About 78% of Americans subscribe to broadband internet at home, while 16% only access the internet on their phones, according to polling from Pew Research Center. Americans living in rural areas are especially likely to lack broadband. This piece will help you understand what’s holding back broadband deployment and what states are doing to improve access. It was originally published by The Pew Charitable Trusts and is edited here for style.  

The federal $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program aims to expand high-speed internet access nationwide — and it dominated broadband policy headlines in 2025.

But state legislatures were also active in their efforts to bridge the digital divide.

Combined, states passed over 160 broadband-related bills and resolutions last year. These included regulatory changes, expanding the authority of their broadband offices and addressing internet affordability for low-income customers.

As states prepare to deploy BEAD projects and navigate new uncertainties from federal policymakers — including the potential withholding of some funding from states that have passed certain regulations on artificial intelligence — it will be increasingly important for states to balance administering federal funding while advancing their own priorities.

Following the changes made to the BEAD program in June 2025 — shifting which locations are eligible for funding and the type of networks that can be awarded — state-funded programs may have an increasingly important role to play in complementing federal efforts to ensure that all communities are connected.

Bills passed in 2025 provide early insight as to how state legislatures may consider managing these challenges in 2026 and beyond.

Broadband deployment barriers

In the long preparation process for BEAD, a program authorized as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, state broadband offices identified several barriers that could prevent them from achieving the goals of the program on time and on budget.

Two leading barriers emerged:

• Federal, state, local and private permitting processes for constructing new high-speed internet networks.
• A lack of trained workers.

Given that both challenges can involve federal, state, and local governments, they cannot be fully addressed at the state level. Still, there was progress last year.

Legislatures in Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, and West Virginia updated their rules governing the broadband construction process to set new timelines and fee structures for permit applications.

In Texas and Kentucky, state legislatures approved funding for new broadband workforce training programs. The legislators in Texas put $5 million toward an apprenticeship program to reimburse participating broadband utility engineering and construction companies. In Kentucky, legislators earmarked $6 million for hiring workers to replace utility poles and manage permits, funding originally passed in 2024 and carried forward in 2025.

As states prepare for their BEAD projects, they’re also administering their own state-funded programs, including those aimed at filling gaps in federal policies, and targeting their own deployment priorities. Pew’s analysis of the 2025 state legislative sessions found that 26 states allocated a combined $1.3 billion to a variety of broadband programs, including new or upgraded networks for homes, small businesses, schools, libraries and other government buildings.

Virginia appropriated $50 million in 2025 to the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative, which has awarded broadband grants since 2017. The 2025 allocation commits funding for new deployment projects administered by the initiative, as well as to accelerate deployment of projects funded by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which must be completed by the end of 2026. The legislature earmarked $30 million of these funds for additional construction costs, such as permitting fees, for projects that may be at risk of missing the 2026 project deadline.

The Minnesota state legislature also approved $50 million for deployment grants in 2025. Minnesota has operated a state broadband expansion program since 2014 and the state has awarded over $400 million, funding broadband connections to nearly 120,000 homes and businesses.

Unlike the federal programs that states administer, state-level programs can be designed to address specific priorities or needs in a given state or community, such as increasing market competition among internet service providers in certain areas or funding the deployment of networks capable of reaching speeds higher than the minimum federal standards.

For example, under Mississippi’s Broadband Expansion and Accessibility program, the state statute defines communities that have access to service only from satellite providers or mobile wireless networks as “critical need areas” and therefore eligible for project funding.

Some states, including California and Maine, also used their own funding to cover the final costs of connecting homes to existing networks, frequently referred to as “line extensions.”

State broadband office responsibilities

As state broadband offices continue to administer federal and state funding, their functional capacity and authority are key factors in their ability to successfully administer these complex programs.

In 2025, 13 states dedicated new administrative funding for their broadband offices, charging them with new responsibilities such as collecting data from internet providers on subscriptions and service areas, publicly reporting on the progress being made by their programs, and offering enhanced resources to support network construction.

For example, a new law in Colorado requires the state’s broadband office to expand its technical assistance offerings to help internet providers to apply for and manage grants, including resources for the deployment of new wireless services.

Broadband affordability

The bulk of federal funding in recent years has focused on building networks to reach communities without access to high-speed internet service.

However, affordability of service remains a barrier to closing the digital divide — high costs of monthly service can prevent a household from subscribing or staying connected.

These factors, referred to as “adoption rates” and “subscriber churn,” can also determine if providers deliver new or upgraded service in higher-cost communities. In 2025, several state legislatures took steps to address this challenge.

Oregon passed legislation allowing the Oregon Public Utility Commission to increase the support offered to low-income customers through its state Lifeline program. At the federal level, the Lifeline program offers a $9.25 monthly discount on phone and internet bills for eligible low-income households.

Under the Oregon bill, eligible households there can receive an additional broadband discount of up to $24.95 per month, or $49.95 on Tribal lands — and, for the first time, receive a $100 discount when buying a computer.

In February 2026, two other states adopted similar policies: California launched a new home broadband pilot and New Mexico passed its Low-Income Telecommunications Assistance Program.

Based on Pew’s analysis, there are now nine states that increase the discount their residents can receive from the federal Lifeline program on internet services.

Connecticut also instituted new affordability requirements for providers. Passed in June 2025, its legislation requires providers that contract with the state to offer a low-cost plan of $40 per month or less to eligible households. The requirement will take effect on Oct. 1 this year.

In January 2025, a similar law went into effect in New York, which requires providers serving more than 20,000 customers throughout the state to offer service at $15 or $20 per month. Prices are based on minimum speeds and available to low-income and other qualified households.

Looking ahead

Several state legislatures are actively working on broadband issues in 2026.

These include bills introduced in Maryland and Illinois to address affordability; proposals to change the regulatory landscape for providers in West Virginia; and an extension of Missouri’s broadband program, which is set to sunset in 2027.

States are also already weighing bills that could alleviate future challenges for their BEAD projects, including a bill in Kansas adjusting the process for when broadband projects intersect with railroad crossings and a bill in New York on how utility poles are managed.

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U.S. and Israeli attacks in Iran have reportedly killed more than 1,300 people since the war there began late last month. Missile and drone strikes have destroyed or closed significant energy infrastructure across the Middle East. The effective closing of the Strait of Hormuz — 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through it — has meant rising energy prices for U.S. and other consumers.

“The war in the Middle East is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” according to a recent report from the International Energy Agency.

On March 16, as the war entered its third week, The Journalist’s Resource and EconoFact convened a panel to discuss the ongoing economic consequences of the Iran war. I moderated the discussion with:

• Binyamin Applebaum, lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board.
• Nicholas Bloom, the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
• Michael Klein, the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at Tufts University and Executive Editor of EconoFact.
• David G. Victor, distinguished professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California San Diego.

Our wide-ranging conversation touched on economic uncertainty, windfalls for oil producers, how business leaders may be communicating with the administration of President Donald Trump, and even artificial intelligence — insights that local reporters and independent journalists can adapt for their audiences.

Here’s one story idea: Whether business uncertainty spurred by the war is slowing hiring within your coverage area. Watch the video and keep reading for takeaways from our discussion.

The war could increase uncertainty in U.S. hiring

The early days of the COVID pandemic in the U.S. were marked by the Great Resignation — workers leaving their jobs at high rates for a range of reasons, from low pay to a lack of advancement opportunities to feeling disrespected at work.

Now, business uncertainty is fueling the opposite — the Great Hesitation, some are calling it — marked by slow hiring processes and high standards for job candidates. The reason, Bloom explained, is that when businesses are uncertain about the future they’re hesitant to invest the time and money it takes to hire someone, unless they think a candidate is a perfect fit.

Still, the labor data isn’t all doom and gloom, Bloom said. For example, the unemployment rate remains historically low at 4.4%.

But job growth is also low, in part because of immigration crackdowns. And adding more uncertainty to that equation isn’t going to help hiring prospects for those on the job market.

“What will the event in Iran do? I think it’s going to make that worse,” Bloom said.

With energy prices rising due to the war, short-term inflation expectations are also up, as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell explained during remarks on March 18.

Interest rates tend to follow inflation, Klein said during the webinar. As the cost of borrowing increases, businesses turn reluctant to invest and expand their workforces.

“Financial conditions probably will deteriorate, would be my guess, based on what’s going on right now,” Klein said.

Oil producers are seeing windfalls

With Brent crude trading at triple-digits per barrel and U.S. gas prices nearing an average of $4 per gallon, oil producers have reaped historic market valuations since the start of the Iran war.

“You’ve seen, just in the last few days, reporting on the incredible increase in valuation of essentially all the Western oil companies,” Victor said. “Anyone who’s not too tethered to getting their product out of the Gulf — and that includes Texas. So there’s going to be a huge windfall.”

Other oil producing countries — including those unfriendly to U.S. interests — also stand to benefit from the choking off of oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

“Russia is going to be a big beneficiary of this,” Klein said. “Not only because of the increase in the price of oil but the relaxation of sanctions on Russian oil.”

If business leaders are discontent over the war, they’re communicating it behind the scenes

It might seem that the oil industry would be, if not thrilled about the war, then perhaps content, considering that the price of their product has significantly risen.

But oil companies think long-run, Victor said. They’re concerned with political support for the industry across multiple administrations, along with public backlash.

The same is true of companies across many industries. When companies communicate concerns with this administration in particular, they tend to tread lightly, Applebaum explained.   

“I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking to business leaders about their interactions with the Trump administration, and the overarching theme that you hear repeatedly is that what they learned during the first Trump administration is that there is almost zero value, and indeed significant negative value, in confronting the president or in criticizing him publicly,” Applebaum said.

Instead, he said, when business leaders have issues with administration policies or actions, they tend not to communicate those publicly, but rather behind the scenes through intermediaries.

“That is why you are not seeing corporate executives talking about this in public,” Applebaum said.

The war could slow economic growth from AI

Infrastructure and software behind the artificial intelligence boom are helping spur economic growth in the U.S., according to a recent analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. AI data centers that require huge computing power are a major part of AI-related infrastructure growth.

The energy needs of AI data centers are well documented. An AI data center may consume as much electricity as 100,000 households, according to the International Energy Agency.

“If energy prices go up there’s more political pressure to push back on AI and its energy use, and that could be another big issue for U.S. growth,” Bloom said. “That I could see coming reasonably soon.”

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Transparency, methodological gold standards and survey weighting: Those were three of many topics covered during two webinars The Journalist’s Resource recently hosted featuring Roper iPoll, from The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.

Roper iPoll is a comprehensive opinion data research platform that offers access to nearly a million survey and poll questions from 1935 to today. Eligible small media organizations and independent journalists can apply for a one-year membership to Roper iPoll.

Kathleen Weldon, director of data operations at the Roper Center, discussed how journalists can use Roper iPoll to access both up-to-date and historical opinion polls.

With the 2026 U.S. primaries underway, keep reading for three insights that will help you accurately cover opinion polls. These takeaways are from both webinars, held on Feb. 26 and March 4. And check out our past work on covering surveys and polls and understanding question order bias.

1. Good polls will be transparent about their methodologies.

Methodological transparency is the foundation of reliable polling data.

“You can’t say that any particular poll is great just because it’s transparent,” Weldon said. “There can be bad polls that are transparent. However, it is very uncommon for good polls to not be transparent.”

The code of ethics of the Association for Public Opinion Research, a major professional organization for public opinion survey professionals, requires that member organizations commit to transparency in how they design, conduct, analyze and report their surveys and findings.

“What we push over and over again is transparency, transparency, transparency,” Weldon said. “It’s the only way that you can ensure that the people who are doing the research are acting in good faith — that they’re willing to share their information, and to allow people to interrogate the data.”

2. There’s no single gold standard for survey methodology.

Phone surveys with live interviewers and random digit dialing has long been considered the gold standard of public opinion polling. But response rates have fallen over recent decades — people don’t answer their phones like they used to — and new polling methods have emerged.

“There’s really no certainty that there is one method that is appropriate in all situations — that can be said to be a perfect gold standard,” Weldon said. “There is a method that does represent most of what currently comes into our archive. And that is online probability polling.”

In probability-based sampling, pollsters randomly select participants. This helps reduce bias in results. If everyone in a population being sampled has an equal chance of being selected, there should be an equal chance that all potential answers to questions will be represented.

3. Take a close look at survey weighting.

Non-probability online samples are another common methodology that journalists may encounter when reporting on polling data.

They may include “opt-in” surveys, where people choose to participate. And because these online samples are not random, they may introduce bias.

Some pollsters use sophisticated weighting methods to try to overcome potential bias and ensure their results more closely represent the population being studied. For example, if the target population is 50% men and 50% women, but 40% of respondents were women and 60% were men, the responses from women would count more than those from men in the final results.

“Definitely pay attention to weighting,” Weldon said. “Is there something they’re not weighting to that seems like it should be there? Almost all of them are weighting to sex and age. People have been waiting to sex and age since the beginning of polling. But some of the other things — like education and income, or even access to the internet — those types of things can be really valuable weights.”

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An earlier version of this article first appeared on Austin Kocher’s Substack. We’ve edited it for style and republished it with permission.

Even while staying busy with my own research, I try to read as much of other people’s work as I can.

Keeping up with the news is important, but I think reading deeply invested work by academic and policy experts will give you a less sensational and less emotional understanding of the immigration enforcement system than the news cycle alone.

These reports and articles take months or years to produce. They draw on data that most people never see.

And they tend to ask better questions than the ones that dominate cable news.

The problem is that a lot of this work is hard to find. Unlike books or journal articles, reports don’t have a central repository. They circulate online, and if you happen to be in the right networks you see them — and if you’re not, you don’t.

My effort here is to highlight a few pieces that you might have missed, all of which have come out recently and all of which I think represent really important work.

I’ve gone over my notes and marginalia for each of these and pulled out three key observations. Most of the pieces below are policy reports. One is a peer-reviewed academic article. Thanks to everyone named and unnamed for the massive aggregation of intellectual labor that went into these five pieces.

ICE Arrests across Trump’s First and Second Terms: Variation in Targeting, Method, and Geography
Chloe N. East, Elizabeth Cox and Caitlin Patler. NBER Working Paper, February 2026.

A lot of people have written over the past year about how immigration enforcement under Donald Trump’s second presidential administration has shifted away from people with criminal convictions.

I’ve written about this extensively myself, and this observation remains important. But it is also important to reproduce that analysis with greater academic rigor — which is exactly what this paper does — and to surface patterns in the data that have been missed, which it also does.

Using administrative data covering the complete universe of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests from 2015 through October 2025, this team compares the two Trump administrations directly to identify what is different between them statistically and what is driving the shift toward arresting people with less criminal history. Here are three key findings.

• The share of ICE arrestees with criminal convictions dropped sharply after the second inauguration, from about 52% to 37%. This decline was far steeper than at the start of the first Trump administration, when the share also fell but by a smaller margin.
• A major driver is the shift toward “community arrests,” which are arrests on the street, at workplaces, courthouses, and other community sites. These more than doubled as a share of all arrests, rising from about 19% to 44%. Community-based operations are far less likely to pick up people with criminal records compared to arrests conducted through law enforcement partnerships.
• Areas of responsibility containing major Democratic-controlled cities saw the largest spikes in community arrests during the second term. Across virtually all regions, as arrests increased, the share of people with criminal convictions declined.

Some in the news media have touched on this topic, but what this team brings is the kind of rigorous, comprehensive data analysis that deepens our understanding of what is driving enforcement. Digging into the full universe of arrest data and comparing the two administrations side-by-side is exactly the kind of work we need more of right now.

Mass Deportation and the Intensity of Policing in the United States’ 100-Mile Border Zone
Geoff Boyce. Law & Policy, October 2023.

This paper was published before the current administration, but it may be one of the most important pieces you can read to understand what is happening right now. Boyce’s argument is that the familiar binary between “border” and “interior” enforcement obscures far more than it reveals.

Drawing on an expansive archive of internal government records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and court litigation, primarily I-213 arrest forms from Border Patrol sectors in Tucson, Arizona, Buffalo, New York and Detroit, Michigan, Boyce documents what enforcement looks like across parts of the 100-mile border zone.

• In the Detroit sector, 86% of arrested noncitizens were of Latin American origin, far exceeding their share of the local foreign-born population. Agents cited contradictory justifications for stops: Slowing down was suspicious in 33% of records, but speeding up was suspicious in 17%. Avoiding eye contact was flagged in 39% of cases, while making eye contact was flagged in 25%.
• Local and state police function as critical force multipliers. In the Buffalo sector, nearly half of all arrests of long-term residents were initiated by other law enforcement agencies that channeled individuals into Border Patrol custody. Despite a nationwide directive prohibiting Border Patrol agents from acting as interpreters for local police, nearly 30% of “other agency” arrests in the Detroit sector involved agents being summoned for that purpose.
• The intensity of enforcement can be reduced through policy. When New York in 2017 banned state employees from inquiring about immigration status, “other agency” arrests in the Buffalo sector dropped from nearly 50% to 31%. When Tucson curtailed local cooperation with Border Patrol, arrests of long-term residents fell 53%.

As I recently argued on the Project Censored podcast, rather than thinking about enforcement in terms of where the border is, we should think about what the border does. Boyce’s work is essential to that reframing. He proposes an “intensity” framework: the volume, diversity, and networked interconnectivity of law enforcement institutions operating in a given area at a given time.

This helps explain why the arrival of Border Patrol agents in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago should not be understood as an aberration, but as an extension of a long-standing enforcement logic. The enforcement authority, racial profiling, and web of inter-agency cooperation that Boyce documents in border communities travel with those agents wherever they go.

Immigration Enforcement in the First Nine Months of the Second Trump Administration
Graeme Blair and David Hausman. Deportation Data Project, January 2026.

The Deportation Data Project, based at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law — in collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles — has been one of the most important initiatives in the immigration space over the past year. Their core contribution has been making the data available in the first place.

Through repeated FOIA requests and litigation — they sued ICE when the agency failed to respond — they have obtained and published individual-level enforcement data that the administration has otherwise refused to share transparently. Without this project, we would have very little reliable information about what the Trump administration is doing on immigration enforcement.

It’s really valuable that the team fought to get this data and took the time to analyze it. Given their deep knowledge of the datasets — and the limitations of the data — this report provides an authoritative summary and analysis that will be useful to researchers, journalists, and anyone trying to understand the full picture of what has happened over the first nine months of the second Trump administration.

• Interior deportations increased by a factor of 4.6. Street arrests, meaning arrests on sidewalks, at workplaces, and in communities — rather than transfers from jails and prisons — increased by a factor of eleven. For the two decades prior to 2025, ICE had relied overwhelmingly on custodial transfers for its interior enforcement. Street arrests at this scale are, as Blair and Hausman put it, “a new phenomenon.”
• Arrests of people without any criminal conviction increased sevenfold. Arrests of people with violent crime convictions increased by only about 30%. The shift away from targeting people with convictions was evident in both street arrests and custodial transfers.
• Once detained, virtually no one was released. Release within 60 days of arrest dropped from 16% to 3%. Voluntary departures increased by a factor of 21, a pattern the authors attribute to the coercive pressure of indefinite detention with no prospect of release. In July 2025, ICE issued guidance asserting that anyone who had entered between ports of entry was ineligible for bond regardless of how long they had lived in the U.S. Despite hundreds of federal court opinions finding this policy illegal, ICE and immigration courts have continued to apply it.

