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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Massachusetts Avenue at Johnston D, Harvard Square.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantastic job, sir. Really nice. Really nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

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

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

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

And what are faculty there at Yale recommending?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you tell me what you did get?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you don’t buy that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or a gentleman’s C.

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

Okay.

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

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

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

Thanks for having me, Kirk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not everyone shares his optimism. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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As colleges scramble to write rules for artificial intelligence in the classroom, one basic question remains unknown: How many students are actually using it?

An anonymous survey of 338 undergraduates at the University of Chicago shows that the answer may be hard to pin down — not just because AI use is changing quickly, but because students may not be self-reporting it accurately.

In the survey, 60 percent of students said they personally use AI tools such as ChatGPT. But 90 percent said they believed the average student on campus uses AI. 

That 30-point gap could mean that students are underreporting their own AI use, overestimating their peers’ use, or both. Without reliable information about how many students are using AI and how they are using it, college administrators risk designing policies based on assumptions rather than evidence. 

The University of Chicago researchers behind the survey suspect that college students aren’t being truthful about their actual use of AI because they’re ashamed. 

“Students don’t want to be perceived by their peers as not able to do the work,” said Alex Kale, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the study, which was presented at a conference in Barcelona, Spain, in April. “They don’t want to be perceived by their peers as dishonest … And it feels deeply personal.”

Kale calls this phenomenon “social desirability bias,” the human tendency to answer questions in a way that makes us look good to others (and to ourselves), rather than being completely honest, even in an anonymous survey. In a separate online survey of 98 undergraduates conducted by the researchers, respondents said that admitting to using AI was akin to admitting that you’re “not able to complete coursework independently,” or are “lazy.” Another respondent thought that students were hiding usage for fear of getting caught and possibly expelled.

The researchers offer an alternate explanation for the gap. Students may be overestimating how many of their peers are using AI because it is such a visible part of campus life. They hear people talking about ChatGPT. They see AI tools open on laptop screens. That can start to feel like the norm. One survey respondent expressed it like this: “I think only a small portion of students actually rely on LLMs to do coursework, while most students do not. That small portion leads some students to assume most are using it.” (The current post-2022 generation of AI tools like ChatGPT are often referred to as large language models or LLMs.)

In other words, students may be using AI more than they admit, while AI hype may also be creating the impression that everyone is using it. 

This same phenomenon — a big gap between what students admit to doing and what they believe their peers are doing — is commonly found in public health research on alcohol, drugs and sex. Students often overestimate how much their peers drink heavily, use drugs or engage in casual sex. And that has had big implications for curbing unhealthy behaviors. When students believe that “everyone else is doing it,” they are more likely to engage in it too. The false perception becomes partly self-fulfilling.

More than 25 years ago, colleges began to worry that warning students about binge drinking on campus was backfiring and actually encouraging students to get drunk. Many shifted strategy, downplaying the problem of binge drinking and publicizing statistics that most students drink in moderation. The number of students who said they drink heavily declined, according to some public health officials. 

There may be some lessons here for how to encourage the responsible use of AI, even though the University of Chicago study doesn’t link the AI use to drugs or booze. But it does raise the point that perceptions matter. If students believe that nearly everyone is relying on AI to complete coursework, they may feel pressure to use it themselves just to keep up.

Kristin Fasiang is a graduate student in computer science and learning sciences at Northwestern University. Fasiang reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.

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

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U.S. colleges and universities are reeling from one of the most challenging years in recent memory. In 2025, institutions laid off more than 9,000 faculty and staff amid enrollment volatility, shrinking budgets and growing skepticism about the value of a college degree. 

As a result, institutions are under increasing pressure to find efficiencies through new technologies and infrastructure. While these investments are important, they often bypass the core engine driving student outcomes: faculty. 

Decades of research show that how instructors design, deliver and support learning remains one of higher education’s most powerful levers for supporting student persistence and completion. When institutions give faculty the resources to innovate and carry out proven education reforms, their students pass courses at higher rates, and are thus more likely to persist into subsequent terms and complete college.

Yet despite this evidence, faculty professional development remains chronically underfunded. 

At many institutions, professional learning for faculty is fragmented, consisting of optional workshops, one-off training sessions or sporadic conference attendance. Too often, institutions treat teaching as a skill you either have or you don’t. In reality, it’s a complex, evolving practice that improves with sustained support. 

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

Effective faculty development isn’t easy or quick. Institutions that see meaningful gains in student learning and completion invest in it deeply and consistently, regardless of institution type and financial profile. 

They engage with faculty over time, build communities of practice and explicitly link professional learning to student outcomes. They also recognize that improving teaching requires the same seriousness as improving advising systems, redesigning math pathways and initiating new technologies.

Over the past decade and a half, colleges have made student completion a central goal. They have enhanced data systems, improved advising models and expanded academic support structures. 

Professional learning for faculty, however, has not seen the same level of focus, and it should.

If institutions want to make progress, they must move beyond piecemeal efforts and commit to comprehensive, evidence-based faculty development aligned with institutional goals. 

That means connecting teaching, assessment, technology and student support strategies so improvements in one area reinforce progress in others.

It also means embedding professional learning into institutional systems rather than leaving it on the margins, where it is easy to ignore.

At Louisiana State University, Shreveport, for example, improving teaching is not treated as a tangential initiative, but as core to student success. Faculty get high-impact professional learning to strengthen instruction in the gateway courses in which students are most likely to struggle. 

The university intentionally aligns faculty development with a plan to strengthen student learning and improve success in the courses most critical to degree completion. 

The most effective faculty development efforts are practical and focused on results. Faculty should lead with concrete plans, redesigned curricula, new course structures and revised assessments and receive support to examine how those changes affect student learning and persistence.

Professional development should be grounded in research about what improves learning, both broadly and within the specific context of a given institution. 

Crucially, it cannot be treated as a one-time event.

Improving teaching is an ongoing process, built through cycles of experimentation, feedback, reflection and refinement. 

Related: A ‘great defection,” threatens to empty colleges and universities of top talent

Texas Southern University, a public HBCU in Houston, launched a center designed to support continuous improvement for its educators, and treats faculty development as a core part of the university’s academic infrastructure. 

The center focuses on helping instructors strengthen their classroom practice in ways that directly influence student outcomes, and it also supports faculty who serve as teaching leaders within departments.

