the idea that we might be burying our daughter.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Francie’s mom, Mary Anne Wilcox, says she and her husband felt scared and helpless. From their home in Savannah, Georgia, they made a difficult decision.

MARY ANN WILCOX: My husband suggested maybe we look into this school in Indianapolis, and we could live here for a couple of years, until she gets through high school, and then go back to Georgia, because there was nothing anywhere in the southeastern corner really for us to do to get her services.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: That’s all too common, says Andy Finch of Vanderbilt University. He’s one of the nation’s leading experts on recovery schools.

ANDY FINCH, Vanderbilt University: Many places just don’t have many adolescent options available, and a lot of times, the options that exist might be too costly for a family to afford.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Finch recently authored a report on the effectiveness of recovery schools vs. traditional high schools for teenagers who have struggled with drug addiction.

He found that nearly 60 percent of students in recovery high schools reported not having relapsed in the sixth months that followed treatment. That compares to just 30 percent of students in regular high schools.

ANDY FINCH: Teenagers who are struggling with addiction are having to face a lot of peer pressure. They struggle sometimes if they’re trying to stop using to find friends who aren’t using, to find adults that know how to handle that and what to do with it.

And, often, the place where they’re either finding drugs or finding friends who are using drugs is in their school.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Finch also says that many adults in treatment admit to first using drugs while in high school, meaning this age is crucial to combating lifelong addiction.

NICK SHIRKEY: High school is hard in general, but it’s even harder when you have like this extra weight or extra pressure on your shoulders.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Nick Shirkey spent much of his early childhood in the foster care system, where he says he was abused and neglected. His drug use started at age 12.

NICK SHIRKEY: At birth, I weighed 1 pound, 6 ounces. I was born addicted to methamphetamines. Parents were real bad addicts. They didn’t care. They just wanted their next high.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Nick tried a treatment facility, but relapsed earlier this year. This is his second attempt at Hope Academy.

BRAD TROLSON: Most of our students, they’re not just substance users. They come with a lot of trauma. They come with a lot of mental and emotional issues that, once they get clean and sober, now those things really start to surface.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: In many ways, 18-year-old Ian Lewis represents Hope Academy at its best. He started using drugs in middle school, moving from marijuana and alcohol to prescription opiates and cocaine.

After two years, Ian graduated in June as co-valedictorian. He is now a freshman studying biology at Indiana-Purdue University in Indianapolis.

IAN LEWIS, Graduate, Hope Academy: If you would’ve asked me two years ago, I probably would’ve told you I didn’t think I was going to college.

But I turned it around after I got into this recovery process.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: But Ian says Hope Academy can only do so much.

IAN LEWIS: It’s not going to save you if you don’t want to be saved. Some of these kids out here, they don’t want to stop using. And that’s when Hope isn’t really effective, because they aren’t using it.

FRANCIE WILCOX: Sometimes, you just forget. You think, well, maybe I can drink, or maybe I can smoke, or maybe, if I go to this party, I can use like a little bit of coke, if it’s, like, recreationally.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: When we visited Francie again in August, she had relapsed for the second time in three months.

FRANCIE WILCOX: It just reminds you that I don’t drink and use like other people do. Like, I have no limits. I have no boundaries. I just — whatever I can do, I do, and that’s just not a right way of thinking.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: But a relapse doesn’t mean the end at Hope.

RACHELLE GARDNER: We can’t be a no-tolerance school. We have to be accepting, because relapse is part of the disease, regardless of how old you are.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: Francie has been assigned more focused recovery classes, where students complete their course work one-on-one with their teachers.

Her mom, Mary Anne Wilcox, says she remains hopeful, but she admits these last few months haven’t been easy.

MARY ANNE WILCOX: I mean, it feels devastating. You know, it’s just — you want so much for the whole thing to be over. But it’s just — it reminds you that it’s not. It’s forever. And it’s something that we will be dealing with forever and she will be dealing with forever.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: As for Francie, she says, despite her setbacks, she can’t imagine life without this school.

Do you worry what might happen if Hope doesn’t work for you?

FRANCIE WILCOX: Yes. I worry a lot. If I had to be in a regular high school, I don’t think I would even be alive.

PAMELA KIRKLAND: There’s been little research into the long-term outcomes for those who attend recovery schools, but, for the students here, they still have hope.

From Indianapolis, I’m Pamela Kirkland for the PBS NewsHour.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s powerful.

Tune in tomorrow night: Could pain be treated without addictive drugs? Our America Addicted series continues with the latest scientific discoveries on pain and how best to treat it.

And online, our newest PBS NewsHour/Marist new poll finds a majority of Americans feel the president has not done enough to combat the opioid crisis.

You can find our analysis and the full results at PBS.org/NewsHour.

The post At an innovative high school, students get support battling their addictions while they learn appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Students walking past Widener Library at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo by Brian Snyder/REUTERS

In August, the Justice Department sought lawyers to investigate whether Harvard University discriminates against Asian Americans in favor of black and Latino applicants. Roger Clegg, a former official under Reagan and Bush in that same department, responded by noting that “it is frequently the case that not only are whites discriminated against now, but frequently Asian-Americans are as well.”

Aside from the government’s new initiative, right now Harvard is contending with an anti-affirmative action lawsuit on behalf of an Asian-American plaintiff that is funded and organized by conservative activist Edward Blum. Blum, the man behind the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, was also the organizer behind the Fisher v. University of Texas case, which upheld affirmative action. Abigail Fisher, a white Texan, argued that she experienced racial discrimination when University of Texas, Austin rejected her application. Blum has now turned to an Asian-American plaintiff to make the case against affirmative action.

Why the sudden interest in Asian-American rights by conservatives who normally reject any mention of race or ethnicity as “identity politics,” especially when those mentions claim racial discrimination? Asian Americans are the latest vehicle for critiquing affirmative action. Blum, Clegg and others claim that providing an admissions boost to black and Latino applicants negatively affects Asian Americans.

Related: Should affirmative action be based on socioeconomic status?

The problem with this logic, however, is that it assumes that the number of seats for white students — the majority in most schools — must remain constant, while Asian Americans and black and Latino applicants vie for the remaining slots. So, under this faulty logic, giving to underrepresented minorities means taking away from Asian Americans. This slippery argument is how conservatives are co-opting Asian Americans in their mission to end affirmative action. As they do so, they assume the dominance of whites.

But affirmative action cannot explain why Asian Americans seem to need higher achievement than whites to gain entrée into top colleges. Is this a form of affirmative action for whites amid Asian-American overachievement? Most Asian Americans support affirmative action, and, in my experience, also believe that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American applicants, in favor of whites.

A campus that is “too Asian” is seen as problematic, but one in which whites are the majority group is not. Why? For many Americans, whiteness is the norm, so other ethnicities must define themselves in relationship to whiteness. So, majority white campus? No problem. Majority Asian? Problem.

Affirmative action for blacks and Latinos differs from giving whites a leg up vis-à-vis Asian Americans. Affirmative action’s goal is to bring previously absent voices to campus and to address racial inequality, past and present. In contrast, colleges would be hard-pressed to make the case that Asian Americans have advantages over whites in the United States.

The United States has a history of maintaining white supremacy in college admissions, though the very definition of whiteness has shifted over time. In the past Jews were not considered part of the dominant white group. During the 1920s, elite universities worried that their campuses would become overrun by Jewish students acing admissions exams, so they changed admissions processes accordingly to dramatically reduce the number of Jewish students admitted. Here, the fear that campuses would become “too Jewish” led the way.

Eventually, of course, the anti-Semitism embedded in these concerns faded away, as Jews became part of a white American mainstream. Today, we don’t hear about the percentage of Jewish students at selective colleges, because it is no longer an issue. A burning question is whether Asian Americans will experience the same incorporation into the mainstream. I will believe it’s happening when no one balks at the possibility of more Asian Americans than white students at Harvard.

