The first two times I tried college, I didn’t finish. There was never enough time to care for my young son, work a full-time job and do my schoolwork. And there was never enough money to pay rent, tuition and child care.

On my third try, everything clicked. This time I was more motivated than ever before — to prove that I could do it, to prove the doubters wrong. 

The first leg of my college journey came to a close this spring, after five grueling years, when I earned my associate degree in criminal justice from Howard Community College — a school that supports student parents like myself. 

I now consider myself proof that motivated and supported student parents can beat the odds and earn a college degree, even though the deck is stacked against us. 

One of every five college undergraduates in this country is caring for a dependent child. Student parents are usually women, at least 30 years old, raising children on their own. A third are Black, and a fifth are Latino. In addition, the largest share of student parents attend community colleges. There used to be a lot more of us, but a strong job market and the rising cost of tuition, housing and child care needs meant that many had to put their college dreams on hold.

The financial and time pressures on student learners are immense. Fewer than 40 percent of student parents earn their degrees within six years. 

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After I graduated from high school in 2019, I thought my road to a college degree would be relatively straightforward. I enrolled that fall but quit soon after I got pregnant. I returned to college in the fall of 2020, but caring for a newborn and trying to navigate online classes during the pandemic was simply too much. 

The college experience on offer did not match my reality of being a student and a parent. I had dropped out of school once already. It was much too easy to do it again.

Leaving college for a second time shattered my confidence and my belief in myself. 

I was raised by a single mom who didn’t go to college. I saw how hard she worked at a low-paying job and how much she struggled but could never get ahead.

I wanted to break that cycle. I was determined to provide a better life for me and especially for my son. I wanted to make sure he had everything he needed to grow up strong, healthy and smart. 

I was going to be the one who made it — the one who was able to look back and say to all who had doubted me that I had done this for me and my little boy.

In the fall of 2022, I tried again, this time at Howard Community College (HCC). The experience turned out to be completely different because HCC acknowledges and values parents like me and had assembled a plan and a program to support us. 

HCC offered me enough scholarships and financial aid to cover my tuition and fees for two years. They even gave me an emergency grant when I had trouble making rent one time. They arranged a flexible schedule that let me take all but one of my classes online at night after I was done with my job and had put my son to bed. At my previous college, I’d had to drop in-person courses when I couldn’t find child care at night. 

Howard also had a Career Links program designed specifically for single parents. It provided one-on-one academic and career counseling that helped me select my major, kept me on track to graduate and gave me the guidance I needed to figure out my future. 

This tremendous amount of support made a huge difference. I renewed my faith in myself. Last fall, I made the dean’s list. This spring, I received my degree.

Related: How parents of young kids make it through college

Today, I have big plans for my future. I’m still working full-time, but this summer I started university classes so I can earn my bachelor’s degree. My son, who turned four this spring, is getting ready to start preschool this fall. 

After I earn my four-year degree, I’d like one day to start a nonprofit that encourages other student parents, specifically single parents and children with an incarcerated parent. My son’s father has been incarcerated for the majority of my child’s life, and I want to provide comprehensive support and resources to help single parents like me overcome similar barriers.

Parents like us need all the help we can get, and I want to provide the assistance that I was lacking for so long.

College is difficult enough without adding a child and a full-time job to the mix. But when colleges can remove some of the financial, scheduling and other barriers that make it so much more arduous for student parents to finish their degrees, they demonstrate their support for their current students — and for the next generation to come.

Abby Bediako graduated from Howard Community College in 2024 and is currently attending the University of Maryland Global Campus. Abby is featured in Raising Up, a documentary film series aimed at elevating the lived experiences of student parents in higher education.

This story about student parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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The typical ambitious high school student takes advanced algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus. None of that math may be necessary for the vast majority of undergraduates who don’t intend to major in science or another STEM field. 

But those same students don’t have many of the math skills that professors think they actually do need. In a survey, humanities, arts and social science professors say they really want their students to be able to analyze data, create charts and spreadsheets and reason mathematically – skills that high school math courses often skip or rush through.

“We still need the traditional algebra-to-calculus curriculum for students who are intending a STEM major,” said Gary Martin, a professor of mathematics education at Auburn University in Alabama who led the team that conducted this survey of college professors. “But that’s maybe 20 percent. The other 80 percent, what about them?” 