Faculty can’t engage fully in this work, however, without psychological and career safety. They need to know leaders won’t penalize them for trying something new and missing the mark and they need to be encouraged to keep trying. 

That is why institutions and policymakers who take faculty development seriously must create conditions for genuine growth. And that means building cultures where leaders and faculty expect — not merely tolerate — learning through experimentation.

Finally, faculty development should address well-being and sustainability. Research shows that more than half of college faculty and staff have considered quitting due to burnout, increased workloads and stress. 

When schools invest in professional learning that acknowledges the mental labor of teaching and allows for reflection, growth and development, they are not only supporting faculty but also protecting the long-term capacity of their institutions.

Improving and sustaining gains in college completion will require many strategies. But none will succeed without meaningful investment in the people who teach and support students every day. Colleges cannot say that they value teaching while also expecting faculty to improve their craft on their own time and with minimal support. 

If higher education leaders want to make lasting progress toward improving college completion, they must ensure that meaningful, student-success-oriented faculty development is central to that effort and not an afterthought.

Janelle Jennings-Alexander is strategy director for Complete College America, a national advocate for increasing college completion rates and closing institutional performance gaps. 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

For many people across the country, paying for college is the largest investment they will ever make. Increasingly, it’s one that feels out of reach. 

Over the past two decades, tuition and fees at private, national universities have jumped by 112 percent; at some “elite” and highly selective schools the annual cost of attendance now approaches $100,000. 

It should come as no surprise that public confidence in higher education has declined, something I heard directly from students when I served as U.S. secretary of education under President Obama. They understandably started to question whether they would be getting an adequate return on their investment. 

That led us to launch the College Scorecard in 2015 to give families easy access to data on the value of college, and to fight against predatory for-profit colleges that leave students with debt and no paths to a better career. 

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Yet, in the years that have followed, skepticism has only grown louder. Despite a report from the U.S. Committee on Education and Labor finding that associate degree holders can make up to $400,000 more than high school graduates over the course of their lives — and bachelor’s degree holders up to $1 million more — attending college is no longer a “default” option for many high school grads. 

If higher education is to rebuild public trust, affordability can’t be an afterthought. It must be at the center of our strategic focus.

Prospective college students want to be confident that a degree will be financially attainable and that it will lead to opportunities after graduation. Among students who are already in college, the pressure is real: 31 percent have considered dropping out because of costs, and more than half report struggling to pay monthly bills. And it’s not just young people: 85 percent of adults who either dropped out or never enrolled in higher education say cost is a major reason why. 

This is about more than higher education. It’s about the future of the American economy. By 2031, an estimated 72 percent of jobs in the United States will require some form of postsecondary education or training. If we fail to make college affordable and accessible, we risk leaving millions of talented people behind — and weakening our nation’s ability to compete in a rapidly changing economic environment. 

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

It doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve seen firsthand how a different approach can make a difference. At the State University of New York (SUNY), for example, a statewide tuition freeze at our four-year campuses has helped ensure that families can plan for the cost of college tuition — which is just $7,070 per year — without fear of sudden increases. 

But affordability requires more than controlling tuition or the cost of course materials; when students can’t afford essentials, education can fall by the wayside. That’s why New York Governor Kathy Hochul has also invested in wraparound supports, including those that address food insecurity and a lack of child care, critical barriers that too often inhibit students’ progress. 

Initiatives like SUNY Reconnect, a free community college program that covers tuition, fees, books and supplies for adults 25 to 55 years old pursuing associate degrees in high-demand fields, are also opening doors for many who once believed a postsecondary degree was out of reach. 

Related: Confusing financial aid letters can leave families deeper in debt

These programs are a win-win for students and schools. At a time when many institutions worry about declining enrollment, SUNY enrollment has grown by 6.5 percent over the past three years. 

Similar efforts are gaining traction nationwide. Michigan and Tennessee, for example, both offer some form of tuition-free community college program, expanding access for millions of students. 

While this progress is inspiring, isolated programs across a patchwork of states will not be enough. If higher education is serious about rebuilding public trust, affordability must become a sustained, systemwide commitment. 

That means keeping tuition predictable, expanding need-based aid, addressing basic needs like food, housing, transportation and child care, and ensuring the students who start college finish their degrees. It also means making the value of college clearer and more transparent, so students and families can make informed decisions with confidence. 

Public trust will not be restored by rhetoric alone. It will be rebuilt when students across the country can see that college is within reach, and that the opportunity it promises is real. 

John B. King Jr. is the chancellor of the State University of New York and, under President Barack Obama, served as the 10th U.S. secretary of education.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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WINOOSKI, Vt. — The day’s class started with a writing prompt: Do you feel safe in school? Why or why not? The students — whose families hail from across the globe and speak languages including Arabic, Nepali, Spanish and Somali — wrote their responses before reading them aloud.

“I feel safe in school because I saw the school doors are locked every time,” one student said, “and I heard ICE is not here.” 

“If ICE comes to school, they are not allowed to go in,” said another. 

“ICE can’t come in,” said a third teen. 

The sense of security students feel in this multilingual learner class at Winooski High School is hard-won. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the federal government has investigated schools for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, rescinded a policy protecting students on school grounds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests and threatened school districts with the loss of federal funding. Administration officials have also encouraged states to challenge a decades-old Supreme Court decision guaranteeing undocumented students’ right to public schooling, which conservative activists say takes resources from American children.

While many districts have chosen to go quiet or self-censor out of fear of being targeted, the Winooski school system and its superintendent, Wilmer Chavarria, have taken the opposite approach. 

Last year, this small district of about 800 students was the first in Vermont to pass a sanctuary policy aimed at protecting students from immigration enforcement while at school. Then, months later, Chavarria refused to sign a document from the Trump administration saying it is complying with the federal ban on DEI efforts in schools. 

That’s happened even as the district has been affected directly by federal policies. In June of last year, Chavarria, a naturalized citizen, was detained for several hours by immigration officials at the Houston airport while on his way back from visiting family in Nicaragua. Over Thanksgiving break in November, a second grader was detained with his mother by federal agents conducting immigration enforcement. After weeks in a detention center, they left the country. In early December, the Winooski School District was the target of racist messages and phone calls after a video of a student raising the Somali flag on a pole outside the high school went viral on social media.