Still, the administration is not close to its stated goal of deporting one million people per year. At the most recent rate, the government would deport under 300,000 people annually. That is unprecedented in this century, but well short of the political rhetoric.

Immigration Detention Expansion in Trump’s Second Term
American Immigration Council. January 2026.

If the Deportation Data Project report gives you the numbers, this report from the nonprofit American Immigration Council — which advocates for immigrant inclusion in the U.S. — gives you the full picture: the policy architecture, funding pipeline, infrastructure buildout, conditions on the ground, and the human stories of people trapped inside the system.

It is, in my view, the definitive overview of what has happened to immigration detention during the first year of the second Trump administration.

While the overall numbers have been covered by many people at this point, some of the most valuable parts of this report are its observations about what kinds of detention facilities are being built, what is happening to people once they enter the system, and how bad conditions have gotten.

• The administration has created entirely new categories of detention infrastructure. Florida opened “Alligator Alcatraz,” a tent camp at the Dade-Collier Airport bordering the Everglades that is wholly owned and operated by the state under a 287(g) agreement, with no direct ICE involvement. No state had ever previously argued it could run its own immigration detention facility. Meanwhile, the military base tent camp at Fort Bliss — “Camp East Montana” — became the largest detention center in the country by November, holding over 2,700 people in soft-sided temporary structures, with plans for up to 5,000. The administration reportedly transferred $10 billion to the Navy to build tent facilities that could house up to 10,000 people each.
• People are disappearing inside the detention system. FOIA data show that transfers between facilities have become dramatically more common. In 2024, 47% of people taken into ICE custody were never transferred from their initial facility. In the first half of 2025, that dropped to just 23%, and the share of people transferred four or more times doubled. One person was transferred 15 times across facilities in Florida, Arizona, California, and Hawaii before being deported from Louisiana. ICE’s own detainee locator system has become unreliable, with people sometimes not appearing for weeks after arrest. One man’s family had to search a detention commissary app to find him.
• Conditions have deteriorated across the system. By April, nearly half of all detention centers were operating above contractual capacity. At the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, overcrowding reached nearly triple capacity, with 60 to 80 people crammed into rooms designed for 25 and women left in chains on buses for hours without access to bathrooms. At the newly reopened Delaney Hall facility in Newark, New Jersey, people were sent in while basic plumbing was not operational, food was limited to two meals a day, and a riot broke out after guards served only slices of bread for dinner. Thirty people died in ICE detention in 2025 as of December 18, more than during the COVID pandemic.

The report also documents the gutting of oversight. The Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties was cut from 150 staff to 22, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman from 110 to 10, and Congressional surprise inspections have been effectively blocked.

This is an essential reference document.

Profiting Off Pain: Privatized Detention, Mass Surveillance and the Drive for Immigrant Prosecutions
American University Washington College of Law, Immigrant Justice Clinic and the National Immigration Project. January 2026.

This is the report to pair with the AIC detention report above, and the distinction matters. The AIC report documents what is happening.

This one asks why the system exists, who built it, and who profits from it.

• The report’s central argument is that criminal prosecution, privatized detention, and mass surveillance are three components of a single interlocking system. The legal engine at the center are Sections 1325 and 1326 of Title 8, which criminalize unauthorized entry and re-entry.
• The anatomy of who profits is detailed and specific. According to the report, GEO Group reported $2.42 billion in total revenue in 2024, with 41% coming from ICE contracts alone. CoreCivic drew 29% of its total revenue from ICE. GEO Group spent $1.4 million lobbying Congress and DHS in 2024, and its political action committee contributed more than $3.2 million to Republican candidates in the 2024 cycle, according to the report.
• Congressional bed quotas, first mandated in 2010 at 33,400 beds, created a built-in financial incentive to detain. ICE contracts include “tiered pricing” structures that give the agency a discount for each person detained above the guaranteed minimum, meaning ICE pays less per person the more people it locks up. The $45 billion allocation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act caused private prison company stocks to jump between 50 and 70 percent, according to the report.

This is a report about a feedback loop: criminalization fills beds, filled beds generate profits, profits fund lobbying, lobbying produces more criminalization. The report also documents how the surveillance industry and the detention industry are converging, with companies like Anduril, Palantir and Amazon Web Services deeply embedded in the enforcement apparatus.

It flags the resuscitation of World War II-era provisions that criminalize failure to register with the federal government or to produce registration documents when stopped by a federal agent. Understanding this loop is essential to understanding why the detention system keeps growing regardless of which party is in power — and why the American Immigration Council’s projection of 135,000 beds is a business plan.

This report was produced with significant contributions from law students in American University’s Immigrant Justice Clinic, including Andrew Gamble, Kailey Kynast, Jack Murer, Junnah Mozaffar and Kimly Tran, supervised by Professors Jayesh Rathod and Chloe Sugino.

It is exactly the kind of clinic project that produces real impact. These students deserve recognition for the depth of research they helped pull together.

A Case for Reading Deeply

Thanks to all of the authors and contributors to these five reports for helping us understand the immigration enforcement apparatus from a systemic and theoretically robust perspective. This kind of work takes months or years to produce, and it matters enormously.

One of my favorite books is Cal Newport’s “Deep Work.” His argument is that the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks is becoming both rarer and more valuable. I think about that a lot in the context of immigration.

The news cycle can exhaust you. Instead, you need to be able to put other things aside and focus on high-quality resources like the ones I have highlighted here. Print them out if you can, sit with them, read them top to bottom and read the footnotes. That is the kind of work it takes to develop a real understanding of these systems — and it is part of my case for reading deeply.

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How to use a new crime data repository, where to turn for numbers since federal funding for public safety research has been gutted, and how to use data to both check statements from public officials and identify crime trends: Those were a few of the takeaways from our recent webinar on digging into crime data.

I moderated the discussion on Feb. 4, which featured insights from:

• Jeffrey A. Butts, a research professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Executive Director of the John Jay Research and Evaluation Center.

• Mensah M. Dean, a staff writer at The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that covers gun violence. Dean covers policies and solutions related to gun violence in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

• George LeVines, editor of The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub, which is open to the public and aims to be the “single most reliable and expansive resource for gun violence in the U.S.”

Experienced crime reporters and journalists new to the beat will find the discussion informative and incisive. But, if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, keep reading for five takeaways.

1. Get to know The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub.

There are three main components to the Gun Violence Data Hub.

The help desk is where anyone – including journalists and academic researchers — can ask questions of reporters and editors at The Trace. Reach out for help understanding gun violence in the areas you cover; collecting, cleaning and analyzing data on gun violence; and proposing collaborations on journalistic or research projects.

On the resources page, find fact sheets, guides and a glossary that can kickstart investigations into gun violence issues locally, statewide and nationally.

And use the data library for trustworthy data on a range of gun violence topics, from ghost guns to suicide to road rage to mass shootings across a range of geographies.

The library includes data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Transportation Security Administration and many others.

“We’ve got 21 datasets right now updating at various intervals — some daily, some weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly,” LeVines said.

2. Explore data alternatives in the wake of federal funding cuts for public safety research and data.

In April 2025 the U.S. Department of Justice cancelled about $500 million in grants for many public safety initiatives, including more than $60 million for research, evaluation and data collection.

“The state of federally sponsored gun research is really poor right now,” Butts said. The John Jay Research and Evaluation Center, along with other programs that research solutions to public safety issues, have seen awarded federal funding withdrawn, he said.

Learn more about federal cutbacks for criminal justice research in this explainer from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Researchers are increasingly turning to philanthropic foundations, along with state and local governments, where competition for grants is stiff, Butts said.

“The workforce has not gone away but the support for it has been slashed badly,” he added. “It’s not just crime and justice, obviously. Health, environment — everything’s been slashed.”

While nothing will replace the research and data collection that rescinded federal grants would have made possible, there are still reliable data sources that reporters covering gun violence can use.

The WONDER database from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention includes numbers on gun deaths and is being updated, LeVines said.

Shortly before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term, the CDC launched a dashboard mapping violent death rates across the country by Census tract, county or state. It also remains active.

For other data sources, Dean pointed to these:

• The Washington Post’s database of police shootings, which covers 2015 to 2024.
• The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database from Bowling Green University, which includes more than 20,000 cases from 2005 to 2021 where local or state law enforcement officers were charged with one or more crimes.
• The Gun Violence Archive, an independent nonprofit that tracks gun violence incidents across the country from more than 7,500 sources, including law enforcement agencies and news media reports.
• And Mapping Police Violence, which tracks police-involved killings in the U.S. It’s produced by Campaign Zero, a nonprofit that advocates for policies that aim to eliminate killings by law enforcement.

“But the front line, I would say, is that you’ve got to get to know your police departments,” Dean said. “Becoming acquainted with their system of how they present their data online is essential.”

3. Know which data can help you fact-check statements from public officials.

Too often, news stories quote local or police officials without fact checking, Butts said.

Quotes without context or fact-checking can especially mislead the public when officials want credit for crime reductions.

“If they’re smart, they don’t come right out and say, ‘We did this.’ But they’ll say, ‘We’re pleased to see these numbers coming down.’ And then they assert their hypotheses … and it’s possible to check these statements,” he said.

Homicide rates are useful for tracking public safety over time, he added. That’s because homicides are more likely to reported than lower-level crimes, such as assault or vandalism. Particularly for property crimes, that data is tracking the probability that a crime is reported, not whether a crime occurred.

“You’re just measuring police activity,” Butts said. “You’re not measuring public safety.”

Beyond published data on reported crimes, victimization surveys are a major source of crime data that journalists can use to vet statements from officials.

The best known is the National Crime Victimization Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. This survey each year reaches a nationally representative sample of roughly 240,000 people and asks whether they have been victims of personal or property crimes — and why the crime was or wasn’t reported to police.

But while victimization surveys are done well at the national level, there’s a need for repeated surveys with consistent methodologies at local levels, Butts said. National surveys don’t allow for direct comparisons of crime victimization between cities.

“It’s not exactly how you make sure that Dubuque, Iowa, is experiencing more safety — by asking the whole country about their experience of crime,” he said.

Journalists should be aware of this limitation of victimization data, though it’s worth checking if the city you cover has conducted recent victimization surveys.

4. Use at least five years of data to report trends.

Police departments are another critical data source for reporters covering criminal justice, along with district and state attorney offices, Dean said.

He recommends that reporters covering criminal justice and public safety look to at least five years of data to identify trends within a specific area.

“Between 5 and 10 years for almost any type of story you’re reporting on would give you a good window of time on how a situation is trending,” he said.

5. Question data that doesn’t make sense.

While working on a piece on record low homicides in Philadelphia, Dean said he went searching for other data on gun crimes for context. When he looked up shooting incidents for 2026 from the Philadelphia Police Department website, it said there were none in January.

That didn’t seem right, so Dean left that data out of the story.

Last week, after he talked to a police department spokesperson, the database was updated to show dozens of shootings for January.

“If anything looks suspicious or hanky, unless you can get someone on the phone to explain that to you, I would highly recommend that you not use those numbers,” Dean said.

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This piece about research on hope, originally published in January 2024, was updated on Feb. 2, 2026, with additional findings.

Research on hope has flourished only in recent decades. There’s now a growing recognition that hope has a role in physical, social, and mental health outcomes, including promoting resilience.

In a 2025 study, published in the journal Emotion, researchers found that people who felt more hopeful reported a stronger sense of meaning in their lives. In other words, it’s not just feeling good — or believing you can reach goals — that matters; the specific feeling of hope uniquely contributes to perceiving life as meaningful.

So what is hope? And what does the research say about it?

Merriam-Webster defines hope as a “desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment.” This definition highlights the two basic dimensions of hope: a desire and a belief in the possibility of attaining that desire.

Hope is not Pollyannaish optimism, writes psychologist Everett Worthington in a 2020 article for The Conversation. “Instead, hope is a motivation to persevere toward a goal or end state, even if we’re skeptical that a positive outcome is likely.”

There are several scientific theories about hope.

One of the first, and most well-known, theories on hope was introduced in 1991 by American psychologist Charles R. Snyder.

In a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Snyder defined hope as a cognitive trait centered on the pursuit of goals and built on two components: a sense of agency in achieving a goal, and a perceived ability to create pathways to achieve that goal. He defined hope as something individualistic.

Snyder also introduced the Hope Scale, which continues to be used today, as a way to measure hope. He suggested that some people have higher levels of hope than others and there seem to be benefits to being more hopeful.

“For example, we would expect that higher as compared with lower hope people are more likely to have a healthy lifestyle, to avoid life crises, and to cope better with stressors when they are encountered,” they write.

Others have suggested broader definitions.

In 1992, Kaye Herth, a professor of nursing and a scholar on hope, defined hope as “a multidimensional dynamic life force characterized by a confident yet uncertain expectation of achieving good, which to the hoping person, is realistically possible and personally significant.” Herth also developed the Herth Hope Index, which is used in various settings, including clinical practice and research.

More recently, others have offered an even broader definition of hope.

Anthony Scioli, a clinical psychologist and author of several books on hope, defines hope “as an emotion with spiritual dimensions,” in a 2023 review published in Current Opinion in Psychology. “Hope is best viewed as an ameliorating emotion, designed to fill the liminal space between need and reality.”

Hope is also nuanced.

“Our hopes may be active or passive, patient or critical, private or collective, grounded in the evidence or resolute in spite of it, socially conservative or socially transformative,” writes Darren Webb in a 2007 study published in History of the Human Sciences. “We all hope, but we experience this most human of all mental feelings in a variety of modes.”

To be sure, a few studies have shown that hope could have negative outcomes in certain populations and situations. For example, one study highlighted in the research roundup below finds that Black college students who had higher levels of hope experienced more stress due to racial discrimination compared with Black students who had lower levels of hope.

Today, hope is one of the most well-studied constructs within the field of positive psychology, according to the journal Current Opinion in Psychology, which dedicated its August 2023 issue to the subject. (Positive psychology is a branch of psychology focused on characters and behaviors that allow people to flourish.)

We’ve gathered several studies below to help you think more deeply about hope and recognize its role in your everyday lives.

Research roundup

Hope as a Meaningful Emotion: Hope, Positive Effect, and Meaning in Life
Megan E. Edwards; et al. Emotion, March 2025

The study: This study examines whether hope, and specifically the feeling of hope, not just goal-directed thinking, plays a unique role in people’s sense that life is meaningful. Previous research focused mostly on hope as a cognitive trait. The authors argue that hope is also an emotion and that this emotional component may matter in a distinct way. The researchers ran six studies, with a total of 2,312 participants using multiple methods and populations.

The findings: Hopeful feelings predicted greater meaning in life. In daily life, days when people felt more hopeful were days they felt life was more meaningful. In longitudinal analyses, hope predicted future meaning, while other positive emotions generally did not. Hope was linked to three facets of meaning — purpose, coherence, and significance — whereas other emotions showed more limited or inconsistent associations.

Key takeaway: “People are motivated to feel like life is meaningful, and emotions can provide affirming information in this regard,” the authors write. “Hope may be especially important in affirming life’s meaning during difficult times.”

While positive emotions like happiness and contentment may be harder to access during difficult times, “feeling hopeful may be an available positive experience even at such times, allowing for the maintenance of meaning regardless of the vicissitudes of life,” the authors write.

The Role of Hope in Subsequent Health and Well-Being For Older Adults: An Outcome-Wide Longitudinal Approach
Katelyn N.G. Long; et al. Global Epidemiology, November 2020.

The study: To explore the potential public health implications of hope, researchers examine the relationship between hope and physical, behavioral and psychosocial outcomes in 12,998 older adults in the U.S. with a mean age of 66.

Researchers note that most investigations on hope have focused on psychological and social well-being outcomes and less attention has been paid to its impact on physical and behavioral health, particularly among older adults.

The findings: Results show a positive association between an increased sense of hope and a variety of behavioral and psychosocial outcomes, such as fewer sleep problems, more physical activity, optimism and satisfaction with life. However, there wasn’t a clear association between hope and all physical health outcomes. For instance, hope was associated with a reduced number of chronic conditions, but not with stroke, diabetes and hypertension.

The takeaway: “The later stages of life are often defined by loss: the loss of health, loved ones, social support networks, independence, and (eventually) loss of life itself,” the authors write. “Our results suggest that standard public health promotion activities, which often focus solely on physical health, might be expanded to include a wider range of factors that may lead to gains in hope. For example, alongside community-based health and nutrition programs aimed at reducing chronic conditions like hypertension, programs that help strengthen marital relations (e.g., closeness with a spouse), provide opportunities to volunteer, help lower anxiety, or increase connection with friends may potentially increase levels of hope, which in turn, may improve levels of health and well-being in a variety of domains.”

Associated Factors of Hope in Cancer Patients During Treatment: A Systematic Literature Review
Corine Nierop-van Baalen, Maria Grypdonck, Ann van Hecke and Sofie Verhaeghe. Journal of Advanced Nursing, March 2020.

The study: The authors review 33 studies, written in English or Dutch and published in the past decade, on the relationship between hope and the quality of life and well-being of patients with cancer. Studies have shown that many cancer patients respond to their diagnosis by nurturing hope, while many health professionals feel uneasy when patients’ hopes go far beyond their prognosis, the authors write.

The findings: Quality of life, social support and spiritual well-being were positively associated with hope, as measured with various scales. Whereas symptoms, psychological distress and depression had a negative association with hope. Hope didn’t seem to be affected by the type or stage of cancer or the patient’s demographics.

The takeaway: “Hope seems to be a process that is determined by a person’s inner being rather than influenced from the outside,” the authors write. “These factors are typically given meaning by the patients themselves. Social support, for example, is not about how many patients experience support, but that this support has real meaning for them.”

Characterizing Hope: An Interdisciplinary Overview of the Characteristics of Hope
Emma Pleeging, Job van Exel and Martijn Burger. Applied Research in Quality of Life, September 2021.

The study: This systematic review provides an overview of the concept of hope based on 66 academic papers in ten academic fields, including economics and business studies, environmental studies, health studies, history, humanities, philosophy, political science, psychology, social science, theology and youth studies, resulting in seven themes and 41 sub-themes.

The findings: The authors boil down their findings to seven components: internal and external sources, the individual and social experience of hope, internal and external effects, and the object of hope, which can be “just about anything we can imagine,” the authors write.

The takeaway: “An important implication of these results lies in the way hope is measured in applied and scientific research,” researchers write. “When measuring hope or developing instruments to measure it, researchers could be well-advised to take note of the broader understanding of the topic, to prevent that important characteristics might be overlooked.”

Revisiting the Paradox of Hope: The Role of Discrimination Among First-Year Black College Students
Ryon C. McDermott, et al. Journal of Counseling Psychology, March 2020.

The study: Researchers examine the moderating effects of hope on the association between experiencing racial discrimination, stress and academic well-being among 203 first-year U.S. Black college students. They build on a small body of evidence that suggests high levels of hope might have a negative effect on Black college students who experience racial discrimination.