Asian Americans, as well as white, black, and Latino Americans, need to understand the history of racial exclusion and the production of racial inequality in American society. When we do, it’s hard not to support affirmative action for underrepresented racial minorities.

Still, we should not shy away from raising important questions about whether universities hold Asian Americans to higher standards than their white peers; little in U.S. history has privileged Asians over whites, so there is little unjust history to address in this case. When we disentangle the question of Asian-American discrimination from affirmative action, it’s easy to see how one could support affirmative action for black and Latino Americans yet critique a boost for whites over Asian Americans.

The post Column: How conservative activists are using Asian Americans to argue against affirmative action appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: For some parents in the U.S., it’s a question in the fall: Should they vaccinate their children to send them to school?

The American Academy of Pediatrics believes so and says that a measles outbreak that started at Disneyland a few years ago shows how fast childhood diseases can resurface if not enough children are protected.

California and several states have since tightened their immunization requirements. But some parents are still pushing back.

PBS special correspondent Lisa Stark of our partner Education Week reports from Vermont about the vaccine fight there.

It’s part of our weekly series Making the Grade.

LISA STARK: Seven-year-old Merin Blake is a second grader at Champlain Elementary in Burlington, Vermont, a school her parents picked for her back in kindergarten, not because of class size or test scores, but based on how many students had all their vaccines.

MIA HOCKETT, Merin’s Mom: When I took a look at the immunization rates for schools in Burlington, and also, though, at the kind of private schools in the area, I was really aghast about how low they were. And that made me really, really anxious.

LISA STARK: Mom Mia Hockett was anxious because Merin was in the midst of treatment for childhood leukemia, diagnosed just before her 4th birthday. The intensive chemotherapy compromised her immune system, making her vulnerable to diseases.

School nurse Nancy Pruitt worked to keep Merin safe.

NANCY PRUITT, Certified School Nurse, Champlain Elementary: In her classroom, we made sure that the kids were vaccinated. We don’t have the — we can’t always do that, but we made sure that she had a classroom with kids that had been vaccinated.

LISA STARK: Vaccinated against preventable illnesses, such as mumps, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and polio, which would have been especially dangerous for Merin.

MIA HOCKETT: I know that kind of a lot of people think that we don’t really have these diseases, so we don’t need to be afraid of them. But in that situation, when we’re kind of thinking about, you know, our child…

LISA STARK: Hockett isn’t just a mom. She’s also a doctor. And she wanted a school with vaccination rates of at least 90 to 95 percent, which public health officials say is required to protect those who are vulnerable or can’t be vaccinated.

Christine Finley runs the immunization program for the state of Vermont.

CHRISTINE FINLEY, Vermont Department of Health: When children are in school, they’re in a setting where they are interacting broadly with one another.

If you don’t have a large percentage of the children vaccinated, then, basically, your shield isn’t going to work, because you have got places where a disease can begin to spread within a school.

LISA STARK: Finley says, by 2014, vaccine rates had dropped to alarming levels, at some public schools, as many as 20 percent of students without all the required shots, and at a dozen private school, 50 percent not fully vaccinated.

Vermont, like every state, requires vaccines to attend school, but, like all states, allows exemptions.

In every state, children can get waivers for medical reasons. Forty-seven states permit families to skip vaccines for religious beliefs; 18 also allow for personal or philosophical exemptions.

Some states are moving to tighten their laws, chief among them California, which, in 2015, did away with all waivers, except for medical exemptions.

Kindergarten vaccination rates have jumped to the highest levels in more than 15 years, nearly 96 percent.

DANIEL SALMON, Johns Hopkins University: The problem is, in many states, it’s easier to get an exemption than it is to vaccinate your child.

LISA STARK: Easier, says Daniel Salmon with the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University, because parents simply sign a waiver request, much less effort than getting children vaccinated.

WOMAN: So, this one is for you, and this one is for the school.

DANIEL SALMON: While, nationally, most people vaccinate their children, and that’s clearly the norm, we’re starting to see communities where more and more parents are refusing vaccines.

LISA STARK: Low vaccine rates in some communities are blamed for three large measles outbreaks in the past four years, one in Ohio, one that began in Disneyland and spread to seven states, and another this year in Minnesota.

Are your children vaccinated?

ARIEL BREWER LOUIS, Vermont Parent: No, they are not.

LISA STARK: Ariel Brewer Louis is a Vermont mom of three. We caught up with her during an event for those who question the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

She told her story on board a bus that’s traveling the nation to promote an anti-vaccine documentary and record vaccine testimonials.

ARIEL BREWER LOUIS: I have three girls.

LISA STARK: Brewer Louis recalled that decades ago her brother may have had a serious reaction to a vaccine, according to their mother.

ARIEL BREWER LOUIS: It must have planted a seed, because when my first was born, I just said no. I just opted out.

LISA STARK: Parents say they forgo some or all vaccines for their children for a variety of reasons. They’re worried about the number of doses, the crowded vaccine schedule, and past claims of a link to autism, which have been discredited.

Jennifer Stella runs the Vermont Coalition for Vaccine Choice.

Are you anti-vaccine?

JENNIFER STELLA, Co-Director, Vermont Coalition for Vaccine Choice: I think I have been called anti-vaccine a lot, haven’t I? You know, I’m pro-choice. I think that everybody should have a choice.

LISA STARK: Stella says her two children reacted badly after receiving several immunizations. Her son cried incessantly, stopped nursing and seized in her arms, and her daughter had head-to-toe rashes.

JENNIFER STELLA: I don’t think that vaccines are safe enough for my children.

LISA STARK: Pediatrician Jill Rinehart says vaccines are extremely safe and effective.

DR. JILL RINEHART, Pediatrician: I mean, there’s not much that I do every day for children that saves lives. Immunizations are something that I do every day that I know makes a huge difference.

LISA STARK: Rinehart and other doctors helped push the state to tighten Vermont’s vaccine laws. So did Hockett, with Mia in tow.

In 2015, lawmakers eliminated the state’s philosophical exemption. Parents can still opt out for religious or medical reasons.

Partly because of the change in law, Brewer Louis is homeschooling her 8-year-old. But she is relying on the religious exemption to send another daughter to preschool.

What is your religious objections to vaccines?

ARIEL BREWER LOUIS: I don’t have a religious objection to vaccines, but that’s my only option. And the way I see it, I have done my research, and there’s no way I am going to vaccinate my children to send them to school.

LISA STARK: What do you say to people who say to you, I should have the right not to vaccinate my child?

MIA HOCKETT: I absolutely agree with that, but none of this legislation actually forces someone to get immunized. What is says is that, if you’re opting out of your right and responsibility to vaccine, then you also have to bear the burden of opting out of the benefits of organized education.

LISA STARK: Here in Vermont, parents have at most six months from the start of school to either make sure their child has all the required vaccinations or to claim an exemption. If they don’t, that child is no longer welcome at school.

School nurse Pruitt says no student has been excluded from her school yet, but some have come close. She believes the new law has had an impact.

NANCY PRUITT: So we had a 2.3 percent increase on our student body being fully vaccinated.

LISA STARK: And do you think that’s because of the change in the law?

NANCY PRUITT: I do.

LISA STARK: As for Hockett, she’s focused on a return to normalcy. Merin is considered cured of leukemia, and, in August, was deemed healthy enough to resume her vaccines.

So, this school year, Merin’s parents hope she can count on her own immunity, not just others, to stay healthy.

For the PBS NewsHour and Education Week, I’m Lisa Stark in Burlington, Vermont.

The post Vermont’s rules on vaccines for school met with parents’ support and pushback appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Eric Bates talks with other alumni between sessions at the Antioch College reunion weekend in Yellow Springs, Ohio Saturday, July 15, 2017. Bates graduated from Antioch College in 1983 and is currently the editor of the “New Republic.” Eric Bates, an Antioch alumnus and the editor of New Republic, on the campus for a reunion with his fellow alumni. Bates calls Antioch a canary in the coal mine for much of the rest of higher education. Photo: Meg Vogel for The Hechinger Report

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio — The summer gathering of alumni at Antioch College was not your conventional reunion.