Martin said that the survey showed that high schools should stress “reasoning and critical thinking skills, decrease the emphasis on specific mathematical topics, and increase the focus on data analysis and statistics.”

This damning assessment of the content of high school math comes from a survey of about 300 Alabama college professors who oversee majors and undergraduate degree programs at both two-year and four-year public colleges in the humanities, arts, social sciences and some natural sciences. Majors that require calculus were excluded. 

The 2021 survey prompted Alabama’s public colleges and universities to allow more students to meet their math requirements by taking a statistics course instead of a traditional math class, such as college algebra or calculus. 

Martin and his colleagues later realized that the survey had implications for high school math too, and presented these results at an Oct. 26, 2023 session of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual conference in Washington D.C.  Full survey results are slated to be published in the winter 2024 issue of the MathAMATYC Educator, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges.

In the survey, professors were asked detailed questions about which mathematical concepts and skills students need in their programs. Many high school math topics were unimportant to college professors. For example, most professors said they wanted students to understand functions, particularly linear and exponential functions, which are used to model trends, population changes or compound interest. But Martin said that non-STEM students didn’t really need to learn trigonometric functions, which are used in satellite navigation or mechanical engineering. 

College professors were more keen on an assortment of what was described as mathematical “practices,” including the ability to “interpret quantitative information,” “strategically infer, evaluate and reason,” “apply the mathematics they know to solve everyday life, society and the workplace,” and to “look for patterns and relationships and make generalizations.”

“Teachers are so focused on covering all the topics that they don’t have time to do the practices when the practices are what really matters,” said Martin.

Understanding statistics was high on the list. An overwhelming majority of college professors said students in their programs needed to be familiar with statistics and data analysis, including concepts like correlation, causation and the importance of sample size. They wanted students to be able to “interpret displays of data and statistical analyses to understand the reasonableness of the claims being presented.” Professors say students need to be able to produce bar charts, histograms and line charts. Facility with spreadsheets, such as Excel, is useful too.

“Statistics is what you need,” said Martin. “Yet, in many K-12 classrooms, statistics is the proverbial end-of-the-year unit that you may or may not get to. And if you do, you rush through it, just to say you did it. But there’s not this sense of urgency to get through the statistics, as there is to get through the math topics.”

Though the survey took place only in Alabama and professors in other states might have different thoughts on the math that students need, Martin suspects that there are more similarities than differences.

The mismatch between what students learn in high school and what they need in college isn’t easy to fix. Teachers generally don’t have time for longer statistics units, or the ability to go deeper into math concepts so that students can develop their reasoning skills, because high school math courses have become bloated with too many topics. However, there is no consensus on which algebra topics to jettison.

Encouraging high school students to take statistics classes during their junior and senior years is also fraught. College admissions officers value calculus, almost as a proxy for intelligence. And college admissions tests tend to emphasize math skills that students will practice more on the algebra-to-calculus track. A diversion to data analysis risks putting students at a disadvantage. 

The thorniest problem is that revamping high school math could force students to make big choices in school before they know what they want to study in college. Students who want to enter STEM fields still need calculus and the country needs more people to pursue STEM careers. Taking more students off of the calculus track could close doors to many students and ultimately weaken the U.S. economy.

Martin said it’s also important to remember that vocational training is not the only purpose of math education.  “We don’t have students read Shakespeare because they need it to be effective in whatever they’re going to do later,” he said. “It adds something to your life. I felt that it really gave me breadth as a human being.”  He wants high school students to study some math concepts they will never need because there’s a beauty to them. “Appreciating mathematics is a really intriguing way of looking at the world,” he said.

Martin and his colleagues don’t have any definitive solutions, but their survey is a helpful data point in demonstrating how too few students are getting the mathematical foundations they need for the future. 

This story about high school math was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: Professors say high school math doesn’t prepare most students for their college majors appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story was produced by The Associated Press as part of a series, The Math Problem, from the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight  newsrooms that is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.  

FAIRFAX, Va. – Diego Fonseca looked at the computer and took a breath. It was his final attempt at the math placement test for his first year of college. His first three tries put him in pre-calculus, a blow for a student who aced honors physics and computer science in high school. 

Functions and trigonometry came easily, but the basics gave him trouble. He struggled to understand algebra, a subject he studied only during a year of remote learning in high school. 