The authors use data gathered as part of an annual paper-and-pencil survey of first-year college students at a university on the Gulf Coast, which the study doesn’t identify.

The findings: Researchers find that Black students who had higher levels of hope experienced more stress due to racial discrimination compared with students who had lower levels of hope. On the other hand, Black students with low levels of hope may be less likely to experience stress when they encounter discrimination.

Meanwhile, Black students who had high levels of hope were more successful in academic integration — which researchers define as satisfaction with and integration into the academic aspects of college life — despite facing discrimination. But low levels of hope had a negative impact on students’ academic well-being.

“The present study found evidence that a core construct in positive psychology, hope, may not always protect Black students from experiencing the psychological sting of discrimination, but it was still beneficial to their academic well-being,” the authors write.

The takeaway: “Our findings also highlight an urgent need to reduce discrimination on college campuses,” the researchers write. “Reducing discrimination could help Black students (and other racial minorities) avoid additional stress, as well as help them realize the full psychological and academic benefits of having high levels of hope.”

Additional reading

Hope Across Cultural Groups
Lisa M. Edwards and Kat McConnell. Current Opinion in Psychology, February 2023.

The Psychology of Hope: A Diagnostic and Prescriptive Account
Anthony Scioli. “Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope,” July 2020.

Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind
C.R. Snyder. Psychological Inquiry, 2002.

The post Hope: A research-based explainer appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

A lawsuit filed against the U.S. Department of Education last summer challenges the constitutionality of three federal grants that, together, have provided hundreds of millions of dollars a year to colleges and universities formally designated as Hispanic-serving institutions.

The Education Department has since slashed funding for these schools, where at least 25% of full-time undergraduate students are Hispanic. Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana filed a bill last month that would eliminate all grants the federal government gives to higher education institutions based on their percentage of students who are racial or ethnic minorities.

To help journalists report on these issues, we asked experts in law, education and education journalism for advice. Below are four of the tips they shared during our recent webinar,  “The Future of Federal Funding at Hispanic-Serving Institutions.”

But first, some important context:

For several decades, the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies have helped fund higher education institutions with a disproportionately high percentage of students who are racial or ethnic minorities. The goal of the Education Department’s Minority-Serving Institutions Program, which provides the bulk of that funding, is to broaden access to higher education and help more people from historically marginalized groups earn college degrees. Most minority-serving institutions are Hispanic-serving institutions, commonly referred to as HSIs.

Both public and private colleges and universities can compete for federal HSI grants. However, it’s unclear how many schools received HSI-related grants in 2025. A total of 602 had the qualifications to become HSIs during the 2023-24 academic year, according to Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit advocacy organization that collects data on HSIs.

The Minority-Serving Institutions Data Project, a collaboration among several academic researchers, reports that 219 colleges and universities received grants through the Department of Education’s program in 2021, the most recent year for which it has data. At the time, 462 institutions were eligible to compete for those dollars.

It’s also unclear the total amount of money that all federal agencies, combined, spent on HSIs in 2025. Several agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Defense, have provided funding through their own programs. The Congressional Research Service estimated in 2023 that annual appropriations made to all minority-serving institutions in accordance with the Higher Education Act of 1965 totaled $1.29 billion in fiscal year 2023.

Last June, the state of Tennessee and the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the Department of Education’s HSI program is discriminatory and violates the U.S. Constitution. Students for Fair Admissions is the national organization that sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over their student admissions processes in 2014. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately sided with Students for Fair Admissions, deciding in 2023 that it is unconstitutional to give racial and ethnic minorities an edge when deciding which students to admit.

Two other organizations have joined the HSI lawsuit as plaintiffs — the nonprofit National Association of Scholars and Faculty and the all-volunteer advocacy group Students Opposed to Racial Preferences. The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities has intervened as a defendant.

In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice notified Congress that it would not defend the Education Department’s HSI program in court. The agency determined that it violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection component.

The Education Department announced in September that it was slashing funding for most types of minority-serving institutions by a total of about $350 million. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the agency will no longer spend discretionary funds — the part of its budget it controls — on grant programs “that discriminate by restricting eligibility to institutions that meet government-mandated racial quotas.”

Two types of minority-serving institutions receive grant funding based on their historical missions, not the percentage of underrepresented minorities they serve: Tribal colleges and universities, often referred to as TCUs, and Historically Black colleges and universities, commonly known as HBCUs.

TCUs receive the bulk of their funding from the federal government as part of its trust and treaty responsibility to tribal nations. HBCUs were founded before 1964 with the primary mission of educating Black Americans at a time when they were generally barred from institutions that served white students.

Keep in mind that an HBCU is different from a school that has been designated as a predominantly Black institution, which qualifies for federal funding if at least 40% of its students are Black.

Tips for reporting on Hispanic-serving institutions

The three experts who spoke at our webinar focused on HSIs. They shared these tips to help journalists ask more probing questions and better understand how the federal lawsuit and proposed legislation could affect HSIs and higher education more broadly.

Our guest speakers were:

• Daarel Burnette, a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education who oversees news coverage of HSIs and minority-serving institutions more broadly. He is also a member of the national Education Writers Association’s board of directors.
• Dan Morenoff, executive director of The American Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit law firm representing parties to the federal lawsuit challenging HSI funding. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
• Anne-Marie Núñez, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies HSIs and Hispanics in higher education. She is also executive director of the Diana Natalicio Institute for Hispanic Student Success.

1. Be aware of myths about HSIs so you can avoid reporting them as facts.

Núñez described and debunked some of the most common myths about HSIs that she has encountered. For example, many people mistakenly assume all HSIs get grants when, actually, a lot of them do not, she said. She also pointed out that the money does not only benefit Hispanic students.  

“In fact, HSI grants often serve as modest, targeted investments that are used for campus-wide improvements that benefit all students,” she said.

Núñez also noted that HSIs do not exist specifically to serve Hispanic students. They do not give preference to Hispanic students or limit students from other demographic groups.

“So, if we’re thinking about admissions, for example, I work at a large, four-year HSI, and my institution is open access,” she said. “So, students who meet college eligibility requirements can attend my institution. There are not admissions quotas. There’s no exclusion. The majority of HSIs are broad access institutions, and about half of them are community colleges.”

About 5% of HSIs are R1 institutions, a classification the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education gives to colleges and universities that produce the most academic research and confer the most doctoral degrees. These schools tend to be the most selective. During the webinar, Núñez miscalculated the percentage of HSIs that are R1 institutions but contacted The Journalist’s Resource afterward to provide a corrected estimate.

2. Interview Hispanic students, Hispanic faculty and political conservatives to demonstrate the range of views on the issue.

Many higher education stories are told from the perspective of college administrators, Burnette, a veteran education journalist, said. The views of individual students and faculty are frequently missing.

He urged reporters to interview Hispanic students and faculty from different backgrounds and school types when reporting on HSIs. He noted that people who are racial or ethnic minorities often hold differing views on programs created to promote racial equity.

“Some students think it’s the best thing ever,” he said. “Some students think it’s the worst thing ever. Some students think it’s humiliating. Some students think it’s affirming.”

Burnette also said journalists covering higher education need to engage with political conservatives.

“We ignore conservatives,” he said, adding that his news outlet started covering the debate around HSI funding after discovering a blog that cited Morenoff’s work. “One of the things that I was so fascinated by was how much, how many policy papers and research papers were out there about racialized policy within higher ed, and how little we had written about this. And this is the Chronicle of Higher Education.”

3. Examine proposals to use HSI grant money for other purposes.

Morenoff pointed out that the lawsuit that challenges the Education Department’s HSI program does not aim to eliminate that funding. It seeks changes to the program to allow all higher education institutions to participate, regardless of the racial or ethnic makeup of their student body.

“The plaintiffs asked to open the door to broader competition to allow all schools to compete for federal money on an even basis,” he said.

The bill that Banks introduced last month calls for funding to be redistributed. The Promoting Equal Learning and Liberty Act, or PELL Act, would eliminate funding for most types of minority-serving institutions and, instead, use that money to help lower-income students.

That’s a change that Morenoff’s organization, The American Civil Rights Project, had urged Congress to make in early 2025.

“I think it’s worth mentioning that to whatever extent any group remains underprivileged, this approach would help them most,” he said during the webinar. “And that it at least appears that it would do so in a way that’s fair — at least race-neutral — [and] doesn’t appear to have any constitutional difficulties, and would maximize those students’ control over their own education.”

4. Explain the legal arguments being made against the Department of Education’s HSI program.

The federal lawsuit argues that the program is unconstitutional in two ways:

1. It is discriminatory because its three grants only go to institutions where at least 25% of full-time undergraduate students are Hispanic. This, the plaintiffs contend, denies students and faculty the equal protection guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

2. Its funding violates a federal spending rule called the independent constitutional bar doctrine. Under the rule, federal spending cannot prompt a recipient of federal funds to do something unconstitutional. Morenoff said during the webinar that some colleges and universities have worked to increase their proportion of Hispanic students to qualify for HSI grants, which he said the 2023 Supreme Court ruling prohibits.

He suggested journalists read an article that attorney Alexander M. Heideman wrote on this topic in 2023, while working for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

In the article, published in a legal journal of the right-leaning Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, Heideman shares examples of institutions declaring their plans to boost Hispanic enrollment to 25%.

Other resources to help you cover HSIs

Read these journalism tip sheets and explainers:

• Hispanic-Serving Institutions: A Primer With Story Ideas and Guiding Questions for Journalists
• Minority-Serving Institutions: 8 Key Facts About Colleges that Serve Many Underrepresented Students
• Higher Education Funding in the US: A Broad Overview
• If You Report on US Colleges and Universities, Get to Know These 19 Higher Education Databases

Review these government reports and documents:

• A December 2025 legal opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which determined that it’s unconstitutional to give federal grants to colleges and universities based on the racial makeup of their student body.  
• A 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that examines HSIs’ “extensive” facility needs, including building repairs, technology upgrades and maintenance backlogs.
• A 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service that offers a broad overview of federal laws and policies related to minority-serving institutions.

Also worth checking out:

• “¿Qué pasa, HSIs?” — a podcast hosted by higher education scholar Gina Ann Garcia.
• HSIs Database for Researchers, a free database maintained by Excelencia in Education.
• HSI STEM Resource Hub, a project that aims to “grow the STEM thinkforce by advancing the efforts of Hispanic Serving Institutions to eliminate barriers to STEM student success.”

Get to know the academic research centers and nonprofit groups that study, track and provide data on HSIs. The most prominent ones include:

• Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions
• The Minority-Serving Institutions Data Project
• Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities
• Excelencia in Education
• State Higher Education Executive Officers Association
• American Council on Education

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Debt collection lawsuits have risen in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic ended as a global health emergency in May 2023. Research shows Black and Hispanic borrowers are more likely than white and Asian borrowers to have a court judgment against them in debt collection cases.

Borrowers past due on their debts may face a variety of collection actions from lenders, including phone calls, mailings and lawsuits. Debt collection lawsuits can be particularly burdensome to individual borrowers facing well-heeled financial institutions or third-party debt buyers.

Among potential causes, researchers point to the phaseout after the pandemic of federal and corporate efforts to ease debt collection.

Debtors facing lawsuits often experience various financial challenges, which lawsuits may compound. These may include taking out new debt to pay off existing debt — known as a debt trap cycle — which can lead to lower credit scores and higher interest payments in the long run.

While Congress abolished debtors prisons in the 1800s, debtors can also face arrest if they don’t comply with court orders. Sometimes, debtors don’t know they’re being sued.

Medical debt remains a top form of consumer debt, while some types of medical-related debt, such as co-pays for office visits, may not show up in data on medical debt. To help enrich local and national reporting on debt collection lawsuits, we cover recent research on:

• The landscape of debt collection lawsuits
• How default judgments work
• Race and class disparities in debt collection lawsuits
• Lawsuits related to medical debt
• The role of artificial intelligence in debt collection lawsuits
• Potential solutions for state governments

The landscape of debt collection lawsuits

Consumer debt is any debt an individual takes out unrelated to running a business. This may include credit cards, medical debt, mortgages, auto loans and student loans. In 2025, total household debt in the U.S. topped $18.5 trillion, with about $13 trillion in mortgages, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. About 14 million people have more than $1,000 in medical debt, while 3 million have more than $10,000 in medical debt, according to a 2024 KFF analysis.

It is illegal under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act for debt collectors to use “abusive, unfair or deceptive practices” when collecting debt, according to the Federal Trade Commission. When lenders send written notices to debtors, federal law requires they include certain information, including the amount owed and when the debtor can no longer dispute the debt. There are also rules about when and how often lenders can call debtors.

One way lenders recoup money from delinquent borrowers is by filing lawsuits in state civil courts. During the pandemic, those lawsuits declined, as many Americans lost their jobs and faced reduced pay. Credit card companies offered forbearance, giving borrowers extra time to pay their debts. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act provided forbearance for most mortgages and federal student loans.

“The CARES Act’s consumer protections, as well as other financial institution loan forbearance programs, likely helped avoid sharp increases in loan delinquencies,” according to a May 2021 report from the Congressional Research Service.

But debt collection lawsuits are rising, particularly over the last two years, in some of the most populated states. The Debt Collection Lab at Princeton University tracks these lawsuits across all or parts of 12 states, and is one of the only repositories for this information.

That data shows a general upward trend since 2022 in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.

A recent analysis from January Advisors, a data consulting firm, uses case-level data from the Debt Collection Lab, with additional individual case data in Wisconsin and Virginia, and aggregate case data for Texas. For states with case-level data, January Advisors was able to assess characteristics of individual cases, while for Texas they could only assess statewide trends. There were seven states with statewide debt lawsuit data available for the analysis.

Consumer debt cases in 2024 in Connecticut, North Dakota and Texas were up about 20% from 2019 levels, the year before COVID reached the U.S. Minnesota in 2024 matched its level in 2019. Wisconsin, Indiana and Virginia were all below their 2019 levels, but up substantially from 2022, which marked the recent low point for debt cases in those states.

In states where full data is available, a large percentage of collection lawsuits are filed by a small number of firms. In Connecticut, for example, 10 plaintiffs account for 80% of the debt docket, according to an analysis by Pew Charitable Trusts of the January Advisors and Debt Collection Lab numbers.

Some of those plaintiffs are firms that buy debt from lending institutions for a fraction of their value, says Lester Bird, senior manager at The Pew Charitable Trusts, who coauthored the analysis. This means people might be sued by an entity they’ve never heard of, not the institution that loaned them money.

“In many states, they don’t even have to say who they purchased a debt from,” Bird says. “They don’t have to give you information. They don’t have to tell you how many times that debt was bought and sold. And so, for consumers, it gets really confusing.”

Some of the most prolific debt buyers filing lawsuits since the pandemic include LVNV Funding, Midland Funding, Portfolio Recovery Associates, Jefferson Capital Systems and Cavalry SPV, according to a January Advisors analysis of six states with full data on individual cases — Connecticut, Indiana, Minnesota, North Dakota, Viginia and Wisconsin.

LVNV Funding has been particularly active, with their filings up 350% since 2019, according to the Pew analysis. Credit card companies Capital One and Discover Bank also file at a high rate, the analysis found.

How default judgments work

In the world of debt collection litigation, a judgment means the court orders the borrower to pay the debt. A judgment may allow the lender to recoup what they’re owed through garnishing the borrower’s wages or bank funds, or putting a lien on property.

“When people get sued for debt, most can’t afford a lawyer,” writes David McClendon, a principal consultant at January Advisors, in a December 2025 blog post. “In many states, they also can’t simply show up to court to defend themselves. They have to file a formal written answer within tight deadlines, sometimes paying hundreds of dollars in filing fees to participate in their own case. Only then will the court give them a date and time to show up.”

Courts could improve show rates among defendants by dropping the requirement that they respond in writing, and allow them to simply show up in court, according to a January Advisors analysis.

Default judgments are automatic judgments that don’t consider the merits of a case, typically because the defendant did not respond to the lawsuit. Default judgments favoring plaintiffs are common — on the order of 70% in some jurisdictions, according research from Pew.  

“The No. 1 outcome we see is a default judgment,” Bird says. “A default judgment, that’s an automatic win for the plaintiffs because no one engaged. After that, we see a bunch of cases that’ll get settled or dismissed. Very rarely do we see judgments in favor of a defendant.”

Garnishments and other measures may be taken against borrowers of virtually any debt, including credit card, medical and student loans. The Department of Education, for example, began sending garnishment notices this month to some borrowers in default, following a six-year respite for borrowers from garnishments.

Race and class disparities in debt collection lawsuits

Judgments vary by race and ethnicity of the debtor, even after controlling for personal income, credit scores and levels of delinquent debt, finds a 2024 paper in the Journal of Banking and Finance.

“Black and Hispanic borrowers are 52% more likely to experience a debt collection judgment,” compared with white and Asian borrowers, the authors write. They estimate the gap in debt judgments using a nationally representative panel of credit data drawn from credit bureau Experian, merged with racial and ethnic information from federal mortgage data, from mid-2013 to mid-2017.

In addition to financial harm from wage garnishment and other collection measures, pressure from debt collectors can exact a mental health toll on borrowers, finds a 2025 paper in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Drawing on a national longitudinal survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the authors examine mental health outcomes related to debt collection for 7,236 people born from 1980 to 1984.

They find that, by age 40, more than 1 in 3 people in this cohort had been “pressured to pay bills by stores, creditors, or bill collectors,” with rates of 55% for lower-income adults and 49% among Black adults.

In considering the effects of debt collection on psychological distress, the authors look at self-reported symptoms of depression for the cohort, with results from nine follow-up surveys through 2019, after the initial survey in 1997. They conclude that “debt collection pressure is associated with increased psychological distress, with more severe consequences among low-income young adults.”

Around 1% of U.S. workers were having their wages garnished to creditors in 2019, finds a 2024 paper in American Economic Review: Insights. With data spanning 2014 to 2019 from Automatic Data Processing, the largest payroll firm in the U.S., the authors find an increase in garnishments toward the end of the period, “driven primarily by a rise in new student debt garnishments.”

Garnishments in the sample last about five months, with about 11% of gross earnings sent to creditors each month. Wage garnishment was almost twice as common for middle class workers in zip codes where residents were  predominantly Black or had lower levels of average education.

“The magnitude of these collections raises the possibility that unexpected wage garnishment could severely strain workers’ budgets and cause them to fall behind on other bills, thus potentially perpetuating a cycle of debt,” the authors write.

Lawsuits related to medical debt

Many Americans are familiar with medical debt, despite most having health insurance. Four in ten adults in the U.S. — more than 100 million people — have medical debt, according to KFF Health News. There is no national database of debt collection lawsuits, so it is difficult to say how many suits related to medical debt are working their way through state courts at any given time.

But researchers suggest medical debt suits are fairly common.

“Our best guess is 25% to 35% of a state court’s docket is related to medical debt,” Bird says. “You just wouldn’t know it.” 

That’s because medical debt can be “a lot more complicated than it looks,” he says. For example, people put copays and deductibles on their credit cards — but that’s tallied as credit card debt. 