Sure, there was the enthusiasm of returning classmates and the babble of nostalgic conversation over dinner in a big white tent erected on the campus quad.

Then the president convened a town hall-style meeting to discuss the state of the college.

At a typical reunion, “What you’d usually hear now is a rundown of statistics that underscore all the wonderful accomplishments we’ve made,” the president, Tom Manley, began.

But very little about Antioch is typical.

Instead, Manley proceeded to share the news that the college was short of its enrollment goals. It was too heavily dependent on alumni contributions for its operating budget. It had borrowed against its endowment to refurbish the campus.

Antioch is, in fact, doing surprisingly well just by still being open, considering it was revived by these alumni after being shut down in 2008 under a previous board of trustees that had diverted many of its assets into a chain of satellite graduate campuses.

Now its near-death experience has become a textbook case for the many other small colleges that are following it into similar financial and enrollment straits.

Antioch provides a cautionary tale about the risks of chasing new sources of income too hastily. It attests to the importance for these colleges in a crowded marketplace of emphasizing what makes them unique. It proves the value of building loyalty among alumni.

And it shows that being frank about problems — as Manley was at the reunion — can help forestall them before they’ve grown too big to fix.

In fact, many financially shaky small colleges are doing the opposite of these things.

Antioch’s decline and rebirth make it more willing to do something else that has historically come hard to higher education: be entrepreneurial and take risks. Founded in 1850, it likes to call its reinvented self a 167-year-old startup.

For example, Manley said, sharing bad news and not just good “is easier for us because we’ve already been closed. What are we afraid of?”

There’s been a lot of bad news for many small, private colleges like Antioch. More than half reported that their number of students last year stayed flat or fell, according to a survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, or NACUBO.

Angel Nalubega, senior at Antioch College, and Jeanne Kay, alumni relations coordinator, organize registration cards for at the Antioch College reunion weekend in Yellow Springs, Ohio Saturday, July 15, 2017. Eric Bates, an Antioch alumnus and the editor of New Republic, on the campus for a reunion with his fellow alumni. Bates calls Antioch a canary in the coal mine for much of the rest of higher education. Photo: Meg Vogel for The Hechinger Report

More than 70 percent have tried new strategies to counteract this — including by giving discounts and financial aid that sucked up 51 cents of every dollar they took in last year in tuition from freshmen. That means their revenues didn’t even keep up with inflation.

And more than 40 percent of chief business officers told NACUBO that discounting is financially unsustainable. The bond-rating firm Moody’s predicts that small colleges’ cash flows will continue to weaken.

Some of those other schools, too, are closing. The number of private, nonprofit colleges eligible to award federal financial aid declined last year by 33, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Saint Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana, suspended operations in May. Mills College in Oakland, California, declared a financial emergency and announced in June that it would lay off some faculty and restructure. Federal data show that Sweet Briar College in Virginia, which was also famously threatened with closing two years ago but stayed open, has seen its enrollment shrink by more than half. (The people who led the charge to save Antioch say Sweet Briar alumni called them for advice.)

“This is a very challenging environment for all colleges and universities,” said Manley, former president of a small college of art in Oregon and administrator at the Claremont Colleges in California.

Antioch, whose first president was the education reformer Horace Mann, got into trouble ahead of the rest, thanks to a tiny enrollment and endowment and a zealous expansion that spun off more than 30 graduate campuses under the name Antioch University.

Running short of cash, trustees embarked on an ambitious fundraising effort, but fell short. The college stayed shut for three years until angry alumni came up with enough money to buy and reopen it. (All but five of those satellite campuses, now legally separate but still known collectively as Antioch University, have closed.)

For much of its history, Antioch was ahead of its counterparts in more enviable ways, including its legacy of promoting social justice. “A hippie school,” its own students, alumni and faculty call it fondly. At the reunion, many of the alumni sported Birkenstocks and tie-dye, the men with their gray hair worn long. Even the surrounding community of Yellow Springs gives off a hippie vibe, with a sign at the town entrance that reads, “Find Yourself Here,” and a banner over the main street that says, simply, “Kindness.”

Coretta Scott King went here. So did Rod Serling, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Stephen Jay Gould. Antioch publishes the prestigious literary magazine The Antioch Review. Its campus is planted with wildflowers, and it grows some of its own food on a farm. The college motto: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

There were student strikes over civil rights and other social issues well before unrest arose on other campuses. A policy requiring that both parties verbally consent to sexual acts as a means of curbing sexual offenses, mocked on “Saturday Night Live,” has since been widely emulated.

“Antioch has always been a bit of a canary in the coal mine,” said Eric Bates, who graduated from here in 1983 and has been among the alumni leaders who stepped in to keep the college afloat.

Barbara Slaner Winslow poses for a portrait at Antioch College, during the reunion weekend in Yellow Springs, Ohio Saturday, July 15, 2017. She graduated from Antioch College in 1968. Eric Bates, an Antioch alumnus and the editor of New Republic, on the campus for a reunion with his fellow alumni. Bates calls Antioch a canary in the coal mine for much of the rest of higher education. Photo: Meg Vogel for The Hechinger Report

“But we were also a canary in the mine when it came to our mistakes,” said Bates, editor of The New Republic. “And one of our mistakes was we reached outside our core and got too big for ourselves.”

The satellite campuses, at first intended to spread Antioch’s unique form of education to inner cities, soon became a principal focus, and the original campus grew neglected.

“You can’t just burn off your seed corn. We jumped in way too fast, too far, and didn’t have the business principles in place,” said Catherine Jordan, a former nonprofit executive and another Antioch alumna (class of ’72).

There’s a parallel in this to other colleges’ leaps into online higher education, touted as a cheap way to deliver instruction and a new means of income. Yet, according to the Babson Survey Research Group, while an impressive 6 million students took at least one online course in fall 2015, the most recent period for which the figure is available, almost half were served by only about 5 percent of colleges and universities. Other institutions have seen little growth in this area.

Antioch’s detour into those graduate campuses was “a lesson 30 or 40 years ahead of its time for how disastrous those mistakes can be if you don’t pay attention to what it is you do and what it is you do well,” Bates said.

This is not to say that Antioch, like other colleges, isn’t still looking for other new streams of revenue. It has to, dependent as it is on contributions from supporters for a disproportionate 71 percent of its operating budget. Only about 11 percent comes from tuition and fees, the college reports. That’s almost exactly the opposite ratio of other higher education institutions, and an amount Antioch supporters are concerned cannot continue.

It’s planning to build the first 34 of an eventual 300 homes on land it owns; residents will be able to take courses and use the recreation, library and dining facilities. It’s considering hosting yoga retreats, the college says. It wants to sell produce to the public from its farm.

Although Antioch reports having raised more than $13 million in the year just ended, from more than 3,000 donors — including $260,000 at the reunion alone — alumni can’t supply the bulk of the budget forever, Manley said. “We do need to get some balance.”

It has also drastically cut costs. The number of faculty is down to 37, and there are 96 other employees, a spokesman said, including at the campus-affiliated public radio station and an adjacent 1,000-acre nature preserve over which Antioch has jurisdiction. Job vacancies have gone unfilled, and in January high-level staffers took pay cuts. Alumni not only contribute money; they help do paperwork, wax floors, paint walls and plant gardens using tools they store in their own designated workshop in a former fire station.

Along with addressing the need to financially diversify, economies like these offer yet another lesson other colleges are gradually coming to understand, said Vicki Baker, a professor of economics and management at Albion College who has studied Antioch: “More and more institutions are realizing and appreciating — particularly small colleges — that we are a business.”

In that respect, said Baker, Antioch’s struggles alone provide a critical lesson. “It’s an important gut check for us that, oh, look, higher education institutions aren’t immune” from existential fiscal pressures.