While there have been no direct threats by the Trump administration to pull Winooski’s federal funding, which accounts for 6 percent of the district’s annual budget, Chavarria said he is preparing for the possibility.

“When somebody wants us to lose funding, we’re going to lose it anyways. The difference is, did we lose it while bending the knee, or did we lose it while standing up for our values?” Chavarria said. “Either way, the outcome will be the same.”

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

Nestled along the Winooski River on the outskirts of Burlington, Winooski is the smallest school district by land area in Vermont. This 1.5-square-mile community is the most diverse district in a state that ranks among the whitest in the nation. Nearly 60 percent of students here are people of color, more than a third are learning to speak English, and about 71 percent of students live in poverty.

For more than three decades, the town and neighboring region have been a federal refugee resettlement community, accepting hundreds of immigrants annually who are fleeing conflict from Bhutan, Somalia, Bosnia and Syria, among other countries. Last year, the Trump administration decreased the admissions cap for refugees into the U.S. from 125,000 in 2025 to 7,500 in 2026, the lowest limit for refugee placement since the program’s inception. 

Since then, the number of refugees resettling in the state has been reduced to a trickle. So far, about 50 refugees, all from South Africa, have relocated to Vermont this year. 

Chavarria, 37, joined Winooski schools in 2023 after serving as director of equity and education support systems in another Vermont district. Born in Nicaragua, he didn’t learn English until high school, a background that resembles many of the Winooski students he serves. His actions on behalf of immigrant students have built him widespread support in the community.

“Wilmer has been a brave voice in a time in our country where that’s being punished,” Robin Merritt, a parent of three children in the district, said as she dropped them off on a Tuesday morning in April. “I can’t speak for everybody, but most of the public is pretty proud of his leadership.”

The sanctuary schools policy is a key reason. The guidance formally outlined Winooski’s policy reaffirming that staff will not share student data with immigration officials. It also restricts agents’ access to campus without a signed judicial warrant, among other steps. In May, after advocacy from Chavarria and others, the Vermont Legislature passed a law modeled after Winooski’s policy requiring all schools in the state to have immigration enforcement protocols.

In an emotional district meeting last February, more than three dozen teachers, students and Winooski residents spoke in support of it. 

“I want to know the district has my back,” one staff member said. 

“We are scared. Passing this will help us feel safe and at ease while at school,” a high school student told board members.

Most school board members supported the policy from the outset. But Nicole Mace, the board president, said she worried it would make Winooski a target of federal officials, who have at times singled out sanctuary communities for policies that impede immigration enforcement. 

She was not at the meeting where the policy was approved, in a 4-0 vote. But in the year since, she said she’s learned how much it has meant to families in the district.

“The risk is around us no matter what, and for the district to take a very clear and unwavering position of support for our families and students couldn’t be done with little tweaks in the policy or putting our heads down and hoping that we could just ride this out,” said Mace.

Ignacia Rodriguez Kmec, policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, an organization that advocates for the rights of immigrants, said clear policies like this one not only protect students, but also staff, who may not know what immigration agents are allowed to do on school grounds. Her group advocates for all school districts to have such policies, in the same ways schools plan for earthquakes and tornadoes and other emergency situations.

“You want to be able to show that you support all families, including immigrant families, that they ideally should participate and not be afraid of coming to school,” she said. 

Related: School closures are accelerating in rural America. Here’s how a battle over small districts is playing out in one state

A 2022 study found that children from families with mixed citizenship status were more likely to earn A’s and less likely to report problems with their teachers and peers if they attended a school that had a “safe zone” policy restricting immigration enforcement on campus.

“I really see the impact in the classroom,” said Caitlin MacLeod-Bluver, who teaches English and history at Winooski High and was Vermont’s teacher of the year in 2025. “When kids feel seen and heard and valued in our district and community, it shows up in the work they’re doing.”

MacLeod-Bluver is part of a group of teachers in the district who have volunteered to drive or walk students to and from school when they are worried about immigration enforcement in town. 

A desire to reassure immigrant families was also the impetus for Chavarria’s decision to raise the Somali flag on school grounds on Dec. 5, three days after President Donald Trump referred to Somalians as “garbage” in a Cabinet meeting. When a video of the flag went viral on right-wing social media, staff had to temporarily take down the district’s website and social media accounts and unplug school phones because of death threats, hundreds of which were turned over to Vermont State Police and the FBI. 

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said at the time that the threats came from individuals who had nothing to do with the Trump administration. “Aliens who come to our country, complain about how much they hate America, fail to contribute to our economy, and refuse to assimilate into our society should not be here,” she told The Associated Press. “And American schools should fly American flags.”

Despite the onslaught, the staff kept the Somali flag up, beside the U.S. and Vermont flags, through the following week to show support for Somali students, who make up about 9 percent of the school system’s student population. 

Chavarria — who with his husband stayed at a hotel for a few days following the episode after receiving death threats — said he believes if more school leaders publicly and vocally pushed back on Trump administration policies, Winooski wouldn’t be as big of a magnet for people’s hate. 

“It does feel like we are alone in an ocean,” he said. “It is very, very scary. It is draining. It is demoralizing. It’s like a nightmare that you wish one day ends, because you feel like nobody else understands it because nobody else is being attacked the way we are.”

Last spring, the superintendent’s brother and sister-in-law had to leave the U.S. after the Trump administration ended a Biden-era program that allowed eligible Nicaraguans to stay in the country for a two-year period with a sponsor. The family, who had lived with Chavarria as their sponsor, still had time left on their visas when the program was abruptly canceled. When Chavarria was stopped at the Houston airport while he was on his way back from visiting family in Nicaragua, immigration officials searched his devices and interrogated him for nearly five hours, about his marriage and work and citizenship, before releasing him. 

“When I get asked, I advise people that your status doesn’t matter if you’re brown,” said Chavarria, who has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security over agents searching his personal and school devices while he was questioned.  

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

Inside the Winooski school building this spring, there were visible traces of the challenges of the last year. Since the deluge of death threats in December, doors separating hallways are locked, requiring a staff member to let students through sections of the building throughout the day. Along the entryway’s walls, dozens of posters and cards from families, students and supporters both near and far carry messages such as, “You belong here,” “You make our community a better place” and “Somali students we stand with you.”  