“That will never count as medical debt,” Bird says. “A lot of medical debt reforms are missing a significant amount of debt because they’re so narrowly scoped to only hospital debt.”

Most doctors work for large corporations, whether nonprofit or for-profit, and have nothing to do with patient billing or debt collection tactics their organization may use, says Dr. Luke Messac, an instructor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“Patients will ask me how much something will cost,” he says. “I can’t answer that question, because it depends largely on what kind of insurance they have, what kind of negotiated rate the hospital has with that insurer, how exactly what I write down is written into the bill, which I really don’t know.”

Luke Messac compares how doctors billed patients in the 1800s with the current medical billing system. Interview conducted Dec. 16, 2025, by Clark Merrefield.

Messac, a historian and author of the 2023 book, “Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine,” has found that hospitals and debt collectors have both pushed for less oversight when it comes to federal rules about medical billing and collection.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 prohibited nonprofit hospitals from pursuing “extraordinary collection actions” without first making “reasonable efforts” to figure out if a patient was eligible for the hospital’s financial assistance program, as Messac and co-authors explain in their 2024 paper “The Policy Alliance Between Hospitals and Debt Collection Agencies,” published in Inquiry: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision and Financing.

But collection actions the federal government viewed as “extraordinary” were still being worked out, and “reasonable effort” remained undefined. In 2012, the Internal Revenue Service issued proposed regulations with a “reasonable effort” definition:

“In general, to have made reasonable efforts under the proposed regulations, a hospital facility must determine whether an individual is [financial assistance policy]-eligible or provide required notices during a notification period ending 120 days after the date of the first billing statement.”

When a federal agency proposes rules or regulations, the public is often allowed to comment, including individual people or organizations. Between June and October 2012, the proposed IRS rule received 224 comments. Commenters included health care organizations, debt collectors and debt buyers.

Their comments are essentially a public record of their point of view at the time of how “reasonable effort” should be defined. Messac and his co-authors in their 2024 paper organized the comments to pinpoint thematic overlap among the commenters.  

“There’s a lot at stake in defining exactly what a hospital and a third-party debt collector have to do before they start engaging in these actions,” Messac says. “Hospitals, it turns out, and their debt collectors were largely aligned in arguing that less should be done.”

In addition to responding to the proposed “reasonable effort” definition, Messac and his co-authors identified several other issues commenters raised. Weighing in on what should be considered “extraordinary collection actions,” hospitals and debt collectors “were nearly unanimous in arguing that debt sales and adverse credit reporting should not constitute ECAs,” the authors write.

“Patients can end up in real dire straits, you know?” Messac says. “Getting their bank accounts seized, getting their homes put liens on — even getting arrested — when they can’t afford care. I’ve spoken to medical audiences around the country and the uniform reaction is horror and anger at what’s going on. But it’s also ignorance. [Doctors] haven’t been involved in this process. We’ve relinquished so much control to people who don’t have the same responsibilities to patients.”

In addition to confronting dire financial straits, families with children facing any amount of medical debt are also more four times more likely to experience food insecurity, research has found.

Another issue raised in the comments for the 2012 proposed rule was whether hospitals should be responsible for collection tactics of third-party debt collectors they sell debt to or otherwise engage with to collect outstanding balances.

“Hospitals worried about being liable for the actions of debt collectors if they pursued [extraordinary collection actions] without meeting the criteria for ‘reasonable efforts’ to determine eligibility for financial assistance,” the authors write. They find that of the 67 hospitals that offered an opinion on liability for third-party collections, “all were opposed to such liability.”

Of the 16 patient advocacy organizations that stated an opinion, all favored hospitals being liable for third-party debt collection tactics. One organization, the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, wrote, “Only if hospitals remain financially or otherwise responsible will there be sufficient deterrence of inappropriate behavior by third parties.”

The IRS issued its final rule on the last day of 2014. The agencies described several actions as falling under “extraordinary collection actions,” including a hospital reporting delinquencies to credit rating agencies, and selling debt to third parties without making “reasonable efforts” to determine whether a patient is available for financial assistance.

“In the final rule, a hospital can be said to have made such efforts if it has notified the patient that there is [a financial assistance policy], given the patient an opportunity to remedy an incomplete application, and processed any complete application to determine eligibility,” the authors conclude. “In other words, federal regulations allow a hospital to sue a patient even if the patient qualifies for assistance, as long as the patient has not successfully completed the application for charity care.”

In examining debt lawsuits filed by hospitals in Virginia, the authors of a 2019 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association identified 48 hospitals in 2017 that garnished an average of $2,783 from 8,399 patients. There were 34 nonprofit hospitals, 12 for-profit hospitals and one was government owned, with garnishments more common at nonprofits than for-profits. One-quarter of hospitals that garnished were rural, while three-fourths were in urban areas.

The 48 hospitals that garnished wages had $806 million in average annual revenue, compared with $946 million in average annual revenue for the 87 hospitals that did not garnish wages. Five hospitals, four of them nonprofits, accounted for more than half of all garnishment cases.

Luke Messac on state reforms to help patients use financial assistance programs at hospitals. Interview conducted Dec. 16, 2025, by Clark Merrefield.

The role of AI in debt collection lawsuits

Chatbots trained on large language models have generally made it easier for individuals and organizations to file lawsuits. For example, a homeowner involved in a simple contract dispute with a builder over an incomplete renovation could turn to a chatbot for help writing a legal petition, according to the nonprofit National Center for State Courts.

But it’s unclear the extent to which the recent rise in debt collection lawsuits is fueled by the AI tools that have recently become widely available.

“When someone uses AI to create a petition, if the petition is sufficient — if it doesn’t contain hallucinations — the court doesn’t know, or frankly care, if it was AI-generated or not,” says Diane Robinson, principal court research associate at NCSC. “And so there’s no real way for us to track that.”

People using chatbots for advice, whether legal or mental health related, is an ongoing concern for the public and professional organizations. Still, Robinson says she’d be surprised if law firms were not using AI to create first drafts of petitions in debt lawsuits. In fact, businesses exist that do that.

“You do research in this area, you know that in many jurisdictions it’s a relatively small number of filers who are filing the vast number of petitions,” she says. “These firms buy up debt, they buy it for pennies on the dollar, they file a whole bunch of lawsuits. I think AI certainly makes that process easier and quicker for doing those kinds of volume filings.”

An open question, she says, is whether those petitions make a sufficient legal case and are vetted by human lawyers before being filed in court — especially considering how common it is for cases to end in a default judgment in favor of the plaintiff.

“The whole system is built on being an adversarial system,” Robinson says. “But when that system breaks down, there’s a real risk that insufficient petitions are getting default judgments.”

Potential solutions for state governments

Journalists covering debt lawsuits should understand their state laws on the topic, as they can vary widely and affect which types of debt lenders may sue over. LawAtlas out of Temple University’s Center for Public Health Law Research is a good source to start to get a handle on your state’s laws.

The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Courts & Communities project offers an overview of steps they say state legislators and courts can take to improve defendant participation in debt cases. These include:

• Using GPS tracking to show that people delivering paperwork for courts attempted to serve debtors being sued.
• Enacting legal standards to make sure debt lawsuit petitions are legitimate.
• Eliminating the need for a formal written response to debt lawsuits and automatically scheduling hearings.
• Automatically applying state legal protections related to garnishments, instead of making debtors request those protections.

Connecticut is one state that has tried to improve its debt lawsuit regulations. In 2011, the state mandated that plaintiffs present more complete evidence when attempting to sue debtors, in an effort to reduce frivolous lawsuits.

“The reforms led to a decrease of approximately 10 filings per quarter by third-party plaintiffs relative to first-party plaintiffs, suggesting that the heightened documentation requirements may have deterred meritless lawsuits,” write the authors of a 2024 report from the Debt Collection Lab.

Still, when the authors randomly selected 88 lawsuits brought by debt buyers from 2021 to 2022, they found not one case where the debt buyers complied with all the documentation requirements.

“Despite the noncompliance, in most cases the debt buyer obtained a default judgment,” the authors write. “This is a failure of plaintiff compliance, but responsibility also lies with the courts as — per the rules and statute, judgments are not supposed to have been entered in these cases.”

The post Debt collection lawsuits are rising in U.S. states. Here’s what you need to know to report on them. appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to do away with cost estimates related to reducing premature deaths when regulating certain pollutants, with a sole focus on industry costs related to pollution limits, according to reporting Monday in The New York Times.

Federal analysts routinely produce cost-benefits reports for proposed rules and regulations. They try to answer a basic question: Will the benefits of a proposal outweigh its costs?

Some rules and regulations save lives — or, more accurately, prevent deaths. If an industry is prohibited from emitting a large amount of pollutants known to cause cancer, for example, then some number of cancer deaths likely will be prevented.

Federal agencies use a monetary value for each death prevented. Most federal agencies put that value at $10 million per death avoided. Far from being a cold, detached calculation, these estimates have played a large role in justifying numerous safety standards enacted over the past half century.

When the EPA news hit my inbox, I reached out to W. Kip Viscusi, who developed the modern calculations federal agencies use to put a monetary value on human lives.

Viscusi is a University Distinguished Professor of Law, Economics, and Management at Vanderbilt University, and he wrote the 2018 book “Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society.” The book, among other things, chronicles his efforts in the early 1980s to get federal agencies to increase their estimates of the monetary value of human life.

We talked about the measure he developed, the “value of a statistical life,” which placed a much higher monetary value on life than what the federal government used at the time. Broadly defined in academic and government literature, the value of a statistical life is the cost people are willing to pay to prevent one death.

We also discussed his response to the EPA news, and his advice for journalists covering the regulatory environment of the current presidential administration. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

—

Clark Merrefield: What is the “value of a statistical life”?   

Kip Viscusi: Government agencies have always had to figure out how important it is to save lives. The Department of Transportation has been doing this forever. And what they did is, they looked at how much is paid off after a wrongful death case in a fatal job accident, which is essentially the present value of lost earnings, maybe medical costs, you know, basically monetary costs, maybe some pain and suffering thrown in. But it was a fairly low number. It was a few hundred thousand dollars.

Until 1980, government agencies used this number to try and monetize deaths. They didn’t want to go out and call it the “value of life,” because that seemed sacrilegious, or it was controversial. So they called it the “cost of death,” which to them seemed less controversial. But it was a pretty small number.

The [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] did this for a hazard communication regulation. This is the first regulation that would have regulated hazardous chemicals in the workplace. They calculated the benefits and costs using their cost-of-death method, and the numbers came out where the costs were greater than the benefits. But OSHA thought the regulation was still desirable.

The Office of Management and Budget — this is at the start of the [Ronald] Reagan administration — turned down the regulations, saying the costs are greater than the benefits. I was brought in to analyze the dispute between the two agencies.

What I found is that if they only replaced the cost-of-death numbers with my “value of statistical life” numbers, that would increase the benefits by a factor of 10. By the way, these numbers came from my Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, so I like them. The value of a statistical life was several million dollars, three-to-four million dollars, as opposed to a few hundred thousand dollars. Benefits now exceeded costs.

Agencies jumped onto this and said, “Wow, this is great.” They may have even thought it was the right thing from an economic standpoint to do it. But the good thing from the standpoint of an agency’s self-interest is they got to increase their benefits by a factor of 10. Increasing the estimated benefits for the regulation was very attractive to them.

CM: Your initial development of the value of a statistical life was in the context of workplace safety and it was novel because what it accounted for was the value that workers place on their own lives and the risk that they were taking on to do potentially dangerous jobs. You were essentially asking a question that hadn’t been asked yet: What’s the point of view of the workers? And there’s data on that, in the form of the wages that the workers are willing to accept to do risky work. Is that a fair overview of the approach you took in developing this measure?

KV: That’s essentially it. There’s great data on worker employment, there’s good data on fatality risks, and you can get a handle on how much extra workers are paid for extra risk. Statistically, it’s a good area to look at.

Since then, I’ve also looked at car prices. Do safer cars command a higher price, controlling for everything else? Housing prices, are housing prices adversely affected by the cancer risk from having a hazardous waste site nearby? There are a lot of different market contexts where you can do it. There’s also a flourishing industry where people go out and ask survey questions. How much would you be willing to pay for safer food, safer cars? They generally have come up with fairly similar numbers.

CM: What was your reaction to The New York Times reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to do away with using cost estimates of certain health effects, including premature deaths, in their clean air rules — with a focus instead, reportedly, on the costs to businesses of complying with those rules?

KV: They’re going after the particulate matter regulations and ozone regulations. These are two pretty important regulations. In fact, particulate matter accounts for something like 70% of what the EPA’s done recently.

It’s irresponsible. It will also be likely overturned by the courts as being an arbitrary and capricious thing that they’re doing that’s inconsistent with anything the government’s done over the past half century. Even before 1980, they didn’t say lives were worth nothing. They were worth less than what we say they’re worth now, but there’s always been a non-zero value attached to lives.

The lion’s share of what the government does is mortality risk reduction. Whether it’s EPA, whether it’s highway safety, whether it’s job safety, consumer product safety, the biggest benefits are from saving lives. If saving lives is irrelevant, this has to have huge effects across everything society’s doing.

CM: What advice do you have for journalists covering the regulatory aspects of the current presidential administration?

KV: Getting into the mechanics of how you construct the value of a statistical life usually makes people dizzy. But I think this case, this incident, is going to be really easy to explain. In the past, during the George W. Bush administration, EPA lowered the value of statistical life and there was an uproar. It got a lot of media attention. Stephen Colbert did a bit on it: You know, the government now says your life is worth less.

This is even easier to understand. The government says your life is worth nothing. You don’t even have to be an economist and know the mechanics of the calculation to know this is off the charts. This is certainly the biggest shift we’ve seen.

CM: In your book “Pricing Lives,” you talk a bit about the part that you played, as an academic, and working in the government, in advocating that federal agencies use the value of a statistical life when doing cost-benefit analyses on proposed regulations. When did this measure become commonly used in those federal analyses and what was your role in making that happen?

KV: Until I did the analysis as part of the OMB-OSHA dispute, they never used [value of a statistical life]. I used the VSL in my analysis. The day after my analysis reached the Reagan White House, they approved the regulation that had been turned down before.

Going forward, agencies then started using it, but they didn’t go high enough. Agencies that had been anchored on the lower wrongful death numbers were slower to move up, like the Department of Transportation. I’d done a study for the [Federal Aviation Administration] that asked what number should they use to value lives for people killed in plane crashes. I came up with my numbers at the time, maybe $4 million [per life].

[Editor’s note: See “The Value of Risks to Life and Health,” published December 1993 in the Journal of Economic Literature for an overview of Viscusi’s value of statistical life research at the time.]

And representatives from the auto industry also met with people at the Office of the Secretary of Transportation, where they argued, well, a million dollars sounds like certainly enough. A million dollars at the time was moving [the department] up, but it still wasn’t getting them up to the right number.

But right now, Department of Transportation’s great. I mean, I think they’re phenomenal in terms of how they do it. They’re superb. Government agencies, the Department of Health and Human Services — all across the federal government, they’re all using numbers over $10 million.

If I were to pick a number, I’d say $13 million would be a reasonable number [today]. And $13 million is a whole lot bigger than zero. So this is a huge shift, in what [the EPA] is doing.

CM: You touched on this a little bit, but for a topic such as air quality, the prospect of valuing life and valuing premature death is more complex than looking at the wages someone will accept to do certain work. The EPA seems to use, as you said, some of these surveys where they’re asking people, “How much would you pay to save a life in this context?” Is that correct?

KV: They use those as well as the market data. They’re thrown in one hopper. And I’ve done some survey studies for the EPA, so I like them, too.

With respect to death, the one area I’ve done for EPA was cancer deaths. Cancer deaths also entail an additional morbidity effect: You’re not just simply dying, you also may have a period of illness before you die. And the question is, how much should they value that? Should you get a premium for that?

I’ve found that, yes, additional morbidity losses should count more. The example we did was 20% more for that particular context. Those estimates are still being refined, because there’s different kinds of cancer, different morbidity effects. Being killed in a traumatic accident in the workplace isn’t pain-free, so you also have to look at, you know, what’s the difference? Conceivably, if anything, EPA might merit a premium on how much they value mortality risk, as opposed to being zeroed out.

CM: So the survey was about pain and suffering, not doctor’s bills and things like that. And you’re asking people: How much would you pay to have this not happen to you? Because it would be worse, if you’re thinking about these things in a vacuum, to have to suffer over a period of time than to die quickly.

KV: The survey was structured to set aside medical costs.

In this case it was, if we could prevent, let’s say, five deaths. We’ve saved five lives from cancer. In this case it was bladder cancer. If we save five expected cancer deaths here, how many automobile deaths would that be equivalent to? Is it five for five? Or do five cancer deaths count as much as six traffic deaths?

So, just trying to get a sense of, are cancer deaths more valuable than traffic safety [deaths]? I thought that was easier for people to think about, rather than asking, point blank, how much would you be willing to pay?

We gave them a description of what was entailed. I’ve done this for several different kinds of cancer, chronic bronchitis and other ailments. You give them: Here’s the medical scenario of what it is, what it means to your life, how it affects your activity.

And knowing that, how would you value the risk?

The post Q&A: W. Kip Viscusi on how the US government assigns monetary value to human life appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

We updated this explainer, originally published in August 2024, to include new research, data and other information on school vaccination policies and strategies for boosting student vaccination rates.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted routine childhood vaccinations across the U.S., reducing the percentage of children entering kindergarten immunized against serious, highly contagious diseases such as the measles, diphtheria and polio. Since then, vaccination rates have continued to fall, partly because many states now allow kids to skip immunizations that were required in prior years.

Public health officials warn that communities do not have herd immunity against a disease until a large proportion of the people who live in, work in and visit the area are immune. The measles, for example, is so contagious that at least 95% of the population needs to receive both doses of the measles vaccine to prevent transmission, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 92.5% of kids who started kindergarten during the 2024-25 school year had received the MMR vaccine, which protects against the measles, mumps and rubella, the CDC estimates in its most recent report on the topic. About the same proportion were immunized against polio. Meanwhile, 92.1% had received the DTaP vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis.

David Higgins, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Anschutz, notes that national averages for vaccination rates mask variations in vaccination coverage across local communities. In an interview with SciLine in August, he points out that an outbreak of measles in West Texas last year spread rapidly through communities with lower vaccination rates.

Nearly 800 people contracted the disease, 99 of whom were hospitalized, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported in August. Two children, a 6-year-old girl and an 8-year-old girl, died.

“The vaccination rate at your own school or community is much more meaningful than what the national vaccination rate is,” Higgins told SciLine, which helps reporters find reputable scientists to interview.

The U.S. had declared the measles to be eliminated in 2000. But as childhood vaccination rates dropped, the disease reappeared. The CDC confirmed a total of 2,065 cases of measles in 2025, up from 285 cases in 2024 and 59 cases in 2023.

Cases of pertussis, commonly known as the whopping cough, also have increased. Provisional data show that 35,493 cases of pertussis were reported to the CDC in 2024 — more than five times as many as in 2023.