Like any business, colleges need to sell themselves — in their case to a shrinking supply of prospective students. The number of American 18-year-olds is down, and an improving economy has drawn older students back into the workforce. On top of all their other problems, colleges are competing for 2.4 million fewer students than there were five years ago. (Antioch enrolled only 45 new students last fall, compared to a goal of 80; its total enrollment now is 115, down from a 1960s peak of 2,000 and a post-reopening high of 266 in 2015.)

Tom Manley, president of Antioch College, answers questions from alumni, after delivering the State of the College address in the South Gym at the Antioch College reunion weekend in Yellow Springs, Ohio Saturday, July 15, 2017. Eric Bates, an Antioch alumnus and the editor of New Republic, on the campus for a reunion with his fellow alumni. Bates calls Antioch a canary in the coal mine for much of the rest of higher education. Photo: Meg Vogel for The Hechinger Report

Many schools are adding academic offerings they think will attract applicants. Thirty-seven percent of colleges have added or changed their academic programs to boost enrollment, that NACUBO survey found.

Observers contend that this has blurred what makes each college special or distinctive.

“At the same time you’re saying, ‘Look at how unique we are,’ you’re saying, ‘Notice how we’re as good as they are,’” said Michael McPherson, former president of Macalester College and an economist who studies the economics of education. “‘We match them point for point, and we’re really different.’ What’s your message here?”

The strongest moral of the Antioch story? Standing out trumps blending in.

“It’s all about differentiating your brand,” said Baker. “If I’m looking at a college with the same curriculum at a higher price, why would I want to pay for it?” Yet “institutions in search of survival are kind of doing the opposite. They’re trying to be all things to all people.”

Even Antioch did this, said McPherson. “They confused the hell out of their brand when they created Antioch University and all of these separate identities.”

But it recovered, and refocused on its singular identity. “They’ve done that brilliantly,” said Baker. “They’re playing it perfectly.” That’s because, “When you cease to exist, you have to have some tough conversations about who you are and how you want to be seen.”

Bates characterized Antioch’s distinctiveness with an anecdote from his own time here.

When a professor from an Ivy League school came to teach at the college, “He had his first class and told the students what he was going to be teaching them, and when he got done he asked if there were questions. And a woman in the back of the class who had her feet up on the desk and was a bit of a hippie raised her hand, and he called on her, and she said, ‘What qualifies you to teach this course?’”

The story speaks to Antioch’s long legacy of involving students in their own educations and encouraging them to challenge authority.

“When you’re in a crowded and competitive market the question always is, from a business standpoint, how do you stand out? What is the value proposition?” Bates said.

“We don’t tend to talk about higher education in those terms,” he said. “But that’s the reality. You’re running a business and you’re asking people to spend a whole lot of money, and you’re asking parents to spend a whole lot of money. What [other] small liberal arts colleges can learn is to find your core and to focus on your core identity.”

Instead, said Baker, other colleges “have been a little too comfortable in thinking that the right students will find them, and they haven’t been thoughtful enough about their branding and how they differentiate themselves.”

Even those that try may not succeed. As a college president, McPherson said, he learned that “everybody thinks the key is to be unique. And that’s definitely right — if you have an honestly defensible distinction. It’s not very hard to come up with a press release. The question is, are you walking the talk?”

Antioch walks the talk, McPherson said. It “can cash the check on this.”

And cashing checks, it does. That’s because alumni value the legitimacy of Antioch’s uniqueness, they said, and are willing to invest in it.

“Just make sure you have dedicated, rich alumni,” Barbara Slaner Winslow, a historian, 1968 Antioch grad and chair of the board of trustees, said, only half joking.

“When you look at folks who are alumni, the good works they have done, what this college is doing — who doesn’t want to save that?” said Craig Johnson, a member of the Class of ’91 who has worked at two universities since graduating from Antioch in 1991. What other colleges could learn, he said, “is that goodwill goes a long way.”

Yet alumni loyalty is being tested elsewhere by high costs and by the fact that more than half of students who earn bachelor’s degrees today transfer at least once, attending more than one institution over the course of their educations, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

“It’s hard to expect the same level of loyalty. It’s a big challenge,” said McPherson, who also co-authored the book “Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in American Higher Education.”

Only 20 percent of alumni feel strongly emotionally attached to the universities or colleges they attended, a Gallup poll found. Only one in five has given money in the last 12 months.

Alana Guth, senior at Antioch College, talks to volunteers at the Antioch College reunion weekend in Yellow Springs, Ohio, while wearing Antioch earrings Saturday, July 15, 2017. Photo: Meg Vogel for The Hechinger Report

“If you didn’t have a supported, highly engaged student experience, you don’t become an engaged alum later,” said Brandon Busteed, Gallup’s executive director for education polling. “There is no such thing as alumni engagement, only student engagement that lasts a lifetime.”

The most devoted alumni in the Gallup survey said they had professors who cared about them as people and “encouraged [their] hopes and dreams.”

You can’t impose that on a campus culture, or hire a consultant to create it, said Angel Nalubega, a senior from New Jersey, who at other colleges saw large lecture classes and less interaction between students and faculty than she said she found at Antioch.

“Students want to go to a college where they can feel heard, where they can grow into themselves,” Nalubega said. “Colleges can say, ‘Oh, we have shiny new buildings,’ but if they don’t have professors who will text you when you’re not in class, then they’re at a deficit and their students are at a deficit.”

That’s what sold Antioch student Marcell Vanarsdale on the college, too. “The relationship [with faculty] doesn’t end in the classrooms. It’s in the coffee shops, it’s passing them on the bike paths,” said Vanarsdale, a senior from Chicago. “Who we are, what is our identity — it’s nothing you can force. It has to be real.”

All of these things interconnect, said Baker. Being unique attracts students and transforms them into committed alumni. Being honest keeps them faithful.

But, for other colleges, addressing their challenges “doesn’t involve copying Antioch,” said Manley. “It involves considering who you are and what you bring to the world.”

That may have come easier here.

Colleges and universities in general “tend not to be built for that, when you have layers of culture and hundreds of years of tradition behind you,” Manley said.

At Antioch, said Alana Guth, a senior psychology major from Michigan, “We’ve already closed. So what do we have to lose?”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in collaboration with the Educate podcast.

The post One small college’s death and rebirth offers lessons for the rest appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos makes remarks during a major policy address on Title IX enforcement, which in college covers sexual harassment, rape and assault, at George Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia. Photo by Mike Theiler/Reuters

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Friday scrapped Obama-era guidance on investigating campus sexual assault, replacing it with new interim instructions allowing universities to decide which standard of evidence to use when handling complaints.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has said the Obama rules were unfairly skewed against the students accused of assault.

“This interim guidance will help schools as they work to combat sexual misconduct and will treat all students fairly,” DeVos said in a statement.

“Schools must continue to confront these horrific crimes and behaviors head-on. There will be no more sweeping them under the rug. But the process also must be fair and impartial, giving everyone more confidence in its outcomes,” she said.

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DeVos’ temporary guidance allows colleges the freedom to decide which standards of evidence they want to use when investigating complaints of sexual assault. Under Obama’s instructions from 2011 and 2014, colleges were told to use “the preponderance of the evidence” standards, while DeVos lets colleges choose between that standard and “the clear and convincing evidence standard,” which is harder to meet.

The temporary guidance will be in place while the Education Department gathers comments and comes up with new rules.

WATCH: DeVos says she’ll end Obama policies on campus sexual assault

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Next, we conclude our special education series Rethinking College.

Tonight, how one university offers customized learning to fit the busy lives of nontraditional students.

Hari Sreenivasan has our report, part of our weekly segment Making the Grade.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Terence Burley lives on the Navajo reservation in Northern Arizona, a place where college often seems beyond the horizon.

TERENCE BURLEY, Personalized Learning Student, Northern Arizona University: I wanted to go to college, and it didn’t work out.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Only 7 percent of residents on the reservation get college degrees.