“I didn’t have a hands-on, in-person class, and the information wasn’t really there,” said Fonseca, 19, of Ashburn, Virginia, a computer science major who hoped to get into calculus. “I really struggled when it came to higher-level algebra because I just didn’t know anything.” 

Fonseca is among 100 students who opted to spend a week of summer break at George Mason University brushing up on math lessons that didn’t stick during pandemic schooling. The northern Virginia school started Math Boot Camp because of alarming numbers of students arriving with gaps in their math skills. 

Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.  

Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow. 

Related: How can schools dig out of a generation’s worth of lost math progress?  

At George Mason, fewer students are getting into calculus — the first college-level course for some majors — and more are failing. Students who fall behind often disengage, disappearing from class.  

“This is a huge issue,” said Maria Emelianenko, chair of George Mason’s math department. “We’re talking about college-level pre-calculus and calculus classes, and students cannot even add one-half and one-third.” 

For Jessica Babcock, a Temple University math professor, the magnitude of the problem hit home last year as she graded quizzes in her intermediate algebra class, the lowest option for STEM majors. The quiz, a softball at the start of the fall semester, asked students to subtract eight from negative six. 

It’s not just that they’re unprepared, they’re almost damaged. I hate to use that term, but they’re so behind.”

Brian Rider, math chair, Temple University 

“I graded a whole bunch of papers in a row. No two papers had the same answer, and none of them were correct,” she said. “It was a striking moment of, like, wow — this is significant and deep.” 

Before the pandemic, about 800 students per semester were placed into that class, the equivalent of ninth grade math. By 2021, it swelled to nearly 1,400. 

“It’s not just that they’re unprepared, they’re almost damaged,” said Brian Rider, Temple’s math chair. “I hate to use that term, but they’re so behind.” 

Researchers say math learning suffered for various reasons. An intensely hands-on subject, math was hard to translate to virtual classrooms. When students fell behind in areas like algebra, gaps could go unnoticed for a year or more as they moved to subjects such as geometry or trigonometry. And at home, parents are generally more comfortable helping with reading than math. 

As with other learning setbacks, math issues are most pronounced among Black, Latino, low-income and other vulnerable students, said Katharine Strunk, who led a study on learning delays in Michigan and is now dean of the graduate school of education at the University of Pennsylvania. 

“Those are the students who were most impacted by the pandemic, and they’re the ones who are going to suffer the longer-term consequences,” she said. “They’re not going to have the same access.” 

Related: How can math education in America be improved? Help us count the ways 

Colleges say there’s no quick fix. Many are trying to identify gaps sooner, adopting placement tests that delve deeper into math skills. Some are adding summer camps like George Mason’s, which helped participants increase placement test scores by 56 percent on average.* 

In lieu of traditional remedial classes, which some research finds to be ineffective, more schools are offering “corequisite” classes that help students shore up on the basics while also taking higher courses like calculus.  

Penn State tackled the problem by expanding peer tutoring. Professors report that students who participate have scored 20 percent higher on exams, said Tracy Langkilde, dean of Penn State’s College of Science. 

What’s becoming a persistent problem at some colleges has been a blip for others. At Iowa State University, known for its engineering program, students entering in 2020 were far more likely to be placed in lower-level math classes, and grades fell. That group of students has had continued trouble, but numbers improved for the following year’s class, said Eric Weber, math department chair. 

At Temple, there’s been no rebound. Professors tried small changes: expanded office hours, a new tutoring center, pared-down lessons focused on the essentials. 

But students didn’t come for help, and they kept getting D’s and F’s. This year, Babcock is redesigning the algebra course. Instead of a traditional lecture, it’ll focus on active learning, an approach that demands more participation and expands students’ role in the learning process. Class will be more of a group discussion, with lots of problems worked in-class. 

“We really want students to feel like they’re part of their learning,” Babcock said. “We can’t change their preparation coming in, but we can work to meet their needs in the best way possible.” 

Related: After the pandemic disrupted their high school educations, students are arriving at college unprepared  

George Mason also is emphasizing active learning. Its new placement test helps students find gaps and fill them in before taking it again, with up to four attempts. During the school year, students struggling in math can switch to slower-paced versions that take two terms instead of one. 