Strategies for boosting student vaccination

Researchers have spent decades studying strategies that encourage people to get vaccinated. Many of these studies focus on schoolchildren and the ways that local schools, community centers and other organizations can help families overcome the various barriers they face in getting kids all doses of the vaccines their state mandates for school attendance.

In July 2024, editors at the leading scientific journal Nature urged policymakers to consult academic research to determine which interventions work best.

“The burgeoning science of vaccine-uptake effectiveness is throwing up some unexpected results that could help public-health authorities to sharpen their policies — and save more lives,” the editors write in the editorial.

Studies published in recent years suggest these four strategies help improve child vaccination rates. Toward the bottom of this article, we provide detailed summaries of key papers that examine these interventions.

• Offering inoculations at schools, libraries and other places children and their families frequent.
• Providing incentives such as financial rewards to families and to health care providers who administer vaccines to children.
• Eliminating exemptions to school vaccine requirements, except for students with medical conditions that prevent them from receiving vaccines.
• Reducing the number of kids admitted to school before they have received all doses of all required vaccines. Many schools allow students to enroll on a “provisional” or “conditional” basis while they catch up on their shots.

Vaccine exemptions

Communication scholar Dolores Albarracín says schools send families mixed messages about the importance of childhood vaccinations when they allow lots of kids to skip immunizations. In Idaho, for instance, families can request vaccine exemptions for any reason. Statewide, 15.4% of kindergartners there were exempt from immunization requirements during the 2024-25 academic year, CDC data show. The exemption rate exceeded 9% in Alaska, Arizona, Oregon and Utah.

Nationwide, 3.6% of kindergarteners — some 138,000 kids — obtained exemptions from at least one state-mandated vaccination in 2024-25. That’s up from 3.3% the prior year.

Albarracín, who is director of the Communication Science Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, has studied vaccination policies. A paper she coauthored, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports in December 2023, suggests vaccination policies can alter social norms and change people’s attitudes toward vaccines.

Like the American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, Albarracín supports eliminating vaccine exemptions that are not directly tied to a student’s medical condition.

“How can schools be trying to really ensure [vaccination] if, at the same time, they’re allowing parents to not vaccinate kids for all these personal and religious reasons?” she tells The Journalist’s Resource.

School vaccination requirements

Children must be vaccinated against certain communicable diseases to attend school in the U.S. School vaccination mandates vary by state but generally apply to both public and private K-12 schools, including charter schools and parochial schools.

Schools generally require kids to get these four vaccines before enrolling in kindergarten: 

• 2 doses of MMR, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella.
• 5 doses of DTaP, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis.
• 2 doses of VAR, which provides immunity against varicella, also known as chickenpox.
• 4 doses of Polio, which helps prevent poliomyelitis, commonly referred to as polio.

All states allow exemptions to these requirements, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks student immunization policies. As of July 2025, every state provided exemptions to students for medical reasons such as having a weakened immune system or being allergic to a component of a required vaccine.

Religious exemptions are common, too. Most states offer them. Meanwhile, 15 states grant exemptions if parents object to immunizations for personal reasons, the National Conference of State Legislatures reports.

In 2015, California banned all exemptions not tied to a medical issue, becoming the first state in almost three decades to do so. At the time, only West Virginia and Mississippi prohibited non-medical exemptions.

In 2019, New York and Maine eliminated religious exemptions, followed by Connecticut in 2021.

Various groups have challenged such policies, however. In 2023, a federal judge in Mississippi sided with several parents who argued that not being able to forgo state-required vaccines on religious grounds violated their First Amendment rights. The court ordered Mississippi, known for its high MMR vaccination rate among kindergarteners, to begin offering religious exemptions.

In November, a circuit court judge in West Virginia ruled that families there should be allowed religious exemptions. But the state Supreme Court temporarily suspended that ruling, pending an appeal by the West Virginia Board of Education, the West Virginia Watch reports.

Focusing on under-vaccinated kids

Epidemiologist Sarah Michels says states could boost vaccination rates quite a bit by focusing on children who have started a vaccine series but not finished it. Michels has conducted national studies of infants and toddlers and found that many are just one or a few doses away from being fully vaccinated.

This is relevant because most doses of the four vaccines schools require are generally administered to children before age 2.

“Most families choose to vaccinate their infants and children, and what we saw is that more than 1 in 6 kids are missing doses,” says Michels, a former epidemiology specialist at the University of Montana’s Center for Population Health Research.

A study she led, published in Pediatrics in 2023, suggests the main reason more young children are not immunized is because of barriers families face in accessing vaccines and not because they fear or object to vaccines. For lower-income families, it can be difficult to make time or afford transportation to vaccination clinics and medical offices.

“We found that moving across state lines, higher numbers of children in the household, lacking health insurance, lower household income, living in a rented home, and race and ethnicity were each associated with a 20% or greater risk of failure to complete multidose vaccine series in early childhood,” Michels and her colleagues write in their paper.

About 7.5% of all kindergarteners in 2024-25 had not received all doses of the MMR vaccine, according to the CDC. The percentage of kindergarteners missing at least one dose of any required vaccine varied by state, reaching as high as 21.5% in Idaho.

Growing opposition to vaccination mandates

Vaccines were a polarizing issue long before the COVID-19 pandemic began. But a 2022 analysis from researchers at Baruch College and Fordham University finds that the political divide in attitudes toward vaccines has widened over the last decade.

“By 2015, a partisan spit emerged across not only vaccine attitudes, but also in reported vaccination behavior,” political scientists David R. Jones and Monika L. McDermott write in the working paper. While Republicans “have become more vaccine skeptical,” they add, Democrats “have become more vaccine supportive.”

In recent years, lawmakers in several states have pushed to make it easier for students to get vaccine exemptions and to ensure parents know which exemptions are available to them. For example, in Idaho, a state law that took effect in 2024 allows students aged 18 years and older to request school vaccine exemptions for themselves. A state law enacted in Louisiana the same year requires schools to include information about exemptions in all communications with parents about vaccine requirements.

Attitudes toward vaccines have continued to diverge under President Donald Trump, who chose vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take over as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last February. On Monday, federal health officials decided not to continue recommending that all U.S. children receive vaccines for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus.

In late 2025, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his plan to make Florida the first state to end school vaccine requirements.

A recent report from the Pew Research Center indicates that public support for school vaccine requirements has fallen. When Pew conducted a national survey in 2019, 82% of U.S. adults agreed that healthy children should have to get the MMR vaccine to attend public schools. When Pew asked about the MMR vaccine again in late 2025, 69% of U.S. adults agreed.

Pew, which surveyed a nationally representative sample of 5,111 adults in October, also finds that Republican parents are much less likely than Democratic parents to have a high level of confidence in childhood vaccine effectiveness, safety testing and the recommended vaccine schedule.

Summaries of key research studies

State Repeal of Nonmedical Vaccine Exemptions and Kindergarten Vaccination Rates
Anthony Bald, Samantha Gold and Y. Tony Yang. JAMA Pediatrics, October 2025.

The study: Researchers looked at changes in kindergarten vaccination rates in the four states that stopped granting exemptions for religious, philosophical or personal reasons during the prior decade. They analyzed data on vaccination rates and vaccine exemptions that all states reported to the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases from 2011 through 2023. The study focuses on kindergarten students who attended public or private schools.

Key findings: After repealing all vaccine exemptions except medical exemptions, kindergarten vaccination rates in the four states rose 2 to 4 percentage points, compared with states that continued to offer both medical and non-medical exemptions. In these four states, the proportion of kindergarten students who received the DTaP vaccine increased by 4.1 percentage points and the proportion who received the MMR vaccine increased by 4 percentage points. Meanwhile, the percentage of 5- and 6-year-olds vaccinated against polio and hepatitis B grew by 3.8 percentage points and 2.8 percentage points, respectively.

The proportion of kindergarteners who were granted medical exemptions rose slightly in the four states — by about 0.4 percentage points, on average, three years after each state stopped allowing non-medical exemptions. The increase was largely driven by California’s repeal in 2015, the researchers explain. After California eliminated personal belief exemptions, schools there saw a sharp increase in students submitting medical exemptions. Earlier research on California’s repeal indicates that some parents who could no longer get personal belief exemptions obtained authorization from doctors to skip vaccines for medical reasons.

In the authors’ words: “Our results indicate that, amid growing vaccine hesitancy, restricting exemptions may play a role in maintaining vaccination coverage. We observed minimal substitution toward medical exemptions, suggesting that state oversight of medical exemption processes effectively limited this potential workaround.”

A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Strategies to Promote Vaccination Uptake
Sicong Liu, et al. Nature Human Behavior, August 2024.

The study: Researchers analyzed research conducted in recent decades to determine which interventions work best to encourage immunization. They combined and examined the results of 88 randomized, controlled trials conducted with a total of 1.6 million people across age groups in 17 countries.

This meta-analysis, which was pre-registered in August 2022, evaluates seven strategies, including broadening access to vaccines, sending vaccination reminders, providing incentives, supplying information and correcting misinformation. The interventions studied targeted various vaccines, including the flu vaccine, the COVID-19 vaccine and routine childhood vaccines.

Key findings: The researchers found that the most effective interventions offered incentives such as cash rewards and made it easier for people to find and get immunizations. “Providing incentives, however, is presumably most effective when they are valued by their recipients, guaranteed to be delivered and delivered immediately after vaccination,” the authors write.

Enhancing access to vaccines — for example, offering vaccinations in places people frequent — “holds the most promise in lower-income countries or countries with lower healthcare access.”

In the authors’ words: “We showed that the odds of vaccination were 1.5 times higher for intervention than control conditions. Among the intervention strategies, using incentives and increasing access were most promising in improving  vaccination uptake, with the access strategy being particularly effective in countries with lower incomes and less access to healthcare.”

Failure to Complete Multidose Vaccine Series in Early Childhood
Sarah Y. Michels, et al. Pediatrics, July 2023.

The study: Researchers estimate the percentage of U.S. babies and toddlers who have not received the all doses of seven recommended vaccines. The researchers also investigate the reasons why a substantial proportion of young children start but do not finish at least one vaccine series. The analysis is based on national data for 16,365 children aged 19 to 35 months, collected from the 2019 National Immunization Survey.

Key findings: Most young children — 72.9% — completed the seven-vaccine series. About 1.1% were completely unvaccinated. Meanwhile, 8.4% lacked just one dose of one vaccine and 17.2% started but did not finish at least one vaccine series. Children were most likely to miss doses of the MMR and VAR vaccines.

Children from lower-income households and children who lived in rental homes were 25% to 30% more likely to be missing vaccine doses. “Having multiple immunization providers increased in the risk of starting but failing to complete all series by approximately 50%,” the researchers write. Black children were less likely than white children to complete a vaccine series.

In the authors’ words: “More than 1 in 6 U.S. children initiated but did not complete all doses in multidose vaccine series, suggesting children experienced structural barriers to vaccination. Increased focus on strategies to encourage multidose series completion is needed to optimize protection from preventable diseases and achieve vaccination coverage goals.”

Coverage with Selected Vaccines and Exemption from School Vaccine Requirements Among Children in Kindergarten — United States, 2022-23 School Year
Ranee Seither, et al. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, November 2023.

The study: Researchers analyze federal data on vaccination rates among kindergarteners in the U.S. during the 2022–23 school year. They provide several charts outlining vaccination rates and vaccination exemption rates in the 50 states and District of Columbia.

Key findings: Vaccination rates for all four state-required vaccines declined in most of the U.S. In 2022-23. About 93% of kindergartners had received all doses of the four vaccines, down from 95% in 2019-20. The nationwide exemption rate was 3%, compared with 2.6% the prior year. In 10 states, more than 5% of kindergartners were exempted from at least one vaccine. Exemption rates ranged from less the 0.1% in West Virginia to 12.1% in Idaho.

In the authors’ words: “Schools and providers should work to ensure that students are vaccinated before school entry, such as during the enrollment process, which is often several months before school starts. State and local provisional enrollment periods that allow students to attend school while on a catch-up schedule also provide the opportunity to fully vaccinate students and to prevent nonmedical exemptions resulting from lingering under-vaccination due to COVID-19 pandemic–related barriers to vaccination, such as reduced access to vaccination appointments.”

The post Changing K-12 school vaccination requirements: A primer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

This explainer about childhood vaccines, originally published on Feb. 26, 2025, was updated on Jan. 5, 2026, with information about the new vaccine schedule after federal health officials reduced the number of recommended childhood vaccines. In 2025, the piece was updated on Sept. 19 to explain new recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. It was also updated on Oct. 6 after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the recommendations, and on Dec. 4 with additional research.

Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases at the American Academy of Pediatrics, studies vaccines and immunization for a living. And if you ask him to summarize what we know about vaccines, he’ll tell you, without hesitation, that vaccines work.

“The science behind vaccines is very clear,” says O’Leary, a professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital Colorado. “The benefits outweigh the risks.”

We created this tip sheet and research-based primer on the heels of the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time vaccine skeptic who now leads the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

On Jan. 5, 2026, federal health officials reduced the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11, nixing rotavirus, influenza, meningococcal disease, RSV, dengue, hepatitis A and hepatitis B vaccines from the list of routine shots, except for children who are considered high risk or when a doctor recommends it.

States are also no longer required to report to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services how many children covered by Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program are vaccinated.

It’s important for journalists to clearly communicate what’s known about the safety of routine childhood vaccines — and dispel myths about their dangers.

We’ve gathered the following resources in this vaccine primer to help you with your reporting:

• 5 tips when reporting on vaccines.
• What’s known about vaccine safety.
• Common vaccine side effects.
• How vaccine side effects are tracked in the U.S.
• A list of childhood vaccines along with their safety and side effects, based on what large systematic reviews and meta-analyses have found.

5 tips when reporting on vaccines

1. When possible, avoid repeating misinformation, including the false link between autism and the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine.

“Simple myths are much more cognitively attractive to the human brain than complicated, nuanced science,” O’Leary says. “We can give a definitive statement that vaccines do not cause autism. Period. But explaining how we know that takes an additional level of nuance and complexity.”

Repeating falsehood in news stories has the potential to perpetuate myths, even if the stories include the correct information.

“People don’t remember every word of every article,” O’Leary says. “They just remember these sort of associations — vaccines, autism; vaccines, autism — ‘I keep seeing that it must be real.'”

At least 27 studies have shown that vaccines don’t cause autism. At least a dozen studies comparing thousands of children who received the MMR vaccine with thousands of children who didn’t receive it have not found a relationship between the vaccine and autism, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

2. Pick your words carefully. More and more, science and health communicators are moving away from using the term “misinformation” and instead using “falsehood” or “rumor.”

“A lot of people who are distrustful in the health system and institutions kind of have a knee-jerk reaction to that word,” says Dr. Kristen Panthagani, who also tries to avoid using the terms “fact-check” and “debunk” when talking to some of her patients.

“For some people those words are fine, but for others, they’ve decided that we’re suppressing all the other information and that’s just our version of reality, as opposed to scientists genuinely trying to explain what the data shows,” says Panthagani, a third-year emergency medicine resident, founder of the website youcanknowthings.com and a contributor to Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter on Substack.

3. Avoid normalizing vaccine hesitancy. There has been a growing anti-vaccination sentiment in the U.S. Recent data shows that childhood vaccination rates have fallen slightly, a downward trend that began with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Childhood vaccination rates dropped from 95% in the 2019-2020 school year to 93% for 2022-2023, according to an October 2024 study in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s scientific publication. Meanwhile, vaccine exemption rates increased during the same period, the study finds.

Even small drops in vaccination rates can increase the odds of an outbreak, especially for contagious diseases like measles.

But it’s important for journalists to also remind their audiences that the majority of U.S. children get their recommended shots every year. Most Americans favor school vaccination requirements, according to a January 2025 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

“We still have 90-plus percent uptake for the vast majority of [childhood] vaccines,” O’Leary says. “Most parents are actually pretty supportive of vaccines. They might have some questions, they might have some ambivalence, but most kids are actually getting vaccinated.”

For more, read “The Risk of Normalizing Parental Vaccine Hesitancy,” a commentary by O’Leary and Dr. David M. Higgins, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in February 2024. O’Leary and Higgins also highlight the need for surveillance of vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. in an October 2024 article published in the American Journal of Public Health.

4. Avoid false balance. When reporting on issues where there’s scientific consensus, including climate change and the effectiveness of vaccines, avoid quoting both sides in the name of balance.

“I think most journalists have gotten better about that,” O’Leary says. “But when you quote somebody like me who’s a scientist who studies vaccines, and then you have another quote from someone who is rabid anti-vax, that gives this sort of pseudo symmetry or false equivalence between these two when you read it.”

Avoiding false balance can be challenging when the person spreading falsehoods is a political leader, but it can be done.

“In cases where public officials are spreading misinformation, the journalist’s responsibility is straightforward — either don’t report it; or report it while pointing out that it’s misinformation clearly, explicitly, and early, and telling people what the truth actually is,” Ed Yong, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and book author, wrote in an email to The Journalist’s Resource in 2021. “I cannot stress enough that simply writing down what officials say is not journalism; you have to analyze, critique, and contextualize those comments, or you’re nothing more than an RSS feed with hands.”

5. Remind your audiences that vaccines save lives. “Vaccines have saved more lives in the past century than any other medical intervention. The data is clear and compelling,” wrote Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, the author and founder of “Your Local Epidemiologist” newsletter on Substack, in her Dec. 17, 2024, newsletter.

Vaccines have helped eradicate smallpox. Deaths from measles, diphtheria and tetanus are near-zero in places where there’s a high vaccine uptake. And thanks to vaccines, polio cases have dropped by 99% around the world.

Jetelina also offers a downloadable fact sheet on childhood vaccination.

Vaccine safety

Although used often, the word “safe” could be problematic, because it is often thought of as binary — something is either safe or unsafe, explains O’Leary. In reality, almost nothing is 100% safe, whether it’s medications, medical procedures, driving a car or crossing the street. But years of research and data find vaccines extraordinarily safe.

When Panthagani talks about vaccines, she avoids using the term “safe” and instead emphasizes that vaccines’ benefits outweigh their risks.

“I think some people, when they hear ‘safe’, they assume that means no risk of any side effects ever, and that’s just obviously not true,” she says.

“Like everything else, vaccines do have risks of side effects. It’s just that their risk is very small and the benefits are large,” she says.

Most research scientists, public health advocates, and national and international health organizations promote vaccines as a way to fight and in some cases eradicate infectious diseases like smallpox, measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, polio, influenza, and, more recently, COVID-19.

The American Academy of Pediatrics “strongly recommends immunizations as the safest and most cost-effective way of preventing disease, disability and death.”

Vaccines teach the body’s immune system to recognize and respond to bacteria or viruses. Some vaccines contain an attenuated, or weakened, version of a pathogen, like the measles, mumps and rubella, rotavirus and chickenpox vaccines. Some vaccines contain the killed virus, including flu, polio, hepatitis A and rabies shots. Some vaccines, like the COVID-19 vaccine, give instructions to the immune system to make antibodies in response to the virus. Here is a list of the types of childhood vaccines.

Over the years, systematic reviews of published research on vaccine safety have found that vaccines are safe, and negative side effects from them are rare or very rare.