TERENCE BURLEY: It was a money issue. My parents weren’t really making a lot of money.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Now a 42-year-old father, Terence is pursuing his bachelor’s degree, hoping to advance his career in computer technology.

TERENCE BURLEY: I want to make myself more marketable.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Burley is using federal grants to pay tuition at Northern Arizona University, a campus that is 160 miles away.

He’s enrolled in an unusual online program called personalized learning.

Rita Cheng is the president of Northern Arizona University.

RITA CHENG, President, Northern Arizona University: Personalized learning is a perfect approach to students who may have competency they have gained from their work experience. It is a demonstration of mastery.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The program allows Terence to quickly move through college courses because it’s based on a subscription, like Netflix. Students pay one flat fee every six months, and take as many courses as they have time for.

RITA CHENG: If they can master something very quickly, they can speed through segments of the curriculum.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Terence is studying information technology, and as a software administrator, he’s been able to use what he’s learned on the job to advance.

TERENCE BURLEY: The courses reemphasizes what you know already. I’m tested for my competency. If I pass my test, I’m able to pass my courses.

HARI SREENIVASAN: He must still take the core curriculum required of all on-campus university students.

Cori Gordon is the coordinator for NAU’s personalized learning program.

CORI GORDON, Personalized Learning Coordinator, Northern Arizona University: Everything is online, and it was all curated by a professor. We will use online textbooks. We use videos. We use case studies. We use simulations, interactive software.

What’s different about us, though, is that the students really have the keys. So, everything is available when the student starts, and they determine when they’re ready to move on to the next concept. They determine when they’re ready to take the test.

HARI SREENIVASAN: But there are challenges with Terence Burley’s remote learning. He lives in his mother’s house, which currently has no electricity or Internet.

TERENCE BURLEY: I use my cell phone to get connected. And on a good day, I usually get two bars.

HARI SREENIVASAN: When his laptop runs out of power, Burley recharges it by plugging into his truck. And his day is long.

TERENCE BURLEY: Usually, I wake up at 4:00 in the morning, be on the road by 4:30 a.m. I get home. By 6:00 p.m., I start my class again from 8:00 p.m. up to 10:00 p.m.

RITA CHENG: There are so many working adults. This allows students to go at their own pace, balance their family, work and stay on the job, demonstrate what they have learned in their career, and complete the degree.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Northern Arizona University was the first public college to receive accreditation and federal aid for four-year degree students who can move through courses by proving competencies.

But the program is still very small. So far, only 172 students have graduated.

Selina Larson is one of them. Selina graduated on the same day as her 22-year-old daughter, Raven. Larson decided on personalized learning after her daughter began classes at NAU’s Flagstaff campus.

SELINA LARSON, Graduate, Northern Arizona University: I said, you know what, I’m going back to school, and I’m going to finish before you.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Larson did graduate before Raven, by five hours.

RAVEN LARSON, Graduate, Northern Arizona University: Here’s my hero graduating from college.

SELINA LARSON: Five hours before you.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Larson did all the course work for a liberal arts bachelor’s degree at their family home in Phoenix. It took her three years.

SELINA LARSON: I did appreciate having my own timeline. I think that gives you a lot of control, but you have to be very motivated.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The university points to anecdotal success stories, but there’s been little research to show if this new way of learning benefits students. And, for Larson, the process wasn’t always easy. There were technical glitches.

SELINA LARSON: There could be a struggle with software, where something just went wrong. It doesn’t open. And you can’t get in, and their I.T. can’t help you. So you’re going around in circles sometimes. There’s no office to go to, to talk to somebody.

HARI SREENIVASAN: President Cheng acknowledges early problems with the software, but says technology has been improving.

RITA CHENG: Every year, we’re getting better with the technology. And NAU has always been known to adapt to the latest in technology, and we will continue.

HARI SREENIVASAN: President Cheng herself was a nontraditional student, relying on the U.S. post office and correspondence courses for much of her college work.

RITA CHENG: I spent seven years and five universities getting a bachelor’s degree. Affordability and access were always important to me.

HARI SREENIVASAN: For Selina Larson, the bachelor’s degree has given her new confidence.

SELINA LARSON: We’re just this huge, prideful family right now.

She was super, super proud. I don’t know that it changed how she saw me, but I know that she has, like, this huge sense of pride that I have in her, now she has in me.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And while Terence Burley estimates he still has two years to go, he believes a bachelor’s degree is finally within reach.

TERENCE BURLEY: I will just take it course by course, and, eventually, I will get there.

HARI SREENIVASAN: For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Hari Sreenivasan.

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More schools are opting for student teleworking and teaching classes online. For many educators, the goal is to prepare students for life after high school since many colleges and universities offer virtual learning.

Will online learning replace face-to-face learning in higher education?

More than one in four students in the U.S. took at least one online post-secondary education class in 2014, totaling 5.8 million students, according to the latest report in February by the Babson Survey Research Group.

While the number of students taking online classes continued to grow, total enrollment in higher education institutions dropped by 2 percent. Enrollment in nonprofit and public institutions increased by 33 percent and 12 percent, respectively. The number of students enrolled in for-profit institutions, who were in the forefront of distance learning, dropped by 9 percent, according to the survey.

And as more students engage in online learning, how do we assess the experience and outcomes of online higher ed? Are the skeptics who are worried about the quality of online degrees justified?

To discuss online degree programs, the PBS NewsHour hosted a Twitter Chat on Thursday, Sept. 21 with Shanna Jaggars, director of Student Success Research with the Office of Distance Education and E-Learning at Ohio State University (@sjaggars); David White, executive director of the Online MS in Computer Science at Georgia Tech, recently profiled by the NewsHour (@GTOMSCS); Ben Miller, senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress (@EduBenM); and Doug Lederman, co-editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed (@dougledIHE).

Here’s a recap of the conversation.

The post Twitter chat: Is online learning the future of college and grad school? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A former bank executive, Helen Drinan, took over as president of Simmons College only to discover the university couldn’t make payroll. She has since used revenue from graduate programs to help restore financial health, an increasingly common strategy in higher education. Photo by Kate Flock for The Hechinger Report

BOSTON — Josh Caouette was cramming for a test in the doctoral program he’s just begun in physical therapy at Simmons College, for which he’s relying on student loans to pay the $51,850-a-year tuition and fees.

He took a break from his notes to consider the fact that schools like Simmons are increasingly banking on the considerable revenues from graduate programs to subsidize their undergraduate divisions.

“I never really thought about it that way,” said Caouette, who already has student-loan debt he racked up getting his bachelor’s degree from the University of New Hampshire. “It’s interesting that my money is kind of funding someone else’s education.”

But Caouette said he was resigned to the cost of his tuition. “I wish it were a little cheaper, obviously, but if it’s helping others, that’s fine by me.” He paused and shrugged. “I mean, I have to do it either way.”

Cash-strapped private universities and colleges are relying on the money they take in from their graduate programs to stabilize increasingly wobbly budgets. Public institutions are using revenue from graduate offerings to make up for state cuts and undergraduate tuition freezes ordered by governors and legislatures.

It’s an effective solution to a big problem faced by institutions often accused of being financially unimaginative; the president who put it into place at Simmons is a former bank executive who inherited a school that could barely meet its payroll and has transformed it into one that now has tens of millions of dollars in annual surpluses.

But it also means that higher education’s money problems are quietly being balanced on the backs of graduate students who face escalating debt.

Related: Universities and colleges struggle to stem big drops in enrollment

“It comes at a cost at the graduate level,” said Joseph Verardo, a master’s degree student in technology systems management at Stony Brook University and vice president of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students. “The unintended consequence [of correcting colleges’ finances this way] is that it comes out of graduate students’ pockets.”