A table with “Know your rights” and “Conoce tus derechos” emblazoned across a banner sits off to the side, with documents translated into more than half a dozen languages telling families how to organize their documents and talk to children about ICE, along with papers they can hand immigration agents explaining their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

Still, outside of school walls, the district has not been able to keep all students safe. In the weeks following the second grader’s detention in November, teachers wrote letters of support appealing to immigration officials and organized a fundraiser for emergency resources and legal fees. Erin Hurley, a multilingual teacher who taught the boy, said detention center officials denied her request to send his school work to him. 

During phone calls, the mother told Winooski staff that her son wasn’t doing well at the detention center in Dilley, Texas, due to lack of edible food, clean water and medical care. After seven weeks in Dilley, and despite having a lawyer fighting for their release, the family decided to self-deport.

In the last year, Hurley and other staff members at the school district have volunteered to be temporary guardians for several students whose parents worry about being detained. 

“I feel so disgusted that our country has come to this. These families make our community so much brighter. They contribute to Vermont so much,” Hurley said.

In March, protests erupted in nearby South Burlington when immigration agents detained three people at a house, none of whom were the man agents had a warrant for. 

A high school student in Winooski — whose family members are Nepali immigrants and whose name is being withheld to protect her privacy — saw videos of the arrests and protest online. She said she appreciated that the Winooski School District sent out a message alerting families about the incident. The sanctuary schools policy has made her and her mother feel safe while she is at school, the student said. And she hopes other districts in Vermont pass similar policies — a requirement under the new state law, starting next year.

“Right now, it’s only Winooski. Even if they don’t have a lot of students or staff of color, I think it’s really good to make it a sanctuary school, still. Because there might be one or two students that it would be really helpful,” said the student. 

Back in Winooski High School’s multilingual learners class, their teacher, Becky Savage, turned to a new topic: Astronauts aboard Artemis II had just released photos from the far side of the moon, the farthest any human has ever traveled from Earth. She pulled the images up on screen for the class to see.

They had a million questions. Is that photo artificial intelligence? How do the astronauts have access to the internet? Why didn’t they land on the moon?

For a few minutes, their thoughts were 250,000 miles away. Then, it was time to practice reading and writing in English again.

Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org.

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Absenteeism is a huge and seemingly intractable problem for the nation’s public schools. And Michigan has one of the worst attendance rates in the country. That makes it a prime target for researchers. In hundreds of schools, more than 3 out of 5 students were chronically absent before the pandemic. When classes resumed, chronic absenteeism approached 4 out of 5 students in the state’s worst-attended schools.

Yet a new study released in May offers hope. Researchers found that some Michigan schools appear to be substantially better than others at getting students to show up, and identified one intervention — frequent home visits to families whose children are absent from class — that was used more often by schools making a difference.

Schools that were more successful in boosting attendance were much more likely to conduct these visits frequently — daily or weekly. Monthly or occasional home visits did not appear to make as much difference. Schools that visited less frequently performed about the same as those that did not conduct home visits at all.

Measuring a school’s impact on attendance is tricky. If a student attends school 95 percent of the time, it can be hard to tell whether the student was already conscientious, or whether the school itself is having a positive influence.

To isolate a school’s influence, researchers at the University of Michigan-Flint and Wayne State University focused on students who switched schools, such as those transitioning from middle to high school. The students themselves remained largely the same while their school environments changed so researchers could more credibly estimate whether particular schools made a difference. To account for the fact that more diligent students might be selected or funneled into higher-performing schools, researchers further adjusted their calculations to compare students with similar backgrounds and academic records as they switched schools.

Researchers analyzed roughly 2,700 Michigan schools between 2022 and 2025 and divided them into quarters based on how much they improved their students’ attendance rates. Students in the top quarter of schools showed up for class about seven more days per year than similar students in the bottom quarter. Seven days is substantial since missing 18 days a year is the threshold for chronic absenteeism.

Encouragingly, these attendance gains were not short-lived. The schools that made the most progress tended to show improvement across all three years of the study.

But improvement does not necessarily mean success. Some of the most effective schools in the state still had chronic absenteeism rates above 40 or 50 percent, said Jeremy Singer, assistant professor at the University of Michigan-Flint and lead author of the study.

The schools making the most progress tend to educate many children in poverty, often clustered in the state’s poorest cities, such as Detroit, Flint and Saginaw, or in economically depressed rural areas where farms are rapidly going out of business. Across the nation, absenteeism rates are highest in poor communities where evictions, addiction, transportation problems, health issues and family responsibilities interfere with school attendance.

High-poverty schools know absenteeism is a problem and have numerous programs and staff in place to address it. Researchers wanted to see if there were common strategies used by schools that were making progress. And so they combined their analysis with a Michigan school survey where principals disclosed how they were tackling the problem. 

That’s how the value of frequent home visits rose to the top, which also corroborates other research in Connecticut. An intensive home visiting program to boost attendance has also shown strong results there.

Still, these visits are not a guaranteed solution. Some Michigan schools conducting weekly home visits saw no improvement in attendance — or even worsening absenteeism. In other words, while many schools using frequent home visits were successful, others were not. “They’re certainly no silver bullet,” said Singer. 

Singer says that researchers need to dig deeper into what makes home visits effective since they are expensive and time-intensive. Possible factors include who conducts them, what time of day they occur, whether they are scheduled or surprise visits, and what conversations take place.

Schools in the study are trying dozens of other interventions, but the researchers didn’t detect a strong connection between most of those efforts and improved attendance. These other interventions include early warning systems, letters home, automated text messages and phone calls. Schools that had support from district personnel, such as truancy officers or liaisons, did not do better than schools without these staffers.

Personalized and frequent text messages were modestly more common among more schools with improving attendance. Researchers also found that schools making more progress were slightly more likely to report actively helping families address outside barriers such as housing and transportation.

The correlation between interventions and schools that are effective in boosting attendance is a clue about what works, but the researchers cannot say whether the interventions are driving the attendance improvements. It could be that the most effective schools are doing other things not captured in the survey, such as hiring especially skilled teachers or building stronger relationships with students that make school feel worth attending. 

The findings are a reminder that “best practices” recommendations often overstate what researchers actually know. Schools can make a meaningful difference in attendance, but identifying genuinely successful schools is hard, isolating why they succeed is even harder, and simple solutions rarely hold up under scrutiny.