A 2014 systematic review by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, published in the journal Pediatrics, concludes, “There is evidence that some vaccines are associated with serious adverse events; however, these events are extremely rare and must be weighed against the protective benefits that vaccines provide.” The authors updated their study in 2021 and found that “Overall, our evidence review found vaccines to be safe across populations with serious adverse events being rare, consistent with other recent systematic reviews of vaccine safety.”

The rise in non-medical vaccine exemptions is partly to blame for the current measles outbreak, which has grown from 24 unvaccinated people in Texas to nearly 100 people in Texas and New Mexico. 

Vaccine side effects

The most common side effects from vaccines are redness, swelling and soreness at the injection site and a low-grade fever. On rare occasions, people may develop severe allergic reactions. These reactions usually appear between 30 minutes to 4 hours after vaccination. The true rate of allergic reactions to vaccines is not known because many go unreported, but researchers estimate the rate to range from 1 case in 100,000 doses to 1 in 1 million doses, depending on the vaccine.

Systematic reviews and studies over the years have found that various vaccines can very rarely lead to severe side effects, which we further break down by the type of vaccine below.

Severe side effects range from 0.1% to less than 0.01% of vaccination cases. For instance, evidence shows that 4 in 100,000 children may develop febrile seizure — a convulsion caused by fever, mostly in young children, and usually harmless — after some vaccinations. For every 1 million flu vaccinations, between one and three adults may develop Guillain­-Barré syndrome, research shows.

Over the years researchers have conducted many studies on the potential link between vaccines and side effects (“adverse events” in medical jargon), observed by patients, caregivers and health care providers. Some of these side effects were identified during the monitoring period after a vaccine was brought to the market, leading researchers to further investigate it. Several systematic reviews, which we list below, have summarized the findings of those studies.

The reviews, for instance, find no evidence that vaccines cause a slew of other side effects such as Bell’s palsy, epilepsy, fibromyalgia, hearing loss, infantile spasms, narcolepsy, miscarriage, stroke or sudden infant death syndrome.

In particular, there’s no evidence associating certain vaccines the following side effects, write O’Leary and his co-authors in a 2020 systematic review of vaccine safety evidence, including 155 papers, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

“Influenza vaccines do not cause asthma, childhood vaccines do not cause autism, vaccines do not cause diabetes, vaccines given to people who are immunocompetent do not cause hepatitis, influenza vaccines do not cause multiple sclerosis in adults, and DTP (diphtheria tetanus and whole­-cell pertussis) and hepatitis B vaccines do not cause sudden infant death syndrome,” the authors write.

In comparison, the risk of severe outcomes, including death, from vaccine-preventable diseases is much higher. About 10 to 15% of people infected with the meningococcal bacteria will die. Nearly 60% of people with severe tetanus die. And about 15% to 20% of people infected with Haemophilus influenzae type b will lose their hearing. More than 28,000 people died from the flu in 2024. Roughly 76,446 people died from COVID-19 in 2023.

How vaccine side effects are tracked in the U.S.

Before the vaccines arrive on the market, they go through clinical trials. Once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reviews a vaccine application and finds the vaccine safe and effective, it may grant the vaccine a license, also known as approving the vaccine. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice, or ACIP, also reviews the data to decide whether a vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks before recommending its use, explain O’Leary and his co-authors in a 2024 study published in Pediatrics.

Although vaccine developers track common side effects during clinical trials, it’s not possible for them to design large enough studies to detect rare side effects that may affect one in 10,000 or 100,000 people.

To solve this problem, the U.S. developed robust surveillance systems in 1990. One of the most widely known programs is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS. The other is the Vaccine Safety Datalink, or VSD.

VAERS is a surveillance system managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA and acts as an early warning system for vaccine side effects. Anyone can file a report on VAERS.

“So, if you know something happens after a vaccine, and you’re not sure if it was the vaccine or not, you can report it to VAERS, and then, if it’s a potentially serious event, it gets further investigated,” O’Leary explains.

The VAERS data does not show causality. However, because its data is publicly available and downloadable, it’s been the focus of vaccine skeptics.

“I think people who are distrustful of the health care system view [VAERS] as the raw stories of people who believe they were harmed by vaccines,” Panthagani says. “It’s information that they can collect and analyze themselves since they don’t trust the people who are putting everything together and actually do it correctly, unfortunately.”

The next layer of surveillance, the Vaccine Safety Datalink, helps researchers parse VAERS data and investigate potential links between vaccines and rare but serious side effects.

VSD is a collaboration between the CDC and 13 U.S. health care organizations. If there are strong signs of possible vaccine side effects in systems like VAERS, then researchers can use Vaccine Safety Datalink to perform more studies to see if there’s indeed an association between the shots and the side effects.

VSD has helped identify rare side effects, including the link between the MMR vaccine and immune thrombocytopenic purpura, a bleeding disorder where the immune system destroys platelets, which can occur in one in 40,000 vaccinations. It has also shown an association between MMR and varicella vaccines and febrile seizures, which can occur in 4.3 of 10,000 vaccinations.

“Perhaps more importantly, the VSD has been able to demonstrate the lack of association of numerous vaccines with purported vaccine adverse events,” O’Leary and his co-authors write in their 2024 study.

There are two other systems tracking vaccine safety: the FDA’s Biologics Effectiveness and Safety (BEST) system, which uses real-world data, including electronic health records, insurance claims and patients registries to assess the safety and effectiveness of vaccines that are already on the market; and the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Project, a collaboration between CDC and medical research centers.

List of childhood vaccines, their safety and possible side effects

To help journalists report on vaccine safety, we’ve created a list of childhood vaccines along with what’s known about their safety and side effects. The majority of these vaccines have been on the market for more than two decades. They have all been found to be safe and effective.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC — via ACIP — have historically issued the same childhood immunization schedule, aligning on which vaccines are recommended, at what ages, and under what circumstances. But that changed in 2025 when the AAP published an updated schedule that diverges from recent CDC guidance, especially around COVID-19 vaccinations for children. The divergence is tied to recent institutional and policy changes at the CDC and ACIP. In January 2026, HHS introduced a new vaccine schedule, which limited the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11.

“The AAP will continue to provide recommendations for immunizations that are rooted in science and are in the best interest of the health of infants, children and adolescents,” AAP President Susan J. Kressly said in a news release issued in August.

We used the following systematic reviews and resources, among others, for this section. We avoided relying on the findings of single studies. An analysis of a large body of research carries more scientific weight than a single study.

• The State of Vaccine Safety Science: Systematic Reviews of the Evidence, by Matthew Z. Dudley, et al., published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases in May 2020, includes a review of 155 studies.
• Safety of Vaccines Used for Routine Immunization in the United States: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, by Courtney Gidengil, et al., published in the journal Vaccine in June 2021, reviews 518 studies.
• Safety of Vaccines Used for Routine Immunization of US Children: A Systematic Review, by Margaret A. Maglione, et al., published in the journal Pediatrics in August 2014, includes a review of 67 studies.
• Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality, by the Institute of Medicine, published in August 2011, culls data from more than 12,000 peer-reviewed articles.
• CDC’s Possible Side Effects from Vaccines.

Also, as we mention above, certain side effects are listed because researchers have investigated their potential link with certain vaccines after they were brought up by patients, caregivers and health care providers. Some were identified during the monitoring period after a vaccine was brought to the market.

COVID-19 vaccine

The COVID-19 vaccine protects against COVID-19, a disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is very contagious and spreads quickly. The vaccines are designed to protect people from severe illness, which can lead to hospitalization or death.

Effectiveness: A February 2024 study published in the MMWR finds that people who received the updated COVID-19 vaccines were 54% less likely to get COVID-19 between September 2023 and January 2024.

Rare side effects:

• Five cases per million vaccine doses can result in a severe allergic reaction, according to the CDC.
• In rare cases, some patients — mostly adolescent and young adult men — can develop inflammation of the heart, which resolves after treatment with medication. The rates are estimated to be 22.4 cases per million after the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 31.2 cases per million after the second dose of the Moderna vaccine.
• The J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine has been associated with an increased risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome. Data from VSD showed that the rate of the condition was 21 times higher after receiving the J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine, compared with the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Based on this data, the vaccine is no longer available in the U.S. as of May 2023.

How we know it works: From December 2020 to November 2022, COVID-19 vaccination programs in the U.S. prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations and 3.2 million deaths, according to a 2022 analysis by The Commonwealth Fund.

Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis (DTaP) vaccine

The DTaP vaccine protects against three serious infections: diphtheria, a bacterial infection affecting the mucous membranes and causing significant complications; tetanus, a bacterial infection causing muscle stiffness and spasms; and pertussis, also known as whooping cough, a highly contagious respiratory disease.

Effectiveness: While diphtheria and tetanus numbers are at historic lows in the U.S., no one has studied the efficacy of the DTaP vaccine in a clinical trial, according to the CDC. Instead, experts estimate how well the vaccines work by looking at the amount of protective antibodies in people. The complete DTaP vaccine series is 100% protective against tetanus and 97% against diphtheria.

The effectiveness of the pertussis vaccine might wane over time. The vaccine is given in five doses, starting at 2 months old to 4 to 6 years old. The vaccine fully protects 98% of children within the first year of the last dose. Its effectiveness drops to 71% five years after the last dose of DTaP.

Rare side effects:

• Serious but rare side effects include persistent crying for three hours or more, high fever, or swelling of the entire arm or leg.
• The vaccine may cause severe allergic reactions among those who are allergic to the tetanus toxoid.
• The preponderance of the evidence suggests there is no link between the vaccine and type 1 diabetes, asthma, encephalitis, fibromyalgia, sudden infant death syndrome, Bell’s Palsy, multiple sclerosis or meningitis.

How we know it works:

• For diphtheria, there were 100,000-200,000 cases and 13,000-15,000 deaths reported annually in the 1920s in the U.S. before the vaccine was introduced in the 1940s. From 1996 to 2018, 14 cases and one death were reported in the U.S., according to the CDC.
• For pertussis, there were more than 200,000 cases each year before the vaccine arrived on the market. Since then, the number of new cases has dropped by 75%, according to the CDC.
• For tetanus, there were as many as 600 cases each year before the arrival of the vaccine. In 2018, 23 cases were reported with no deaths, according to the CDC.

Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine

The Hib vaccine prevents infections caused by Haemophilus influenzae type b bacteria, which can lead to severe illnesses like meningitis, pneumonia, and epiglottitis, primarily in children under 5 years old.

Effectiveness: The vaccine is 95% effective in infants who receive the vaccine series of 2 or 3 doses.

Rare side effects: Studies haven’t found any serious side effects associated with this vaccine.

How we know it works: There were about 20,000 cases of Hib each year, mostly in children younger than 5 years old, before a vaccine was approved in the U.S. in 1987. The rate has dropped by 99% since, according to the CDC.

Hepatitis A vaccine

The hepatitis A vaccine protects against the hepatitis A virus, which causes liver disease and can lead to symptoms like fatigue, nausea and jaundice.

Effectiveness: At least 94% of people who get the recommended two doses of the vaccine become immune to the hepatitis A virus. Protection from the vaccine lasts 14 to 20 years in children.

Rare side effects: There’s some evidence that in rare cases the vaccine may increase the risk of idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura among children aged 7 to 17 years, a bleeding disorder where the immune system mistakenly destroys platelets, leading to easy bruising and bleeding. (Source)

How we know it works: Hepatitis A vaccines were first licensed in the U.S. in 1995. Before 2004, hepatitis A was the most frequently reported type of hepatitis in the U.S. From 1996 and 2011, hepatitis A cases dropped by 95%, but re-emerged in 2016 because of widespread outbreaks among people reporting drug use and people who were unhoused, according to the CDC.

Hepatitis B vaccine

The hepatitis B vaccine protects against the hepatitis B virus, which can lead to chronic liver infection, liver failure and liver cancer. The vaccine was first licensed in the U.S. in the 1980s.

Effectiveness: The vaccine is more than 90% effective in preventing infection in infants, children and adults. The vaccine is recommended for newborns because the virus can be transmitted from mom to baby during birth.

Rare side effects: There’s an increased risk of allergic reaction in patients with allergies to yeast in about 1.1 cases per million doses given. (Source)

The preponderance of the evidence suggests there is no link between the vaccine and a higher risk of asthma, autoimmune disease, heart attack, stroke, diabetes or multiple sclerosis.

How we know it works: Before 1982, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people in the United States were infected annually with HBV, including approximately 20,000 children, according to a 2002 CDC study. Thanks to nationwide vaccination efforts, including laws requiring the vaccination of school children, hepatitis B rates among children up to 9 years old dropped by 80% between 1986 and 2000.

Additional reading: “Universal Hepatitis B Vaccination at Birth: Safety, Effectiveness and Public Health Impact,” by the Vaccine Integrity Project and supported by an unrestricted gift from Alumbra Innovations Foundation to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, published on Dec. 2, 2025.

Also read, “Universal Hepatitis B Vaccination at Birth—Risks of Revising the Recommendation,” a viewpoint by Michael S. Abers, Angela K. Ulrich and Rochelle P. Walensky, published on Dec. 3, 2025 in JAMA.

Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine

The HPV vaccine protects against human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease, which can cause six types of cancer: cervical, vaginal, vulvar, anal, penis and throat cancers. It can also cause genital warts.

Effectiveness: The HPV vaccine is nearly 100% effective in preventing HPV infections, according to the CDC.

Rare side effects: There’s a one per million chance of severe allergic reaction.

The preponderance of the evidence suggests there is no link between the vaccine and an increased risk of multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, birth defects, miscarriage or seizure.

How we know it works: Nearly 79 million people in the U.S. were infected with HPV before the vaccines arrived on the market. In the decade after their introduction, the prevalence of HPV types 6, 11, 16 and 18 has decreased by 86% among girls between 14 and 19 years old and 71% among women 20 to 24 years old, according to the CDC.

Inactivated Poliovirus (IPV) vaccine (Polio vaccine)

IPV protects against poliomyelitis — polio — a viral disease that can cause paralysis and is potentially fatal. The vaccine contains an inactivated — killed — virus, which cannot cause disease.

Effectiveness: Two doses of the vaccine are 90% effective. Three doses are almost 100% effective, according to the CDC.

The preponderance of the evidence suggests there is no link between the vaccine and negative side effects, such as childhood-onset leukemia.

How we know it works: Polio infections peaked in the U.S. in 1952, with more than 21,000 paralytic cases, according to the CDC. Polio vaccines arrived on the market in the U.S. in 1955. The last case of polio acquired in the U.S. was in 1979.

Influenza vaccine

The influenza vaccine is designed to protect against the influenza virus, which causes the flu, a contagious respiratory illness that can lead to severe health complications, especially in young children, the elderly, pregnant individuals and those with certain chronic health conditions. Annual vaccination is recommended due to the virus’s frequent changes, which means the vaccine’s composition is updated each year.

Effectiveness: The flu vaccine is updated each year, and its effectiveness varies by year, but overall, it reduces the risk of flu by 40% to 60%. A 2014 study in The Journal of Infectious Diseases found that the vaccine during the 2011 and 2012 flu seasons reduced the risk of life-threatening flu illness in children by three-quarters.

Rare side effects:

• One to three adults per 1 million flu vaccinations may develop Guillain­-Barré syndrome, research shows.
• There’s also a rare chance of severe allergic reactions to the vaccine for people with certain allergies.

The preponderance of the evidence suggests there is no link between the vaccine and a higher risk of asthma, autoimmune disease, Bell’s palsy, heart attack or stroke. Flu vaccines don’t cause multiple sclerosis in adults.

Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) and MMRV vaccines

The MMR vaccine is a combined vaccine that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella — three contagious viral diseases that can lead to serious health complications. In 2005, the FDA approved the MMRV vaccine, which includes measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (chickenpox), for use in children aged 1 through 12 years.

Effectiveness: The vaccine is 96% effective against measles, about 86% effective against mumps, and about 89% effective against rubella. Immunity against mumps may decrease over time in some people, according to the CDC. A 2024 study, based on mathematical modeling, estimates that following vaccination, immunity against measles may wane slowly at a rate of about 0.04% per year.

Rare side effects:

• The vaccine may cause a severe allergic reaction in children with allergies. There’s no evidence of an increased risk of asthma.
• The MMRV vaccine has been associated with an increased risk of febrile seizures among children 12 to 23 months old after the first dose, compared with when the MMR and varicella vaccines are administered separately on the same day. Vaccination with MMRV results in one additional febrile seizure for every 2,300 doses given instead of separate MMR + varicella vaccines, according to a 2010 study. (A febrile seizure is a brief shaking episode in young children triggered by a fever. While it looks alarming, it usually isn’t dangerous. Febrile seizures are not uncommon in young children, according to the CDC. About 4% of young children will have at least one febrile seizure, usually between ages 6 months and 5 years.)
• One to three in 100,000 children can develop immune thrombocytopenic purpura, a bleeding disorder where the immune system destroys platelets, especially in people with a history of the condition.
• Some children between ages 10 and 12 may develop temporary joint pain.

There’s no evidence that the vaccine causes autism. This has been shown in at least 27 studies. There’s also no evidence that the vaccine causes epilepsy or fibromyalgia.

The preponderance of the evidence suggests there is no link between the vaccine and chronic fatigue syndrome, encephalitis or other neurological conditions, hearing loss, type 1 diabetes or epilepsy.

How we know it works:

• Before a vaccine became available in 1963, measles was nearly universal during childhood, according to the CDC. There were nearly 500 deaths each year. Although the number of measles infections has dropped by more than 95% in the U.S., outbreaks occur, mostly in communities where people are not vaccinated. The MMR vaccine was licensed in the U.S. in 1971.
• Mumps was one of the most common causes of aseptic meningitis and sensorineural hearing loss in childhood in the United States until the introduction of a vaccine in 1967, according to the CDC. There were about 152,000 cases of mumps in 1968. That number dropped to fewer than 300 cases in 2004.
• Rubella was endemic before the arrival of the vaccine. By 2004, there were fewer than 10 cases per year. Since 2012, all reported rubella cases have been imported from other countries.

2025 update: On Sept. 18, the new ACIP panel, appointed by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., voted 8 to 3 against vaccinating children under 4 years old with the MMRV vaccine. On Oct. 6, CDC’s acting director Jim O’Neill signed off on ACIP’s recommendation. (The recommendations for MMR and varicella vaccines have not changed.)

Meningococcal vaccine

The meningococcal vaccine protects against infections caused by Neisseria meningitidis, a bacterium responsible for serious diseases such as meningitis (inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord) and septicemia (blood poisoning). There are multiple strains of N. meningitidis, with strains A, B, C, W, and Y being the most common causes of disease.

Effectiveness: The effectiveness of the vaccine ranges from 69% to 88%, depending on the vaccine and bacteria strain, according to the HHS.

Rare side effects: The vaccine may cause severe allergic reactions in children with allergies.

The preponderance of the evidence suggests there is no link between the vaccine and an increased risk of heart attacks, diabetes, febrile seizures, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, Kawasaki disease, seizure, asthma, autoimmune disease, encephalitis/encephalopathy, meningitis, multiple sclerosis, or transverse myelitis.