Josh Caouette, a graduate student at Simmons College, crams for a test. Caouette is resigned to the cost of his degree. “If it’s helping others, that’s fine by me. I mean, I have to do it either way.” Photo by Kate Flock for The Hechinger Report

Graduate education is a growth industry. As employers increasingly require master’s degrees, the number conferred per year has more than tripled from nearly 236,000 in 1970 to about 759,000 in 2015, the last period for which the figures are available from the U.S. Department of Education

With increasing demand come higher prices. Average graduate and professional school annual tuition at all universities and colleges has also more than doubled from $6,603 to $14,398 between 1988 and 2010, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Department of Education. At private institutions, it’s grown from $12,301 to $20,172.

That’s an irresistible source of revenue for colleges and universities, said Andrew Policano, a professor of economics and public policy and former dean at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. He cites the famous quote attributed to the outlaw William “Willie” Sutton, when asked why he robbed banks. “Because that’s where the money is,” Sutton purportedly responded.

“Well, this is where the money is,” said Policano, author of the book “From Ivory Tower to Glass House: Strategies for Academic Leaders During Turbulent Times.” “If you can charge more money for graduate school, you do it.”

That’s the course Simmons president Helen Drinan chose to take when she arrived on the campus in 2008 to discover, on her first day, that the university couldn’t make payroll. Weighed down by its small all-women undergraduate division, Simmons had lost nearly $30 million in just the previous three years.

“We had no cash on hand. None,” remembered Drinan.

Related: With consumers pushing back against increased tuition, colleges seek new revenue

Unlike other all-women schools, Simmons decided not to go co-ed to solve its problems. “When you give up your mission, you start to drift,” said Drinan. “If you don’t have something that differentiates you, you can’t compete.”

Instead, to improve its competitiveness and therefore its desirability, the university purposely reduced its enrollment, increased financial aid for its undergraduates (there are 1,790) and offered new full-tuition scholarships for the best applicants, which created buzz.

Paying for that required laying off 90 employees and freezing salaries for the rest. Simmons had to borrow $20 million from its endowment to finish a half-completed building for the school of management. It took out a mortgage on its dorms.

Then, said Drinan, it started looking at market data to see how to underwrite these obligations over the long term.

“We needed a strategy,” she said. And so administrators began asking: What’s out there that people say they need?

The answer was Simmons’ graduate programs, offered to both women and men. In addition to the in-person graduate classes it already provided, it teamed up with the digital higher-education provider 2U to sell its courses online.

“We said, ‘This is where we’re going to make more money.’ We had established master’s degree programs we could market” in such high-demand fields as social work and nursing, Drinan said. In record time, she said, Simmons went back to 2U and said, “Where do we sign?”

The partnership began in 2014, and Simmons made $5.4 million that year from its online graduate programs. In the fiscal year that ended last June, federal tax documents show, that was up to $56 million.

The documents show that while its undergraduate division did a little better than break even in the fiscal year that ended last June, Simmons took in more than $98 million a year from its in-person and online graduate programs combined — nearly $24 million more than they cost to provide. The university’s total annual revenues from all sources have nearly doubled, from $109 million to $208 million, since Drinan took office.

“I love looking at these numbers,” Drinan said, peering at a tablet on which she keeps the university’s financial data.

She deflected the idea that Simmons’ turnaround was built on graduate students’ tuition.

“You have to look at the whole picture,” she said. Rising prices threaten traditional residential undergraduate education. “We need that. How are we going to produce the leaders of the future if we lose it? If we give that up, the nation gives up a tremendous asset. But how are we going to pay for it?”

Meanwhile, for their contribution, graduate students get something in return, said Drinan: higher pay. “This is about professional graduate education. This is about studying something that’s going to improve my ability to make a living or to change jobs.”

Related: Placement rates, other data colleges provide consumers are often alternative facts

And it does. Average earnings for 35- to 44-year-olds with master’s degrees are nearly 25 percent higher than for those with bachelor’s degrees, the Urban Institute reports.

“The overarching data about graduate degrees is that they pay off in every single field of study in terms of lifetime earnings, in terms of employment rates,” said Julia Kent, spokeswoman for the Council of Graduate Schools.

But paying for those degrees has gotten much, much harder. Fewer than 40 percent of master’s degree candidates get institutional financial aid — less that half the proportion of undergraduates who do. Also unlike undergraduates, they face no limits on borrowing toward their tuition. And they’re charged higher interest rates: 6 percent and 7 percent for the two principal kinds of federal graduate-student loans, compared to the 4.45 percent undergraduates pay.

While attention is typically focused on undergraduate student debt, some 40 percent of the more than $1 trillion Americans owe for college is for graduate study, the think tank New America calculates.

“The big growth in loans has been in graduate schools,” said Jason Delisle, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Yet there’s just no heat on what are people getting for these degrees. On the undergraduate side there are loan limits and concern around defaults and earnings. On the graduate school side, there’s none of that.”

Graduate debt has been spiraling. The median combined undergraduate and graduate debt of graduate students rose from $43,966 in 2008 to $57,600 in 2012, New America says. That includes for such degrees as a master’s in education (up from $33,910 to $50,879) and arts (up from $43,247 to $58,539).

Helen Drinan, president of Simmons College. Photo: Kate Flock for The Hechinger Report

“Those are great degrees to have, but you don’t necessarily make huge sums of money with them,” said Verardo, of the graduate student association.

Sixty percent of master’s students feel stressed about their finances, a survey by the Council of Graduate Schools and the financial services provide TIAA found. Nearly 40 percent drop out or still haven’t completed their degrees after 10 years, according to the Urban Institute.

Simmons may have been unusually successful at maximizing graduate revenue, but it’s far from unique. Marygrove College in Detroit announced in August it was jettisoning its entire undergraduate program and preserving only its graduate program. “Grad studies are sustainable and in demand,” said Kay Benesh, the chair of the college’s board of trustees.

Related: Golden parachutes for public college presidents burden already thin budgets

“Everybody’s been forced to confront the business issues of higher education,” Policano said. And if that means using graduate revenues to balance budgets, he said — as long as graduate students are getting their money’s worth — “then full speed ahead.”

Even he and other economists who admire the approach, however, worry about one other prospect: that colleges and universities may become so dependent on graduate programs that they could slip back into trouble if the growth in those programs — or the prices they’re able to charge — slows down.

That’s already begun to happen. The rate of increase in graduate tuition has begun to slow since 2010, the Urban Institute reports. So has growth in graduate enrollment. Both trends have been driven by an improving economy that has sucked people back into the workforce and by a hemorrhaging of graduate students from private, for-profit universities.

“As others around the country see that there’s demand for that specialized degree and more players get into the market, your market share starts to shrink and you may end up having to lower your price,” said Glen Nelson, an associate dean at Arizona State University who studies tuition policy. “In the short term, if there’s demand for this degree, that’s great. But it’s kind of like being addicted to heroin.”

Back at Simmons, however, Drinan has no second thoughts about her strategy.

“We now are in a place where we’re not worrying day to day,” she said. “If we’d waited, we’d be closed.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up here for our higher-education newsletter.

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U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S. February 27, 2017. Photo by REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday named a lawyer and former NFL player as executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, as the administration faces criticism from those institutions of promises unkept.

Jonathan Holifield, who also writes and consults on the topics of innovation and inclusiveness, told leaders and students that HBCUs must contribute more to the American economy.

“There is no path to sustain new job creation, shared prosperity and enduring national competition without the current and increased contributions of historical black colleges and universities,” Holifield told students at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House.

His appointment answers one complaint from the leaders HBCUs, who are making their second visit to the White House this year amid strains with the Trump administration over unfulfilled promises. Trump has said he would move the office of historically black colleges and universities from the Education Department to the White House. He promised support for the schools during his presidential campaign and Black History Month meetings, when college presidents posed for pictures with Trump in the White House.

But the annual gathering in the nation’s capital for those schools has been reduced to a two-day summit, further aggravating college officials. And Trump was not in Washington to receive the visitors Monday. Instead, he was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly.

“Everyone’s uptight in this day and age with our current president and with what’s going on,” said Ty Couey, president of the National HBCU Alumni Associations. “Things are out of control.”