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

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Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the White House and Congress have worked aggressively to overhaul federal student financial aid. On July 1, many of those efforts will come to fruition.

Student borrowers will begin to see different options for loan repayments and forgiveness, while current students will face new limits on how much they can borrow in the first place. Low-income people will have more funding available to pursue career and technical training. 

These moves have cheerleaders, critics and skeptics. The Hechinger Report checked in with experts around the country to find out what they’re wondering and watching for as it all unfolds.

Workforce Pell 

Change in higher education rarely moves so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. But one new federal policy that takes effect July 1 has states and providers scrambling. At stake are hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and a continued supply of workers in essential jobs.

After years of unsuccessful bipartisan support, federal Pell Grants will be available for the first time to help lower-income students pay not just for associate and bachelor’s degrees, but for short-term training that leads to certificates or certifications for in-demand roles, including nursing assistants, phlebotomists, EMTs and child care providers, and in many trades — truck driving, welding, car repair and HVAC.

This new option, widely nicknamed short-term or Workforce Pell, has a lot of rules. It applies to programs as short as eight weeks but requires providers to show that at least 70 percent of students successfully finish and get jobs within six months that pay enough to justify the cost.

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

Enforcing these conditions is largely left to states, which have had less than a year to prepare. Some are further along than others. Meanwhile, a survey shows that fewer than half of people who could most benefit from these non-degree programs are aware of them, let alone that they may now qualify for government grants to cover the cost.

Even once they do know, there are nearly 1.9 million such programs to choose from, according to the Counting Credentials project. They’re offered by 134,491 different providers, from public community colleges to private, for-profit schools. Of those, anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand will meet the eligibility criteria for short-term Pell Grants, according to the most specific available projection from the U.S. Department of Education.

Whether the programs pay off will be the most critical question to answer. One study finds that only about 12 percent of more than 23,000 non-degree credentials analyzed left their students earning at least 10 percent more than they made before enrolling. Another shows that graduates from non-degree programs at community colleges in Texas saw wage gains of about 4 percent; those in fields like transportation and engineering technologies benefited the most, while their counterparts in business and marketing and information sciences saw zero increase in earnings.

Most states still have a long way to go to establishing eligibility rules to protect prospective students from wasting their time — and federal money — on poor programs. 

— Jon Marcus 

Scrapping the SAVE loan program

What happens when more than 7 million people who owe money on their federal student loans are forced to find new repayment plans in the span of a few months? We’re about to find out.

The federal SAVE — Saving on a Valuable Education — program is being phased out by the Trump administration, leaving its 7.5 million participants to transfer their student debt to one of at least three other plans starting July 1. Most SAVE borrowers will need to switch by September. Those who miss the deadline will automatically be enrolled in a standard federal repayment plan that could cost significantly more.

“The key thing is making sure people understand that they really do need to take action,” said Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, a trade group representing loan servicers. “There’s nothing stopping people from acting now.”

The SAVE program, enacted by the Biden administration in 2023, limited federal loan repayment to 5 percent of an undergraduate borrower’s disposable income and made it easier to seek forgiveness for loans. The Trump administration ended the program to settle lawsuits by Republican officials in 18 states, who argued that SAVE’s provisions went beyond what Congress had intended in authorizing income-driven repayment plans. 

While the Department of Education will offer a new income-driven plan, the terms will be less forgiving than the SAVE program’s. The lowest-income borrowers will no longer be able to skip some payments, and debt will be allowed to be canceled only after a minimum of 30 years, in contrast with the SAVE plan’s 10-year minimum.

Going forward, as many as eight plans will be options, but not all will be available to every borrower, and some will expire in 2028. Depending on which new plan a SAVE borrower chooses, monthly payments could rise by hundreds of dollars, said Natalia Abrams, president and founder of the Student Debt Crisis Center, an advocacy group for student borrowers.

“I would say this is by far the most confusing time for the student borrower landscape,” she said, noting that more than 700 people attended her organization’s most recent workshop about the coming changes. “I don’t think we’ve gotten clear guidance on it.”

Confusion and worry have been common among SAVE borrowers who reached out to Lane Thompson, Oregon’s student loan ombudsperson. Many wondered about the timeline for the changes, she said, and many feel stressed about the effects on their living expenses amid inflationary pressures. The latest rules also follow years of loan pauses, lawsuits and other measures that have affected federal student loan rules.

“I’m definitely seeing people who are very confused,” Thompson said. “People are kind of exhausted by all the change.”

Related: Fake student loan debt offers proliferate as federal government rolls back enforcement

SAVE borrowers will start receiving letters from the Department of Education around July 1, although some might arrive later as the department staggers implementation. The letters will open a 90-day window for borrowers to find a new repayment plan. The government’s loan simulator can help borrowers make decisions.

Borrowers will need to choose a plan that fits their repayment goals, said Sarah Sattelmeyer, project director for education, opportunity and mobility at the left-leaning think tank New America. Some people will want the lowest possible monthly payments, while others might want to pay off their loans as quickly as possible, Sattelmeyer said.

It’s important to research and speak to loan servicers to find the best option, she said.

“Borrowers are having to take in a very large amount of information and decide what’s the best move for them,” Sattelmeyer said. “Different plans meet different borrowers’ goals, and it’s based on personal circumstances.” 

— Matt Krupnick 

Public Service Loan Forgiveness

The federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program has had a relatively clear message to student borrowers since 2007: Work in a government or nonprofit job for enough time, and your debt will eventually be canceled.

But a new caveat from the Trump administration has created chaos for hundreds of thousands of borrowers whose public service jobs may no longer qualify. Starting July 1, employers with what the administration deems a “substantial illegal purpose” — such as helping immigrants or providing transgender care — could be excluded from the program.

The administration has not specified which employers would meet that definition, only saying it expects fewer than 10 employers per year to be affected. Advocacy groups worry that the Trump administration might target state governments such as California, Illinois or New York, institutions such as Harvard University or other groups it disagrees with.

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

“I’m trying to minimize the panic here,” said Betsy Mayotte, president and founder of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, who has spoken with borrowers who have already quit the public service jobs the program was meant to encourage them to take. “But I would be worried if I worked for an employer that has already been singled out by this administration.”