How we know it works: The disease peaked in the U.S. in the late 1990s. The first vaccine was introduced in 1999. In 2018, there were 329 cases reported in the U.S., equal to 0.1 cases per 100,000 people, according to the CDC.

Pneumococcal conjugate vaccine

The vaccine protects against 13 types of pneumococcal bacteria, which can cause serious infections like pneumonia, meningitis and bloodstream infections.

Effectiveness: The vaccine is 60% to 70% effective in preventing serious pneumococcal disease, according to the CDC.

Rare side effects: A rare side effect is febrile seizures, with a risk of 3.92 cases per 100,000 vaccinations in children between one and five months old.  

The preponderance of the evidence suggests there is no link between the vaccine and an increased risk of asthma, childhood-onset leukemia, heart attack, meningitis, Kawasaki disease, seizures or death.

How we know it works: Before the routine use of the vaccine in 2000, the infection affected more than 17,000 children under 5 each year, with nearly 200 dying each year. There has been a more than 90% drop in the number of new cases since the vaccine’s arrival, according to the CDC.

Rotavirus vaccine

The rotavirus vaccine protects against rotavirus infection, a leading cause of severe diarrhea and dehydration in infants and young children.

Effectiveness: The vaccine provides 85% to 96% protection against severe illness.

Rare side effects: There’s a small risk of bowel blockage that may need hospital treatment and surgery. This may happen in 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 100,000 U.S. infants, according to the CDC.

The preponderance of the evidence suggests there is no link between the vaccine and an increased risk of diabetes, asthma, autoimmune disease, encephalitis/encephalopathy, febrile seizures, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, seizures, stroke, autoimmune thyroiditis (Hashimoto’s disease), Kawasaki disease or meningitis.

How we know it works: Nearly all children in the U.S. were infected with the virus by age 5, and as many as 40% developed severe illness before a vaccine arrived on the market in the U.S. in 2006. More than 200,000 visited the emergency department as a result of illness and as many as 70,000 were hospitalized. The vaccine has helped reduce 45,000 hospitalizations and 62,000 emergency department visits between 2007 and 2011, according to the CDC.

RSV immunization for infants

RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, is a common respiratory virus that is typically seasonal. It is most serious in infants, older adults and people with compromised immune systems. Adults receive the RSV vaccine, while infants and young children receive RSV immunization, which contains the RSV antibody and provides immunity for up to a year. The antibodies fight the disease, rather than teach the body how to create antibodies, as most vaccines do.

Effectiveness: The immunization is 90% effective in preventing RSV-associated hospitalization in infants during the RSV season, according to a March 2024 study in MMWR.

The RSV immunization arrived on the market in the U.S. in late 2023.

Varicella (Chickenpox) vaccine

The varicella vaccine protects against chickenpox, a contagious disease caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which can cause an itchy rash and fever.

Effectiveness: One dose of the vaccine is effective in preventing any form of varicella infection by 82%. Two doses of the vaccine is 92% effective, according to the CDC.

Rare side effects:

• The vaccine can cause severe allergic reactions, in 1 per million vaccine doses.
• It can also reactivate the varicella-zoster virus, causing shingles, meningitis or encephalitis, especially among people with a weakened immune system.
• There’s some evidence that it may lead to immune thrombocytopenic purpura, a bleeding disorder where the immune system destroys platelets, among children 11 to 17 years.

How we know it works: Before the vaccine was licensed for use in the U.S. in 1995, varicella affected most people in the U.S., infecting an estimated 4 million people each year. The number of new cases has dropped by 97% since the vaccine’s arrival, according to the CDC. In 2005, a combination measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (MMRV) vaccine was licensed for 12-month to 12-year-old children.

Additional reading

• The Role and Safety of Aluminum Adjuvants in Childhood Vaccines
  Edward Nirenberg, Yvonne A. Maldonado and Seth A. Hoffman. Pediatrics, December 2025.
• Contribution of Vaccination to Improved Survival and Health: Modelling 50 Years of the Expanded Programme on Immunization
  Andrew J, Shattock, et al. The Lancet, May 2025.
• Reflections on the Successes of Pediatric Vaccines
  Kathryn M. Edwards. JAMA, February 2025.
• When We Confuse the Smoke Alarm with the Fire
  Jessica B. Steier. Unbiased Science Substack, September 2025.
• Estimated Vaccine Effectiveness for Pediatric Patients With Severe Influenza, 2015-2020
  Kelsey M. Summer et al. JAMA Network Open, December 2024.
• The Dire Need for Surveillance of Vaccine Hesitancy in the United States
  David M. Higgins and Sean T. O’Leary. American Journal of Public Health, October 2024.
• Strategies for Improving Vaccine Communication and Uptake
  Sean T. O’Leary, et al. Pediatrics, February 2024.
• Principal Controversies in Vaccine Safety in the United States
  Frank DeStefano, Heather Monk Bodenstab and Paul Offit. Clinical Infectious Diseases, August 2019.
• International Consensus (ICON): allergic reactions to vaccines
  Stephen C. Dreskin, et al. World Allergy Organization Journal, September 2016.
• Call to Action: Obstetric Care Professionals Urge Recommended Vaccines during Pregnancy
  The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, October 2024.

Reporting resources

• The Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
• Vaccine Safety References by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center.
• CDC’s Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule by Age.
• American Academy of Pediatrics information pages for clinicians and parents.
• Immunize.org, a nonprofit vaccine advocacy organization.
• National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, a nonprofit organization.
• Vaccinate Your Family, a nonprofit organization that advocates vaccines and vaccinations.
• Voices for Vaccines, a family-led organization that serves as a catalyst to spark positive peer-to-peer conversations about vaccines, and provides fact-based information on vaccines.

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As this challenging year draws to a close, we’re looking back at our 10 most popular pieces of 2025, which supported coverage of some of the biggest news stories of the year — including reductions in funding to public safety-net programs and other major policy shifts that demanded evidence-based reporting of stories about public health, immigration, education and economic policy.

Using Google Analytics, we looked at the number of unique page views each post has received so far this year to determine which is most popular. We limited the list to tip sheets, explainers, research articles and expert commentary articles that were published or significantly updated in 2025.

It’s been an honor to help inform the news in 2025, and our team is looking forward to doing the same in 2026.

1. Four-day school week: Research shows the impact of a condensed schedule varies by school location and student grade level

To help recruit teachers and save money, more than 2,000 public schools in the U.S. have switched to a four-day school week. In this frequently updated piece, Denise-Marie Ordway explored the research and spoke to researchers about how this change affects students and families.

2. Researchers rush to preserve federal health databases before they disappear from government websites

In January, the new Trump administration temporarily halted most communications from the Department of Health and Human Services and began rapidly taking down government websites and datasets full of vital public health information. Naseem Miller highlighted some of the important efforts to preserve that data.

3. Covering Trump’s proposed tariffs? 4 things you need to know

President Trump’s tariff agenda created a need for clear, evidence-based explanations for the history of tariffs and how they work. To give journalists a strong foundation for covering tariffs in 2025 and beyond, The Journalist’s Resource co-hosted an hourlong webinar with Econofact, drawing attendees from local, national and international news outlets. Clark Merrifield summed up the key takeaways in this popular tip sheet.

4. The future of the US Department of Education: 8 tips for journalists covering the agency under Trump’s second term

In this tip sheet and explainer, published in January, Denise-Marie Ordway offered advice to help news reporters interrogate President Trump’s proposal to close the Education Department, provide historical context and evaluate the agency’s effectiveness.

5. As Congress considers cuts to SNAP, we address 8 questions about this US federal nutrition program

Clark Merrefield’s thorough explainer offered important background info and research to bolster ongoing news coverage of potential reductions in federal spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

6. Childhood vaccines: What research shows about their safety and potential side effects

Naseem Miller created this comprehensive tip sheet and research-based primer on the heels of the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who now leads the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It’s a go-to source for anyone covering or following news about childhood vaccines.

7. 287(g): The program that lets state and local police perform the functions of federal immigration officers

In this expert commentary, adapted from his popular Substack, researcher Austin Kocher offered advice for covering the rapid expansion of a controversial program that delegates immigration enforcement powers to state and local law enforcement agencies across the U.S.

8. The National Debt: How and why the US government borrows money

The US government is paying $1 trillion a year in interest on its debt, which totaled about $38.4 trillion as of December. With interest costs outpacing national defense spending, Clark Merrefield created this explainer to help journalists understand the public debt and unpack it for their audiences.

9. The battle over Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies: What to know as open enrollment looms

In the fall of 2025, the longest-ever federal government shutdown prompted attention toward a political standoff over subsidies for health insurance plans sold on federal government-run exchanges. To help news reporters and their audiences make sense of the situation, Kerry Dooley Young walked us through how ACA health insurance marketplaces work, why enrollment has grown recently, and what’s at stake for consumers.

10. As the US government removes health websites and data, here’s a list of non-government data alternatives and archives

To help health journalists continue reporting in the wake of datasets disappearing from federal government websites, Naseem Miller curated a collection of non-government websites with reliable health data. This piece was part of our “Know Your Research” section, featuring tip sheets and explainers to help you understand academic research methods, find and recognize high-quality research, investigate scientific misconduct and research errors, and avoid missteps when reporting on new studies and public opinion polls.

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Whether it’s on TV commercials or posts by social media influencers, dietary supplements are marketed as a daily need to maintain optimal health, or as a quick fix for a range of ailments and conditions, from hair loss to weight management.

And although dietary supplements like vitamins can benefit some people, including older adults, pregnant people and individuals at risk of nutrient deficiencies, there’s little evidence that they benefit the average healthy person. Some supplements may contain contaminants that are harmful, and some may interact with prescription or over-the-counter medications.

However, these products continue to grow in popularity, including a surge during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A 2023 study published in Nutrients finds that the COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant surge in the use of dietary supplements globally, mainly for their perceived immune-boosting effects, even though there’s very little known about how effective these products are against COVID-19.

One reason for the persisting popularity of supplements in the U.S. is that it’s “just ingrained into the American society that we should be able to go and treat ourselves when we have health issues, and not have to necessarily get the advice or prescriptions from doctors,” says Dr. Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a national expert on dietary supplements.

Because the Food and Drug Administration does not approve dietary supplements before they’re marketed, there is no complete list of supplements sold in the U.S. There are between 80,000 to 100,000 different supplements available to consumers in the U.S., according to an estimate by the agency.

The future of supplement regulation under the current administration is still unclear. The FDA could introduce new regulatory hurdles that may not be welcomed by the industry, according to an article in Axios, published in October. Meanwhile, news reports in December suggest that the FDA may relax a warning label rule for supplements, according to NBC News.

If you’re reporting on the topic, it’s important to inform your audiences about the promises, limitations and potential harms of over-the-counter supplements.

Below, we’ve gathered credible sources of information, fact-checked data and peer-reviewed research studies to help you with your reporting. We address the following topics:

• What are dietary supplements?
• What are some key supplement use statistics in the U.S.?
• How are supplements regulated and how are the regulations enforced?
• What are the benefits and harms of taking supplements?
• Are dietary supplement serving sizes standardized?
• What do stamps on supplement labels really tell you?

The questions are followed by two pieces of advice for journalists, five research studies about dietary supplements and more reporting resources.

What are dietary supplements?

The term “dietary supplement” was defined in the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 as “a product intended for ingestion that, among other requirements, contains a ‘dietary ingredient’ intended to supplement the diet.”

The term “dietary ingredient” includes:

• Vitamins and minerals, such as multivitamins, individual vitamins, calcium, and iron.
• Herbs and other botanicals, such as echinacea and ginger.
• Amino acids, such as tryptophan and glutamine.
• “Dietary substances” that are part of the food supply, such as enzymes and live microbials (commonly referred to as “probiotics”).
• Concentrates, metabolite extracts, or combinations of any dietary ingredient from the categories listed above.

Dietary supplements may have two types of ingredients:

• Dietary ingredients, listed above.
• Other ingredients, such as fillers, binders, preservatives, sweeteners and flavorings.

Dietary supplements may be found in many forms, such as pills, tablets, capsules, gummies, softgels, liquids, powders, teas and bars. Topicals or inhaled products are not supplements.

What are some key supplement use statistics in the U.S.?

The use of dietary supplements has been on the rise in the U.S., increasing from 50% of adults and children in 2007 to 56% in 2018, according to a 2022 survey study published in the Journal of Nutrition.

A 2024 study analyzing data from the 2011 to 2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, including a total of 12,529 participants, found that more than 70% of the respondents took dietary supplements daily. Nearly 40% said they had been taking supplements for more than five years, and 67% said they were “highly adherent to at least one supplement.”

The U.S. dietary supplements market size was estimated at $64 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $124 billion by 2033, according to a market analysis report by Grand View Research.

The global value of the dietary supplements market was estimated to be around $152 billion in 2021, and expected to grow to $300 billion by 2028, according to a 2023 study, “A Global Overview of Dietary Supplements: Regulation, Market Trends, Usage during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and Health Effects,” published in Nutrients.

How are supplements regulated and how are the regulations enforced?

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 is the main legal framework that governs supplements today, shaping debates over consumer safety, misleading health claims and whether supplements should face stricter oversight similar to drugs. DSHEA classifies supplements as a category of food rather than drugs.

The act created a distinction based on whether an ingredient was on the market prior to its passage.

• Dietary ingredients marketed in the U.S. before the passage of the act are presumed safe and do not require FDA safety review.
• Ingredients introduced after the act’s passage are classified as New Dietary Ingredients. This means manufacturers must submit a notification to the FDA 75 days prior to marketing, providing information on why the ingredient is “reasonably expected to be safe.”

Unlike prescription drugs, dietary supplements are not evaluated by the FDA for safety or efficacy before arriving on the market. Manufacturers are not required to perform clinical trials. “In fact, in many cases, firms can lawfully introduce dietary supplements to the market without even notifying FDA,” according to the agency.

DSHEA created a post-market or reactive regulatory approach for the FDA, placing the burden of proof on the government to show that a product is unsafe, adulterated or misbranded before it can be removed from the market.

The legislation requires supplement manufacturers to notify the agency when they introduce a new dietary ingredient into the market. But in 2022, the FDA estimated that it had not been informed about at least 3,400 new ingredients in available supplements, according to a STAT+ article.

The FDA has several enforcement tools to remove hazardous ingredients from dietary supplements. They include issuing warning letters to manufacturers, requesting or mandating that manufacturers recall products, and publishing public notices, according to a 2022 study published in JAMA.

Still, as Cohen has found in his research, some products remain on the market for years after the FDA issues warning letters about them.

The FDA and the Federal Trade Commission share responsibility for the oversight of dietary supplements and related promotion. The FDA generally is responsible for safety, quality and labeling, and the FTC is responsible for regulating advertising. Both agencies have the authority to take enforcement actions against dietary supplements and firms in case of violations.

Globally, dietary supplements are also loosely regulated and there is little agreement between countries on the definitions or terminology used to classify the supplements and regulatory requirements, according to a 2023 study published in Nutrients.

• Find the FDA’s warning letters here.
• Consumers can report side effects from dietary supplements to the FDA.
• Here’s a directory of FDA actions and communications on dietary supplement ingredients and substances.

What are the benefits and harms of taking supplements?

Certain vitamins can prevent diseases that are the result of vitamin deficiencies. For instance, vitamin C can prevent scurvy and vitamin D can prevent rickets. Patients who have undergone bariatric surgery may need supplements. Lack of folic acid in pregnant people has been associated with an increased risk of certain neurological defects in babies, according to a 2021 reporting resource by SciLine, which summarizes research findings about the benefits of long-term use of supplements and vitamins.

“On the other hand, there might be extracts of particular botanicals that have no proven benefit, that are sold right next to the vitamins,” Cohen says.

Supplements can also interfere with prescription medications. For example, herbal St. John’s wort, often used for mood disorders, may interfere with the effectiveness of certain medications such as antidepressants, blood thinners, birth control pills and some cancer treatments, according to a January 2025 article in the National Institutes of Health’s MedlinePlus Magazine.

The most serious safety issue of dietary supplements is the sale or marketing of products that are adulterated with illegal or unsafe ingredients whose efficacy hasn’t been shown.

In a 2021 study, Cohen and his co-authors found several unapproved drugs, including ones that were not approved for human use in the U.S., in over-the-counter supplements marketed to improve memory and cognitive function.

In another analysis, published in JAMA Network in 2023, Cohen and his co-authors found that the labels of 89% of performance-enhancing dietary supplements did not accurately declare the ingredients that were in the products, and 12% of products contained ingredients prohibited by the FDA.

The three most problematic dietary supplement categories in the U.S are sexual enhancement supplements, weight loss supplements, and sports performance and bodybuilding supplements, according to the 2023 study.

Are dietary supplement serving sizes standardized?

No. According to the FDA, “Other than the manufacturer’s responsibility to meet the safety standards and labeling requirements for dietary supplements and to comply with current good manufacturing regulations, there are no laws or regulations that limit the serving size of a dietary supplement or the amount of a dietary ingredient that can be in a serving of a dietary supplement. This decision is made by the manufacturer and does not require FDA approval.”

What do stamps on supplement labels really tell you?

There are a variety of quality and safety stamps on the labels of dietary supplements, and not all carry the same weight.

“Most of [the stamps] are not going to be very useful,” Cohen says.

In some cases, the supplement manufacturer has paid a company to give it a stamp of approval on its label, Cohen says.

“My recommendation is to go for the third-party programs that are very solid,” he said.

Here are two organizations that Cohen trusts:

• U.S. Pharmacopeia is an independent, scientific nonprofit organization focused on building trust in the supply of safe and quality medicines.
• NSF is an independent organization that plays a pivotal role in the development of robust public health standards.

Advice for journalists

Cohen offered the following advice to journalists when reporting on dietary supplements.

Report on the nuances of supplements.

Certain supplements are effective at a certain dose, similar to medications.

“Let’s take creatine, for example,” which can be used to slightly increase the ability to lift weight, Cohen says.

The supplement is sometimes portrayed in news stories and other content as either great or dangerous to health, but the reality is more nuanced.

“When it comes to things that have some evidence that they work, what’s often missed is the idea that the only way something’s going to work is if you’re taking an accurately labeled product at the proper dose that has been shown in studies to be effective,” Cohen says.

“Just like a prescription medication, you wouldn’t be like, ‘Oh, let’s take Lipitor at any dose’. We know that makes no sense,” Cohen says. “It’s the same thing for all the supplements. We just need to realize they’re just like medications and take them seriously, and that part of the story is often lost.”

Remind your audience that an FDA warning letter doesn’t mean the supplement will be removed from the market right away.

The FDA’s primary responsibility is to ensure the safety and purity of dietary supplements after they are marketed and to remove any product that may be potentially dangerous to consumers from the market, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Nutrients.

But researchers like Cohen, who study supplements, say that some products remain on the market for years after the FDA issued warning letters about them.

“The FDA has not been doing its job to even use the laws it does have to ensure the safety of supplements,” for the last several decades, Cohen says. “So people need to understand that the FDA has not, historically and will continue not to be, responsible in terms of doing its little part in trying to ensure a little bit of supplement safety.”