Advocates for the schools say there has been little to no action from the Trump administration. The institutions have not seen increases in their funding in Trump’s proposed budget, and they had to beat back a White House push to call construction money for historically black colleges and universities unconstitutional. All that followed the backlash after school presidents posed with Trump for a photo in the Oval Office.

That led to calls from the colleges’ major advocates to postpone the annual National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week Conference.

“It has become painstakingly clear that these promises are not being kept,” said Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C., who leads the Congressional HBCU Caucus.

“In this current environment, and with zero progress made on any of their priorities, it would be highly unproductive to ask HBCU presidents to come back to Washington,” she said.

In February, Hari Sreenivasan spoke with Johnny Taylor, president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, and journalist Sophia Nelson about Trump’s plans for HBCUs.

The week is normally planned by the White House HBCU Initiative’s executive director along with a presidential HBCU advisory board, said Johnny C. Taylor, president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, a nonprofit organization that has supported public historically black colleges and universities since 1987.

Responding to “feedback from key stakeholders,” the Education Department sent an email Sept. 5 saying it was “postponing this year’s National HBCU Week Conference” and replacing it with “more intimate conversations.”

Omarosa Manigault Newman, a HBCU graduate and assistant to the president and director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview last week that the conference was simply scaled back. She said the White House intended to announce an executive director for the initiative on Monday.

Also announced Monday was a lineup of 62 HBCU “All-Stars” — students who serve as the initiative’s ambassadors to black colleges.

The leaders were expected to discuss capital financing, improving student outcomes, alliances with the tech sector and post-secondary degrees. Students are getting a tour of the White House, mentoring and a special tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“President Trump’s commitment to the HBCU Community remains strong and unwavering,” Newman said in a statement. “Registration remains at capacity and we are looking forward to welcoming HBCU presidents, students and guests.”

Trump received 8 percent of the African-American vote during the election. Since then, he has generated controversy through several statements, including saying last month said there were “very fine people” among the white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis protesting the possible removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“There is legitimate concern that some may want to use this event to protest, boycott or much worse, refuse to work with the Trump Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress,” Taylor said.

The White House is not the only game in town, Couey said.

“A lot of our time is not spent on Trump. He’s just one individual,” he said. “We have many friends in Congress that we interact with; we have many friends within the federal government. These are the people we’re dealing with, the people who actually get things done.”

Adams now plans to hold an inaugural “HBCU Brain Trust” meeting during the Congressional Black Caucus’ annual meeting.

“Despite the ongoing drama and unnecessary distractions of the president’s own making, we plan to move forward with opportunities for HBCU leaders to engage in substantive dialogues that put our schools and students first,” Adams said.

Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this story.

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Juan Belman, 24, a 2017 graduate of University of Texas at Austin. Photo by Sarah Gonser/The Hechinger Report

When President Trump announced his decision to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that protects young undocumented immigrants, the 800,000 young adults who were brought to the United States illegally as children began again to face the possibility that they may be deported, beginning March 2018.

And yet when Mr. Trump met with Democratic leaders on Wednesday night, they may have struck a deal (though contradicted by the president on Twitter) on how to enshrine the protections of DACA in new legislation.

READ MORE: Trump’s decision to end DACA, explained

The Hechinger Report spoke recently with four DACA recipients about how the potential end of DACA affects their lives and education goals. Here are their words:

Vanessa Rodriguez, 19
Sophomore, University of Texas at Austin
Education goal: Bachelor’s degree in government and then law school

Every day I feel like I don’t belong, like I don’t have the luxury to sit here and listen to a professor. Because tomorrow, I may not have this luxury and may not be able to work, so I should go out and fight. Do something about it while I can. I love studying, I love all this knowledge, sometimes I wish I could stay here forever. I don’t know how my future might look, once DACA ends.

The reason I didn’t apply to any out-of-state universities or colleges is because I knew then I’d have to leave my family in this unprotected situation. That was a risk I was not willing to take. So I chose UT Austin because it’s close to home. I’m only half an hour away from them, so if anything happens to them, I can get to them quickly and take immediate action.

Vanessa Rodriguez, age 19, sophomore at University of Texas at Austin. Photo: Sarah Gonser/The Hechinger Report

I have a lot of mixed feelings about DACA. I am very grateful for the opportunity it gives me. It has allowed me to remain united with my family and pursue my dream of higher education. At the same time, it’s the reason my family is split apart. My oldest sister left the country when she was 17 to get a student visa in Mexico so she could come back to Texas for college. She was denied a student visa and not allowed to return, so we haven’t seen her in seven years. That was a year before DACA, and if it wasn’t for DACA, that would probably have happened to my other sister and me too. So DACA is definitely bittersweet for me.

Related: Counting DACA students

I don’t think any of us are really happy. Sometimes I can be glad about something going on in my life, but in my family, happiness is that unity that comes from being together and sharing moments.

I am now mostly saddened about what the DACA repeal means for people whose permits will expire very soon and who will undergo really tough times. I’m frustrated by all the challenges a whole group of people will have to face. And saddened that young individuals will not be able to go to college, and will not have the same opportunities I was afforded with a work permit.

I’m hopeful about what people in Congress can do. I’m hoping what they do might turn into real action for real people, rather than just words of support.

Dennyse Ortega Ramirez, 20
Third-year student at San Antonio College
Education goal: Bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, then medical school

I knew I wasn’t from here, but it didn’t hit me until senior year in high school when my class took a trip and we needed a passport and a social security number. I raised my hand to get an application but I never filled it out. I knew I wasn’t born here but I just didn’t want to be humiliated.

Dennyse Ortega Ramirez, age 20, junior at San Antonio College. Photo: Dennyse Ortega Ramirez for The Hechinger Report

After I earn my associate degree, I want to transfer to University of Texas at San Antonio to get my bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. I go to class really early each day, Monday through Thursday, then work full-time at Walgreens until 11:30 each night. I have to work full time so I can afford full-time tuition. I keep applying for financial aid, I have nothing to lose, but I never qualify. School costs me $2,000 per semester.

Related: Attacking DACA during a national tragedy is divisive and un-neighborly

I have two years left before my DACA status ends, basically 24 months left assured here. My plan is to become a medical examiner, but knowing that this may not happen because of DACA ending is devastating. If that’s not possible because I can’t have a work permit, I’m left in the blank. What will I do next? I don’t have the two things you need to become a citizen: a spouse or a family member [with citizenship].

I just hope people understand: DACA isn’t bad. It’s something that is helping us. In no way are we trying to do any harm. We pass background checks. Why focus on trying to take something that’s helping us? DACA is helping us succeed.

Mizraim Belman Guerrero, 19
Sophomore, Georgetown University
Education goal: Bachelor’s degree in international relations, then law school

I’ve been hit hard by the issue of being undocumented, starting when my dad was put in detention in 2011. It’s been in my face, what it means to be undocumented. I know what it feels like, how much it hurts and what it’s like to feel so helpless. I started organizing and being an advocate for the immigrant community in high school. It’s what I’m passionate about.

Mizraim Belman Guerrero, age 19, sophomore at Georgetown University. Photo: Sarah Gonser/The Hechinger Report

We come from a small town in Mexico. Who would ever think that I’d get the opportunity to study at Georgetown University — a school that costs more per year than any of my family has ever seen?

I think many of us brown and black kids going to low-income high schools, we could never imagine going to a university like Georgetown. It’s something I couldn’t pass up. But every day I think about what I could be doing instead: sending money to my family, helping out with things like driving my little brother to doctor appointments because DACA allows me to have a driver’s license. My [undocumented] mom now takes on that risk, and without any status, who knows what that could mean — even just a drive to get groceries — if something were to happen?

Related: What some colleges are quietly doing to help undocumented students

There is so much instability in our futures, we don’t know what things will look like six months from now, or once work permits officially expire. We don’t know where our futures are going.

I want to stay grounded to my immigrant community. I want to work in that field so I can make things better for immigrants. In the future, I’d like to go to law school and become an immigration attorney and give back.