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program allows borrowers to request their remaining debt be canceled if they have made 10 years of payments while working for a qualifying employer. Those employers include public schools and government agencies as well as nonprofit organizations such as hospitals, universities and food banks.

Several lawsuits could affect the program’s future. One, filed in Massachusetts by 14 parties including the cities of Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, labor unions and nonprofits, argues that the administration has no right to alter a congressionally approved program. That complaint has a hearing scheduled for June 3. A second lawsuit has been brought by a coalition of 23 state attorneys general.

Borrowers should wait to see how the legal challenges proceed before making major decisions, said Winston Berkman-Breen, legal director of Protect Borrowers, which represents some of the 14 plaintiffs.

“No one should change their life plans or give up their dream job for this,” he said. “We think it would be premature for someone to make such an important decision on their job or where they live based on this rule.”

Regardless of the lawsuits’ outcomes, it’s not yet clear whether any changes could be enforced or how many people would be affected, Mayotte said.

“If an employer does fall under scrutiny, the employer will have the opportunity to defend themselves,” she said. “I think the number of borrowers affected, if this makes it through the courts, will not be broad at all.” 

— Matt Krupnick 

Graduate student loan limits 

Grad PLUS loans, officially named Direct PLUS loans, allowed graduate students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance. They are being phased out. Instead, students enrolled in 11 fields categorized as professional, such as doctors and lawyers, are limited to $50,000 per year and a lifetime total of $200,000. All other graduate programs, such as nursing, teaching and social work, will have a lower cap of $20,500 per year and $100,000 in total. Two dozen states filed a lawsuit in May challenging the definition of “professional” that created these lower loan limits. Student borrowers already enrolled in a program won’t be affected by the changes. 

Education Department officials say the restrictions will help protect incoming students from ballooning debt that they can’t repay and will pressure institutions to lower costs. Opponents worry that the caps will make a degree less accessible to low-income students, restricting economic mobility for those who would benefit most. 

About 28 percent of graduate students would surpass the borrowing caps if they were in place today, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. 

Some fields of study could be deeply affected. Today, close to 80 percent of dentistry, 21 percent of registered nursing and 58 percent of medical students borrow more than the new limits, according to a recent report by the PEER Center at American University.   

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

Policymakers across the political spectrum expect growth in private student loans, which have fewer protections than federal ones. Critics note that low-income students, whose families disproportionately have lower credit scores, could face higher interest rates in the private market. More than a third of students who borrow over the new limit have credit scores that will make it difficult to get approved for a private loan. 

“Knowing how many people are going to struggle to access private loans on their own, I think it is safe to assume there will be a notable impact on enrollment,” said Clare McCann, one of the co-authors of the PEER report. “Some of these people will choose not to go, and unfortunately, that’s even going to be true in a lot of the fields where the return on investment is very strong.” 

Supporters of the caps say student debt and unrepaid loans, which cost the federal government billions of dollars, will decrease. 

“Before, you could have a really overpriced graduate program that students would just take out these ridiculous student loans for and not be able to repay them,” said Andrew Gillen, research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. “These overpriced programs are not going to be able to convince a private financial institution to give loans to their students.”

Gillen and others hope that nonprofits and colleges will step in to cosign loans for students with low credit scores who can’t get private loans on their own.

Still, some policymakers who believe in loan limits say it’s unclear whether private companies will risk lending to people with poor credit, even if they attend a high-quality school. They were frustrated with the final law and had advocated for pegging the limits to a graduate’s ability to pay back the loan. 

— Meredith Kolodner

Parent loan limits

Parent PLUS loans, which previously allowed parents to borrow up to the cost of a child’s attendance, will be capped at $20,000 per year and a lifetime total of $65,000 per dependent student. These borrowers will also no longer have access to the limited income-driven repayment plans that previously existed.

Originally aimed at affluent families who needed a quick cash infusion, Parent PLUS loans have increasingly been used by middle- and low-income families to bridge the financial gap as federal financial aid no longer covered the cost of attending college. About 56 percent of Parent PLUS borrowers qualify for Pell Grants, which are aimed at low-income families. 

There has been agreement across the political spectrum for years that Parent PLUS loans landed families in unmanageable debt. After 10 years, the average borrower has barely paid off half of what they owe, and with a 9 percent interest rate, the amount owed can climb to thousands of dollars beyond what was borrowed.

Congress created the new caps to keep families from spiraling into debt and steer them toward more affordable options. The motivation was not to stop government waste — the program has traditionally made a profit for the government with a 16 percent return most recently, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.

The impact of the caps will vary by income level. About 18 percent of borrowers from families making less than $50,000 now borrow above the new annual cap and 9 percent borrow more than the lifetime limit, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute. For borrowers from families who make more than $200,000, those numbers are 57 percent and 46 percent, respectively. 

Critics of Parent PLUS loans note that low- and middle-income families who struggle to repay their loans tend to borrow well below the limit, making the caps less effective for them. 

“For families with strong financial profiles and good credit, this shift may yield access to lower-cost options than Parent PLUS loans,” wrote the authors of the Brookings report. “However, for families with weaker credit or limited collateral, private market underwriting may result in reduced access to loan funds and substantially higher borrowing costs, potentially exacerbating existing inequalities in college financing.”

Instead of across-the-board loan limits, critics argue that Parent PLUS loan approval should take into account the ability to pay, include an income-based repayment option and hold colleges accountable for high default rates. 

— Meredith Kolodner 

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

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

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In my English and writing classes, I ask my students to interrogate fictional character bots. 

The first time I assigned this project, I worried that I would get them addicted to Character.AI — arguably the most seductive and addictive type of chatbot for young people, because it gives students exactly what I assumed they wanted: a friend who never says no, never gets tired and never pushes back. 

The exact opposite happened. Months later, I asked if they wanted to interrogate another character chatbot. The answer was a resounding, “Nah, that’s old news.”

Those students didn’t need to be told AI was addictive. They didn’t need a policy or a warning. They came to their own conclusions because they had been given a structured encounter with the technology — one that required them to interrogate it rather than consume it. 

Their attitude answered a question that many in education are struggling with: What does it mean to be “AI literate”? No, it is not a fake concept — it just hasn’t been fully defined yet. We’re still researching it. We’re still trying to understand it.