In a 2022 study, listed below, Cohen and his co-authors find that nine of the 31 products they analyzed remained available for purchase online for an average of 6 years after the FDA issued warning letters.

Five research studies to consider

Recalls, Availability, and Content of Dietary Supplements Following FDA Warning Letters
Pieter A Cohen, Bharathi Avula, Kumar Katragunta, and Ikhlas Khan. JAMA, July 2022.

• This study investigates whether dietary supplements that received FDA warning letters for containing prohibited stimulants, such as amphetamine-like substances, were recalled, removed from the market, or became free of banned ingredients.
• Researchers identified 31 supplements that had received FDA warning letters for the presence of three prohibited stimulants: amphetamine analogue β-methylphenethylamine (BMPEA), the ephedrine analogue methylsynephrine (Oxilofrine), or dimethylamylamine analogue octodrine (DMHA or octodrine). The FDA issued warning letters for these stimulants in 2015, 2016, and 2019, respectively, mandating that manufacturers inform the FDA of the steps the firm will take to correct the violation and prevent similar violations in the future.
• Of these 31 products, one was recalled by the manufacturer. Nine of the 31 products — 29% — remained available for purchase online for an average of 6 years after the FDA issued warning letters.
• The results may not be generalizable to all dietary supplements subject to FDA warning letters. It’s also not clear whether the presence of adulterants might vary from batch to batch or over time.

Vitamin, Mineral, and Multivitamin Supplementation to Prevent Cardiovascular Disease and Cancer: Preventive Medication
Elizabeth O’Connor, et al. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, June 2022.

• Across 84 studies with a total of 739,803 participants, the researchers found that common supplements, including vitamin D, vitamin E, calcium, vitamin C, B vitamins, magnesium, selenium and zinc, generally do not reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer or death.
• Use of multivitamins was associated with a very small reduction in the overall risk of cancer and a small decrease in lung cancer.
• Consuming beta carotene supplements increases the risk of lung cancer, especially among smokers or in people exposed to asbestos. It also increased the risk of cardiovascular death.
• Use of other vitamins also carries risk. For instance, the use of vitamin E was associated with an increased risk of hemorrhagic stroke. Use of 1,000 units or more of vitamin D was associated with an increased risk of kidney stones.

Dietary Supplements — For Whom? The Current State of Knowledge about the Health Effects of Selected Supplement Use
Regina Ewa Wierzejska. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, August 2021.

• The goal of this scoping review is to present what is known about the effects of using selected dietary supplements for chronic diseases and the risks associated with their use.
• The author’s review of literature shows that vitamin and mineral supplements neither lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases nor prevent the development of cancers in healthy people.
• Most of the randomized controlled trials analyzed in this review found that vitamin and mineral supplements do not lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
• For weight loss supplements, the use either has a marginal benefit or is completely ineffective. Meanwhile, their side effects and the risk of contamination with illegal substances remain concerning.

Label Statements and Perceived Health Benefits of Dietary Supplements
Joanna Nicole Assadourian, Eric D. Peterson, and Ann Marie Navar. JAMA Network Open, September 2025.

• Researchers conducted two online surveys of U.S. adults, one for a fish oil supplement (2,239 participants) and one for a fictional supplement called Viadin H (2,164 participants).
• For each survey, participants were randomized to one of four labels that were otherwise identical but had different health-related statements on the label. The surveys were conducted between January and March 2024.
• Participants exposed to claims that included heart-related words, or brain health or cognitive function wording on labels, were more likely to believe the supplement did what they claimed, even for the fictional supplement.
• The results show that consumers often interpret vague label statements as implying disease prevention or treatment benefits, even though such wording is not intended to imply specific effects on disease prevention under FDA rules.

A Global Overview of Dietary Supplements: Regulation, Market Trends, Usage during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and Health Effects
Ouarda Djaoudene, et al. Nutrients, July 2023.

• This overview provides a global comparison of supplement regulation and cross-border sales.
• The authors provide market numbers, growth trends and usage statistics.
• In addition, the study examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected supplement use globally.

Additional resources

• Read SciLine’s 2021 Reporting Resource for more information on dietary supplements. SciLine is a free, nonpartisan service, based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, helping journalists and scientists work together to bring accurate, research-based science into news reporting.
• “Institutionalizing Misinformation — The Dietary Supplement Listing Act of 2022,” a perspective by Pieter A. Cohen, Jerry Avorn, and Aaron S. Kesselheim, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in May 2022, argues that the proposed Dietary Supplement Listing Act of 2022 is unlikely to improve consumer safety.
• “Does Regulating Dietary Supplements as Food in a World of Social Media Influencers Promote Public Safety?” by Joshua J. Klein and Scott J. Schweikart, published in the AMA Journal of Ethics in May 2022, argues that the current supplement regulatory framework creates weaknesses, especially in the context of social media influencer marketing, and may undermine consumer protection and public safety.
• The FDA’s Information for Consumers on Using Dietary Supplements page has answers to common questions about supplements.
• Listen to this 2024 FDA podcast called Q&A with FDA, where Dr. Cara Welch, the then-director of the FDA’s Office of Dietary Supplement Programs, answers some of the common questions about dietary supplements.
• “What doctors wish patients knew about vitamins and supplements,” an article on the American Medical Association’s News Wire, provides an overview of the topic in an interview with three physicians.
• Listen to (or read the transcript of) Dr. Cohen’s 2021 interview with AMA’s Moving Medicine video series to learn more about dietary supplements.

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Millions of U.S. college students skip meals and rely on cheap staples such as instant ramen and boxes of macaroni and cheese because they have limited funds for food. A new academic paper estimates that 1 in 4 undergraduate students and 1 in 8 graduate students nationwide struggle with what researchers call “food insecurity” — not having enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs.

Not having enough to eat can have serious consequences for college students. Academic studies have found a link between food insecurity and mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. Research also demonstrates that hungry students often earn lower grades and take longer to graduate. They are more likely to drop out than their well-fed peers. 

Students from lower-income families are particularly likely to experience food insecurity, as are those from historically marginalized groups such as racial and sexual minorities, single parents, and students with disabilities, researchers Katharine Broton and Milad Mohebali write in their new paper. They analyzed federal data collected from a nationally representative sample of students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico during the 2019-2020 academic year.

Their findings represent the experiences of more than 7 million undergraduate students and almost 4 million graduate students. Broton and Mohebali note the need for policy changes to address the problem, challenging the notion that college students are expected to skip meals and live on packages of instant ramen because earlier generations had to do that, too.

“Culturally, college has historically marked the transition to adulthood and independence, as traditional-age students enjoyed a robust college life,” they write. “This popular narrative effectively erases the struggles of today’s working-class and poor students, who despite working, still contend with basic needs insecurity.”

Helping journalists cover the issue

We compiled the list of story ideas below to help journalists better understand and examine food insecurity among college students. Two researchers — sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab and registered dietician Beth Racine — pitched in to help.

1. Examine the reasons why college students in your area don’t have enough food.

Academic research indicates a variety of factors cause or contribute to the problem nationally. Here are some of them:

• Rising college costs. Over the last three decades, tuition and fees alone have nearly doubled at public universities and private, nonprofit colleges and universities, according to a new analysis from the College Board. Students who pay in-state tuition at public universities and live on-campus will need an average of $30,990 to cover the combined cost of tuition, fees, housing, food, books, transportation and other costs for the 2025-26 academic year. At private, nonprofit colleges and universities, students who live on-campus will need an average of $65,470, the College Board estimates.
• Expensive housing. Most students live off campus and commute to community colleges and public universities. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies looks at the nation’s housing affordability crisis in its “The State of the Nation’s Housing 2025” report. A key finding: 67% of renters who earned less than $30,000 a year in 2023 spent a full half of their income on rent.
• Pell Grants’ declining purchasing power. The federal government gives lower-income college students money to help them pay for higher education. These grants, capped at $7,395 per student for the 2025-26 academic year, have not kept pace with the cost of going to college. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that President Trump signed in July expands the Pell Grant program to cover short-term job-training programs. But students with full-ride scholarships will no longer be eligible for Pell Grants.
• More low-income adults attend college. A larger proportion of undergraduates come from lower-income families. Across the U.S., the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants grew from 27% during the 2008-09 academic year to 31% in 2022-23, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
• Low SNAP participation. Many lower-income students do not receive help from the federal government’s food aid program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, because they are unaware they qualify or because complex eligibility rules discourage them from applying. About 41% of college students who were potentially eligible for SNAP benefits in 2020 received them, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated last year.
• Limited options for inexpensive, healthy meals on campus. College student meal plans typically provide a range of food options. But they can be pricey. For example, at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a public university, students paid $3,325 for a meal plan for the fall 2025 semester. Students who don’t have a meal plan pay $10.15 for breakfast, $14.50 for lunch and $16.75 for dinner at the campus dining hall.

2. Explain why campus food pantries aren’t enough.

Across the country, college administrators and student groups have opened food pantries on campus to provide students with meals and snacks. The College and University Food Bank Alliance, which started with 15 schools in 2012, grew quickly as higher education institutions across the country opened food pantries. More than 800 colleges and universities had joined by October 2021, when it was acquired by Swipe Out Hunger, a nonprofit organization that partners with institutions to fight student hunger.

But food pantries are an insufficient way to address food insecurity among college students, says Goldrick-Rab, a leading scholar on food insecurity in higher education. She led the first national study on the topic and founded three nonprofit organizations to tackle the problem, including Believe in Students, which provides students with small grants to cover emergency expenses for such things as food, housing, car repairs and childcare.

Goldrick-Rab points out that college food pantries often don’t provide fresh produce or many other ingredients students need to prepare nutritious meals. Offerings generally tend to be shelf-stable, processed foods such as granola bars, crackers, instant oatmeal, rice, pasta, peanut butter, canned soups and canned meats.

Campus pantries are meant to quell student hunger on an emergency or short-term basis. The lack of variety is one reason many students with long-term needs do not frequent them, she adds. The social stigma associated with receiving food assistance and a lack of awareness about food pantries  on campus are two other reasons students don’t use them more, a recent review of research published on the issue finds.

“Why do food pantries have such a strong hold on the minds of higher education administrators?” Goldrick-Rab asks. “They’re telling themselves, ‘I have a food pantry. I did my thing.’”

Academic studies have found that food banks at higher education institutions and elsewhere “are limited in their overall influence on improving food security,” researchers write in a recent review of 33 academic papers published on the topic between 2003 and 2023. Only one of those papers, published in 2021, looks specifically at whether a college-based program changed student levels of food insecurity.

That study focuses on a food distribution program that served students at two campuses of a community college system located in and around Houston, Texas in 2018. Researchers randomly selected 2,000 students from a list of students who were at least 18 years old and had yearly incomes of $25,000 or less. Half the students were invited to select items from a campus food stand while the other half were monitored as the control group.

During the eight-month study, students invited to take food from the food stand were allowed to do it twice a month. At each visit, they could take up to 60 pounds of food, which included both shelf-stable foods and perishable foods such as fruit, vegetables and meat. The program was not deemed a success, however. Only half the students recruited to participate signed up. Those who did sign up continued to experience the same levels of food insecurity, probably because many students did not show up to collect food, the authors of the paper write.

Three of the main reasons why students did not visit the food stand often were a lack of transportation, schedule conflicts and the extended length of time they sometimes had to wait to complete the check-in and check-out process at the food stand.

3. Report on the hurdles that prevent college students from receiving SNAP benefits.

College students can participate in the SNAP program, which researchers find reduces food insecurity, if they meet certain criteria, such as being a single parent, having a physical or mental disability, or working more than 20 hours a week.

A report the U.S. Government Accountability Office released last year estimates that about 3.3 million college students were potentially eligible for SNAP in 2020, but most didn’t sign up. The report emphasizes that only 26% of U.S. college students are “traditional” students, who are financially dependent on their parents and go to college immediately after graduating high school.

In fact, in 2020, 39% of college students were aged 25 or older and 41% worked full-time, the report notes. About a fifth of students cared for a child or other dependent.

In a letter to congressional leaders that is included with the report, Kathy Larin, one of the accountability office’s directors, notes that food insecurity threatens the effectiveness of the federal Pell grant program. Its primary goal is to help lower-income students earn a college degree or vocational certification.

“In fiscal year 2023, the federal government spent approximately $31.4 billion dollars on Pell Grants to help over 6 million students with financial need attend college,” Larin writes. “This substantial federal investment in higher education is at risk of not serving its intended purpose if college students drop out because of limited or uncertain access to food.”

Many anti-hunger organizations and student advocates are pushing to change SNAP eligibility rules so more college students qualify. Last summer, federal legislators introduced the Enhance Access To SNAP Act of 2025 in both the U.S. House and Senate.

However, expanding access to SNAP will only help those students who sign up for benefits. Some students do not realize they can participate in SNAP or know how to apply.

When researchers in Missouri surveyed students from nine higher education institutions there, they learned that a significant proportion were unfamiliar with the SNAP program. Almost half the 844 students who completed the survey, conducted during the 2021-22 academic year, reported not having enough food. Meanwhile, two-thirds of participants did not know if they were eligible for SNAP and more than half did not know where to go to enroll.

Goldrick-Rob, along with two researchers from the Urban Food Policy Institute at the City University of New York, outline the main reasons many students don’t seek SNAP benefits in an essay for the American Journal of Public Health. A big one: The guidance offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, can be confusing.

“Even though the rules do allow some full-time students to receive SNAP, they are written in a confusing manner that leads many to mistakenly conclude that students simply are not eligible,” Goldrick-Rob writes with Nicholas Freudenberg, a professor emeritus of public health, and Janet Poppendieck, a professor emerita of sociology, in December 2019.

“The main message sent by the USDA and many intermediaries, including colleges, is that most college students are not eligible for SNAP,” they continue. “A search for ‘college students’ on the USDA Food and Nutrition Service SNAP Web page finds the statement that ‘Most able-bodied students ages 18 through 49 who are enrolled in college or other institutions of higher education at least half time are not eligible for SNAP benefits.’”

4. Investigate college food service operations.

Beth Racine, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies college student nutrition and food choices, encourages journalists to examine local colleges’ food service operations.  

“University food environments usually contain two major types of food options: Dining halls and a variety of fast food/quick service shops,” she wrote by email to The Journalist’s Resource. “Dining halls typically have a wide array of healthy food choices — like a salad bar, a variety of healthy proteins, cooked vegetables, fresh fruit, and dairy.”

She points out that some students purchase college meal plans, which generally allow students to eat a certain number of meals in a student dining hall and provide a certain amount of credit that students can use to buy food at other restaurants and shops on campus. However, many students do not buy meal plans, which can be expensive.

“Healthy food access for students not on a meal plan can be a real issue,” Racine wrote. “While those students can purchase food at the university food venues, they may not have much disposable income. This is where (I think) the problem with food insecurity shows up most — among students not on a meal plan.”

A report on meal plan pricing that student loan lender ELFI released earlier this year finds that meal plan costs vary considerably, from $3,000 for two semesters at Oregon State University to $8,640 at the University of Richmond. Across the 150 U.S. colleges and universities that ELFI surveyed, the average cost of the least expensive plan for first-year students is $5,656 for the 2025-26 academic year.

Research demonstrates that meal swipe programs help lower-income students get free meals. These programs, usually launched by student organizations, allow students with meal plans to donate “swipes” on the cards they use to pay for food on campus. Those swipes are then pooled and distributed to students who request them, often by loading the meals onto the students’ school identification cards.

A recent paper that Broton co-wrote with a fellow University of Iowa researcher, Solomon Fenton-Miller, indicates students prefer to get food through a meal swipe program than a campus food pantry. Broton and Fenton-Miller studied how students at a large, unnamed state university used three programs designed to help students meet their basic needs: a food pantry, a meal swipe program, and an emergency aid fund that provided students with one-time grants averaging $500.

They discovered that the meal swipe program was, by far, the most popular.

Some higher education institutions set aside money to provide meal vouchers to lower-income students. When Goldrick-Rab, Broton and Mohebali studied a meal voucher program at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, they discovered that students who used vouchers to eat at the cafeteria or café a few times a week during the 2017-18 and 2018-19 academic years completed more credits and had higher graduation rates than similar students who did not participate in the program.

As you examine colleges’ food service operations, it’s important to ask questions like these to gain a fuller understanding of how students are affected by their campus food environment:

• What do meals and meal plans cost at local institutions?
• How do college officials determine whether meals are affordable for students?
• How does a student’s nutrition and health status change during their time at college?
• Do students know how to prepare healthy meals for themselves?
• How much money do colleges’ food service operations make and what do they do with it?
• Do colleges help students manage the money they have to purchase food?
• Do students who commute to campus have access to microwaves and refrigerators?

Racine has learned through conversations with students that the meals they prepare at home could be their healthiest. Many students don’t bring homemade meals with them, though, as they travel from building to building, because common areas frequently lack kitchen facilities for heating and refrigerating food.

In a paper published earlier this year, Racine and several other researchers recommend that cooking equipment and food storage be placed in some buildings to encourage students to bring nutritious meals and snacks from home.

Further reading

Nationally Representative Estimates of Food Insecurity among College Students
Katharine M. Broton and Milad Mohebali. Journal of College Student Development, November-December 2025.

Evaluation of Food Insecurity Programs on Campus: A Scoping Review
Putu Novi Arfirsta Dharmayani, Gantsetseg Ganbold, Nadia Farnaz, Taylah Scutts, Sheralle Kumar, Ariik Ajak, Miriam Williams and Seema Mihrshahi. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, September 2025.

Developing and Implementing a University Nutrition Security Action Plan
Lilian O Ademu, Jessica Escobar-DeMarco, Nicole Peterson, Rajib Paul and Elizabeth F Racine. Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, March 2025.

SNAP for U: Food Insecurity and SNAP Use Among College Students, Including Institution Type Differences
Matthew Chrismana, Andrea Cullers, Candace Rodman, Allene Gremaud, Gil Salgado and Kelsey Gardiner. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, August 2024.

Research Trends and Gaps Concerning Food Insecurity in College Students in the United States: A Scoping Review
Barbara J. Goldman, Carolina Neves Freiria, Matthew J. Landry, Andrea Y. Arikawa and Lauri Wright. Journal of American College Health, June 2024.r,

Estimated Eligibility and Receipt Among Food Insecure College Students
Report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, June 2024.

Meal Vouchers Matter for Academic Attainment: A Community College Field Experiment
Katharine M. Broton, Milad Mohebali and Sara Goldrick-Rab. Educational Researcher, April 2023.

Feasibility of Delivering an On-Campus Food Distribution Program in a Community College Setting: A Mixed Methods Sequential Explanatory Investigation
Daphne C. Hernandez, Sajeevika S. Daundasekara, Quenette L. Walton, Chinyere Y. Eigege and Allison N. Marshall. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, November 2021.

Houston Food Scholarship Program Report
Sara Goldrick-Rab, Daphne Hernandez, Vanessa Coca, Tiffani Williams and Brianna Richardson. Report from the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, January 2020.

College Students and SNAP: The New Face of Food Insecurity in the United States
Nicholas Freudenberg, Sara Goldrick-Rab and Janet Poppendieck. November 2019.

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