But without DACA, my work opportunities are greatly diminished, maybe completely out of the question. I won’t be able to use my degree in the field I want in any possible future job opportunity. So one of the things I think about now is to continue my studies, go to law school, but that’s really expensive and even after that, I don’t know if I could use that degree toward a future job in the United States. It really makes life in the U.S. hard.

Juan Belman, 24, brother of Mizraim
University of Texas at Austin, graduated 2017 with a bachelor’s in anthropology
Works as an immigration services coordinator for Workers Defense Project in Austin
Education goal: Law school

I knew since I crossed the river in 2003 that I was undocumented; different than most of my peers.

Being undocumented means you miss out on so many opportunities. I can’t go to Mexico to see my family, my grandmother, cousins, aunts and uncles. I haven’t seen them for a long time. Being undocumented, the mentality is that we have to worry about our families and safety all the time. And that’s always a priority over education: worry about our future. Our futures are so uncertain.

It worries me all the time. Under the current administration, everyone’s a priority [for deportation] so I could be deported at any moment, taken from my community, my family, my friends. This is my community, the people I love. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. It sucks that so many politicians want to push us out, because at the end of the day, I think we all just want to contribute to our community.

And now, once my DACA permit expires, what will I do, what’s going to happen? It’s going back to that point in my life where I was driving without a license, and I couldn’t legally work. It’s so much stress, not just for me, but for my mom who worries about me all the time. And that’s going to come back now once my DACA expires.

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

The post What students protected by DACA are worried about appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JOHN YANG: Now we return to our Rethinking College series.

This week, we take a look at efforts to help unemployed coal miners earn community college degrees and get on-the-job training.

Hari Sreenivasan has our report, part of our weekly segment Making the Grade.

HARI SREENIVASAN: In the heart of Appalachia, generations of coal miners have lived through good times and bad.

CHRIS FARLEY, Former Coal Miner: We will have some early tomatoes. Then we will have…

BERTHA FARLEY, Grandmother of Chris Farley: Middle.

CHRIS FARLEY: Middle tomatoes. Then we will have late tomatoes.

BERTHA FARLEY: Late tomatoes to can.

HARI SREENIVASAN: When coal miner Chris Farley was laid off two years ago, he began growing food on his grandmother’s West Virginia lot to feed his family.

BERTHA FARLEY: I’m telling him, you have got to grow what you eat. You have got to survive. In this area, most of all, you have to eat.

CHRIS FARLEY: I got laid off, and there was no jobs around here to be found. They went from jobs everywhere to nothing. And I was actually at the point of going from door to door with my neighbors, seeing if they need grass mowed or weeds cut, or just any odd jobs to try to pay the power bills and anything, whatever it took to provide for my family.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Between 1980 and 2015, the number of coal jobs fell by 60 percent, due to automation and competition from natural gas.

But even before the decline, Bertha Farley had lived through many coal industry downturns.

BERTHA FARLEY: My daddy got laid off, and I had five brothers, and they all had to leave here. No work.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Still, her son Floyd and grandson Chris both became miners.

CHRIS FARLEY: My dad, when he got old enough, he went into the coal mines, so I followed his footsteps, and went into the coal mines.

HARI SREENIVASAN: It wasn’t a choice Floyd Farley wanted for his son.

FLOYD FARLEY, Former Coal Miner: I wanted him to go to West Virginia University. I tried to explain to him, I said, you don’t have to be like you’re old man. You won’t have to be out here, breathing this dust. You can sit in an office somewhere. I said, it sure beats the heck out of coal mining.

HARI SREENIVASAN: But, in 2002, when Chris Farley graduated from high school, working at the coal mine meant top wages.

CHRIS FARLEY: I made over $50,000 a year as soon as I started out, straight out of high school, with no college, nothing.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Some believe the high wages created an unhealthy dependence on coal jobs.

BRANDON DENNISON, CEO, Coalfield Development Corporation: You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, which is the mistake that West Virginia made with the coal industry.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Brandon Dennison grew up in Appalachia, but left to study social entrepreneurship. After earning his master’s, he returned to retrain displaced workers.

BRANDON DENNISON: The moral arguments, I’m not interested in on coal, but it’s like investing your money. You never put it all in one investment account. You spread it out, you diversify.

HARI SREENIVASAN: In 2010, Dennison formed a nonprofit called the Coalfield Development Corporation. With financial support from the Appalachian regional commission, the nonprofit launched new businesses that Dennison believes will generate sustainable jobs, everything from furniture making and solar installation, to home building and agriculture.

BRANDON DENNISON: What we need is a diversified economy, with lots of different businesses and lots of different opportunities for all different types of people.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Coalfield crew members are paid $11 an hour and given 33 work hours per week, an amount that doesn’t come close to their former coal job wages. They must also attend three hours of life skill classes, and six hours of community college. Money to pay crew members comes from sales, contracts, and private and public funders.

BRANDON DENNISON: We are not just creating a job for these folks, many of whom still need a lot of job training, but we’re also enrolling them in the local community college. And then we’re providing three hours a week of personal development to figure out how business works and to be successful.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Chris Farley is now an honors student working toward his associates degree in applied science and agriculture.

CHRIS FARLEY: I can still pay my bills. I’m getting an education that I would never thought I would get. I never thought I would be in school. I never thought — never dreamed I would have a 4.0 GPA.

BRANDON DENNISON: The bottom line is, if you look at states with low numbers of higher education attainment, like we have, there are not a lot of jobs. And if you look at states and communities with high numbers of people with degrees of higher education, you see a lot more jobs.

HARI SREENIVASAN: One project, called Refresh Appalachia, brings former coal miners like Chris Farley back to a mining site.

BRANDON DENNISON: We have all of these mine land sites that we have got to do something with, right? These are massive former mountaintop removal sites that are sitting there kind of not being used productively.

HARI SREENIVASAN: On this mountaintop in Mingo County. Dennison’s workers are transforming a former mine into a farm that serves local markets.

CHRIS FARLEY: We’re planting all this, different types of berries, and pawpaw trees, and we’re going to have a big orchard, different types of stuff to sell, goji berries, blackberries, raspberries, elderberries.

HARI SREENIVASAN: James Russell is the farm’s crew chief.

JAMES RUSSELL, Crew Chief, Coalfield Development Corps: We have lots of interest with restaurants for our meat and eggs, and our berries also.

We have goats, pigs, and chickens, and they give back to the land. And the pigs tear it up. It’s just a good combination of fertilizer when you mix the three together. After a couple of years of working the soil, you can grow anything you want.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Crew member Jared Blalock worked for six years in the mine industry.

JARED BLALOCK, Former Coal Miner: Running a dozer on the coal pile, taking care of the stacker belt, shoveling, greasing, just your everyday labor.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Now he’s refurbishing old buildings for a Coalfield Development project called Restore Appalachia. As part of his employment, Blalock is working toward his associate’s degree in management. He says he’d go back to the mines if a job was available, but worries about the instability of the industry.

JARED BLALOCK: I don’t have anything wrong with coal mining. Coal mining is a — it’s a great industry here, but you don’t know. That’s the thing about it. That’s why I’m doing this right now, because I need to take advantage of my opportunity.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So far, 23 crew members have completed their degrees and have been placed in full-time jobs; 55 are currently in the program, and 15 are on the waitlist.

Chris Farley hopes to use his degree and work experience to start a business of his own.

CHRIS FARLEY: I would like to actually start my own restaurants called Homegrown Home Cooking. My little girl, she’s going to help me with the farm. My wife is going to help me. We’re just going to start our own little business.

HARI SREENIVASAN: For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Hari Sreenivasan.

JOHN YANG: There’s more online from our series Rethinking College, including a look at a Tennessee pilot program that helps ease the financial burden so adults can finish their college degrees.

You will find that at PBS.org/NewsHour.

The post Job training and community college put coal miners on a new path appeared first on PBS NewsHour.