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

The exercise had helped build their resistance to AI addiction. I believe that is what AI literacy actually produces. Not dependence — antibodies. We’re still looking for the right dosage, but finding the right balance and type of AI exposure helps the body build up its protective layers. The activity I engaged my students in helped them learn to interrogate AI, one of the best ways there is to build up the cognitive defense system. 

It is possible that a small amount of AI in a student’s life might even be good for them. Or, in another way, it might act as a vaccine.

AI is being sold as a product that increases productivity and even creativity. The only way to articulate its dangers is to engage in research. 

That research, subsequently, will shine a light on its ills. Scientists thought cocaine was good for the body before they realized it was bad. Researchers claimed cigarettes could reduce stress before they realized it caused cancer.

The AI companies don’t want you to know about AI’s harms. They don’t want you to be aware. Every ruling class in history has understood that a literate population is a dangerous one.

Related: TEACHER VOICE: Students must be taught about the potential harms of AI along with its benefits 

AI is a drug: Heroin. Cocaine. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Uneducated AI use is like getting behind the wheel with no training. 

It’s as dangerous as can be. I have felt that way since ChatGPT was first released three years ago. I feel that way — often — whenever OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks, or even if I just see his face on my iPhone screen.

But this drug is here. It’s being peddled on the streets. It’s freely available, and our students are consuming it in mass quantities.

And yet, despite its dangers, we shouldn’t turn away. Learning this new technology does not amount to capitulation. It is — or can be — an act of subversion.

Look at it this way: What do we do when a new drug hits the streets? What do we do when a new virus enters our world?

Well, for one, we contain it. We capture it. We make a vaccine out of it. And when we find the right controlled dosage, we give it to everybody. We build up the antibodies. We develop a natural resistance. 

Related: OPINION: Schools cannot teach AI literacy without a way to measure it

Physiological resistance is developed through exposure. Not through uncontained exposure, but via monitored exposure. There are no “doctors” of AI literacy yet — but anyone can become one.

With respect to narcotics, we know that “Just Say No to Drugs” doesn’t work. Drug education works. Drug literacy works. 

The more a person knows about what is out there and what it can do to them, the more they develop discernment. It’s the same with AI as it is with viruses. We know that the only way to develop a vaccine is to test it out in small increments. Document the findings. Toggle the dosage. Combine it with other elements. 

We are all already part of this. The more we ignore the permeation of society by a technology that never asked permission to enter our lives, the more it invades our systems undetected.

The best strategy is proactivity. Proactivity is not resignation, it is strength. It is revolutionary. Action, not inaction.

AI is a drug. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that drugs need to be researched.

So please — engage. Understand. Learn. Because the more you know, the more you help build up our antibodies.

Mike Kentz is an adjunct professor of writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the founder of AI Friction Labs — an educational technology platform that provides challenging, story-based simulations to educators for training and evaluating student skills. 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — On a late February afternoon, a dozen or so Sacramento State students, all current or former foster youth, filed into the office of the university’s Guardian Scholars Program for a financial aid workshop that promised to teach them how to “get that bread and get ahead.”

When program coordinator Gina Bryan projected scholarship information on a screen, one young man called out: “I’m gonna get some money!” 

Not everyone felt that confident. Some said they’d never applied for scholarships and didn’t know how, while others said they feared being rejected or were intimidated by the essay requirements. 

Bryan broke down the complicated process using bread-making metaphors and jokes. And she addressed a mindset barrier that she knew many of them faced, even if they wouldn’t say so out loud. “You’re capable and worth investing in,” she told the students. “You’re not asking for a handout, you’re claiming a resource.” 

The Guardian Scholars Program at Sacramento State is one of hundreds around the country designed to help students who are former foster youth stay enrolled, thrive academically and graduate with plans to build stable careers. It offers a window into policies that work — from scholarships to housing help to social connections for emotional support — at a time when the federal government has begun focusing renewed attention on these students and holding out the promise of more investment in them.

Former foster youth — a term that includes anyone who has spent time in the child welfare system, typically due to abuse or neglect — have some of the worst college graduation rates of any demographic group. An estimated 8 to 11 percent of former foster youth go on to earn any college degree, compared to 49 percent of adults overall, according to one analysis. They also typically have lower rates of employment and lower earnings than their peers with similar levels of education. 

Experts attribute the students’ struggles in higher education to instability and trauma they experienced growing up, inadequate academic preparedness and a lack of social and emotional support systems in college. 

It makes a big difference when students have “somebody on campus that really understands the unique and complex needs of former foster youth, that’s helping former foster youth build community with each other and find resources on and off campus,” said Rebecca Louve Yao, CEO of the National Foster Youth Institute, a nonprofit that aims to improve the child welfare system and empower foster youth. “That’s where the Guardian Scholars programs really work.” 

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

The first Guardian Scholars Program began in 1998 at California State University, Fullerton, with funding from philanthropy. The model has since spread to all the California State and University of California campuses, and colleges around the country have adopted similar programs. And in 1999, the federal government established the Chafee Foster Care Program to help youth aging out of foster care get access to grants for college and other postsecondary training. 

Earlier this year, lawmakers introduced a bill to increase the Chafee program’s education and training vouchers from $5,000 to $12,000 per year, with some restrictions. Another bill, introduced last fall, proposed establishing a fund of $50 million annually to expand career training and apprenticeship opportunities for former foster youth, as well as a study of the child welfare system and the resources that are currently available. 

Also last fall, President Trump issued an executive order calling for, among other things, the creation of an online platform where young people formerly in foster care can find resources related to their education, job training, housing, health care and other basic needs. 

Students in the Sacramento State program — which was created in 2006 and is funded by a combination of private and public dollars — get special scholarships, help paying for textbooks and priority registration for campus housing and courses, said Linda Ram, the program’s former director. The Guardian Scholars office provides advising and holds events like the financial aid workshop (students are required to attend two advising sessions and two events every semester). For students who need quick cash for immediate needs, like replacing a broken laptop or traveling to see an ill relative, Guardian Scholars also offers emergency grants.

At Sac State, the program is growing — from 52 students in fall 2021 to 248 students in fall 2025. That’s largely because of a boost in state funding for the programs at California State schools in 2022, Ram said, which also allowed her to more than double her office’s staff from two to five. Ram recently left Sac State for a job at a local nonprofit. 

Last fall, the university launched a new program that guarantees admission to former foster youth as long as they graduated from high school with a GPA of 2.5 or higher and completed a series of courses across seven subjects known as the A-G requirements. 

Still, the path to graduation isn’t easy: Data from the university shows that of the 11 students who entered the Guardian Scholars Program as freshman in 2019, one graduated within four years and five graduated within six years. Eight of the 12 former foster youth community college transfer students who enrolled in 2021 graduated in four years, and eight of the 25 who enrolled in 2023 graduated in two years. 

Sac State President J. Luke Wood said he’s proud of the growth of the program, but he wants to see far higher graduation rates. “We’re nowhere near where I want to be,” he said. “I’m happy for where we’re at, while being incredibly dissatisfied by where we’re at, too.” 

Ram said that despite the resources that the program provides, these students still face significant challenges. Although the program offers priority housing registration, many students will have to work one or two jobs to pay for their living expenses, which might slow them down or cause them to stop out, she said. 

Ram said she tried to make the program’s office an on-campus home for her students. She stocked the cabinets with healthy snacks and pasted inspirational quotes around the office’s main space. She often had quiet, calming music playing.

And sometimes now, when the office door is open, it’s possible to hear someone (often President Wood) playing a donated piano in the building’s foyer. His office is just one floor above the Guardian Scholars Program — and that’s not by coincidence.

Wood, who joined the university in 2023, grew up in foster care after his mother relinquished him and his twin brother. Eventually adopted by a foster family, Wood enrolled at Sacramento State after high school. There was no Guardian Scholars-type program then, but he found mentors on campus, and went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees. 

Shortly after becoming the university’s president, Wood moved the Guardian Scholars from a small office across the campus into its big, bright space on the first floor of the administration building. Now, the students stop to chat with him while he’s playing the piano, or join him to sing, sometimes bringing out the blue acoustic guitar that lives in the Guardian Scholars office. Jarred Holloway, a 26-year-old business major, who taught himself to play classical guitar in the eight years since he aged out of care, said he’s learned some Beatles songs because Wood likes them.

Holloway went into the foster care system when he was 13, bouncing between foster families and group homes. During that time, Holloway said he attended three different high schools. He had few adults to encourage him to prioritize education, let alone college. 

“It felt like sometimes you’re just looked at like ‘Oh this person is not really going to go anywhere,’ ” he said. 

But eventually, with the support of people he met through his church, he was able to enroll at Cosumnes River College, a two-year college in Sacramento. There he joined a group for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds and another group for former foster youth, where he learned about financial aid opportunities and other supports for higher education. When he transferred to Sacramento State, he immediately got involved with Guardian Scholars. Over time, he said, he began to feel like he had more control over his education. 

Last summer, he marked a milestone when he landed his first internship, at a local credit union. “I was like, ‘Finally, I’ve put in so much work and effort and here I am,’ ” he said. 

Related: From foster care to college 

The path to college was complicated for many of the Guardian Scholars students, and some of them continue to struggle with basic needs insecurity once they’re enrolled. Before arriving at Sac State, Christiano Quinones, a 28-year-old junior, had dropped out of high school, aged out of foster care and worked as a pastry chef in Southern California. A co-worker mentioned a program offering two years of free tuition toward an associate degree for first-time college students, piquing his interest. 

He earned his GED, received an associate degree from Fullerton College, a community college in Southern California, and then transferred to Sacramento State.

He had housing lined up, but it fell through, and last fall he and his partner slept in their car when they were broke or in hotels when they’d saved enough money between their financial aid refunds and jobs. Over winter break, Quinones worked with Ram and Bryan, the program coordinator, to get into a dorm for the spring semester. He’s had to take out student loans to pay for it. 

Despite the challenges, Quinones said he’s been able to find time to enjoy himself. The Ticket to Dream Foundation, a nonprofit, provides Guardian Scholars participants with box seats at Sacramento Kings games and major concerts. In late February, Ram took Quinones and eight other students to see Cardi B. It was his first concert.

“It makes you feel like you belong. It makes you feel like you’re a part of society,” Quinones said. “It’s pretty to see us all together having fun, you know, acting like humans, laughing.”

Related: Couch surfing, living in cars: Housing insecurity derails foster kids’ college dreams

Bryan, who was herself a student in the Guardian Scholars Program about a decade ago, said students are often too preoccupied with their dwindling time and resources to enjoy the present, or they use living in the present as an escape to avoid preparing for the future. 

She said she encourages them to focus on their growth, strength and resilience, and how these characteristics can help them achieve their goals. “It really has to be about sustainability,” Bryan said. “How can we slow you down to enjoy stuff about the present while making sure you have resources and aid that’s going to help with long-term success?” 

Louve Yao, of the National Foster Youth Institute, said that Trump’s proposed online platform of resources could help reduce this uncertainty. She said that former foster youth often aren’t aware of all that they’re eligible for, of the different deadlines to apply for those resources or that the busy social worker whose job it is to help them figure it out is only available during normal business hours. 

It’s unclear exactly what the status of Trump’s proposal is. The federal Administration for Children and Families is developing the platform and has gotten input from advocacy groups and former foster youth throughout the process. Trump gave ACF until May to create the platform. 

Neither the bill that would require a study of the current child welfare system and establish a $50 million annual fund for former foster youth nor the bill that would more than double the annual maximum Chafee grant have progressed at all since they were introduced. 

Related: How an old hotel shows one solution to community college student housing problems 

In the meantime, the burden to support these high-need students falls to community- and campus-based advocates like Bryan — and even to student workers like Holloway, the 26-year-old business major.

Since arriving at Sacramento State, Holloway has worked off and on in the Guardian Scholars office, helping out with events like the financial aid workshop. He’s passionate about making the office a place of community where former foster youth can take their minds off challenges they’re up against and just have fun. 

He spends a lot of time in the center, even when he’s not working. Sometimes he’s doing homework, and other times, he’s playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo Switch in between classes or noodling on that blue guitar. 

“When you have a family, and if you sit down with your family, there’s connection. There’s joy and playing together and working together and having fun,” he said. In a way, that’s what the office time means to him. “It’s more about the space than it is about the game,” Holloway said. 

Contact staff writer Olivia Sanchez at 212-678-8402 or osanchez@hechingerreport.org. 

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

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