At math camp, Fonseca felt he was making up ground. He studied hard, even doing practice problems on the train ride to camp. But when he got to the placement test’s algebra portion, he made the same mistakes. His final score again placed him in pre-calculus. 

The setback would have meant spending at least one extra semester catching up on math at George Mason. In the end, Fonseca decided to start at Northern Virginia Community College. After two years, he plans to transfer to one of Virginia’s public four-year universities. 

A couple weeks after camp, Fonseca again found himself taking a placement test, this time for the community college.  

“I managed to use the knowledge of the boot camp, and I got into calculus,” he said. “I didn’t have any expectation I’d do that.” 

Update: A figure in this sentence on George Mason’s summer camp has been updated.

This story was produced by The Associated Press as part of a series, The Math Problem, from the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight  newsrooms that is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.  

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content. 

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By Olivia Sanchez

*|MC:DATE|*

ATLANTA – As more and more attempts to restrict discussion of gender and race in K-12 schools across the country take hold, where do the ideas go?

Despite the general hostility, despite the recent legislative attacks on so much of what they stand for, the leaders of Spelman College’s comparative women’s studies department have fostered a sort of “safe haven” for Black feminist and queer studies, said M. Bahati Kuumba, the associate director of the department.

Women’s studies, at Spelman and elsewhere, is an interdisciplinary major that examines the way identity – including race, class, sexuality, gender, ability and age – affects the dynamics of power and privilege in society. The discipline looks critically at racism, sexism and other systems of inequality in society. In a college known for that field of study, it would be hypocritical not to create an environment that welcomes every student and celebrates them for who they are as a whole person, said Esther Ajayi-Lowo, an assistant professor in the department.

“I just feel really lucky, happy that those of us at Spelman are not as impacted by the negative trends,” Kuumba said.  She said this motivates her to “work even harder to make sure the theoretical perspectives that encapsulate our experiences, which are the areas of thought that they’re trying to make illegal, are actually valued at Spelman.”

Among the 102 historically Black colleges and universities, Spelman is the only one that offers a bachelor’s degree in women’s or gender studies. Some other HBCUs offer interdisciplinary degrees in which students can select a concentration on similar topics, and others offer minors in gender or women’s studies. 

Kuumba said that Spelman is an intellectual oasis that has, so far, been spared any legislative attempts to cut funding for certain departments or control what topics can be studied. Other political changes to the education sphere, such as the expected Supreme Court ruling on the use of race in college admissions, Kuumba said, are unlikely to have a significant effect on historically Black colleges like Spelman.

Application figures suggest increased interest in Spelman over the past few years. The women’s college received 13,614 applications for the fall of 2022 – a 48 percent increase over the 9,179 who applied in fall of 2019, according to a spokesperson for the college. Enrollment over the same time period rose by about 12 percent, and the number of students who are majoring in women’s studies has remained steady.

At Spelman, students are sheltered from the negativity in some ways: the community is overwhelmingly made up of Black women, and the principal mission of the college is to educate Black women and prepare them to contribute to positive social change.

And while Atlanta is a liberal city, Georgia isn’t immune to the political struggles. Last year, the governor signed a law limiting what K-12 schools can teach children about racism, and prohibiting anything that might make a student feel guilt or shame about their race. A bill meant to restrict education about gender and sexuality in K-12 schools and other settings was introduced by Republican state lawmakers this spring, but has not progressed.  

Instead of despairing about these policies and others like them in other states, Ajayi-Lowo said the women’s studies department gives students the opportunity to make sense of “racial and gendered oppression,” use history to put it into context and begin building hope. She believes it’s personally empowering to students to learn how to advocate for themselves and their communities.

“It’s not just like, ‘there is a war, all of this is happening, the world’s falling apart,’” Ajayi-Lowo said. “They’re able to see themselves as critical stakeholders who have the agency to make changes.”

Fostering a “safe haven” at Spelman shows students that it’s possible to create communities that are free of oppression, Ajayi-Lowo said, and teaches them that if, later in life, they find themselves with no space like this, they will have the power to recreate it. Knowing they have this power is even more important in a moment marked by pervasive hostility and so many legislative efforts to control various aspects of education, Ajayi-Lowo said.

Discussion of race and gender is not being limited only in grade schools. Wyoming has seen several attempts to defund gender and women’s studies programs at public colleges. Florida has a new law that severely restricts gender and women’s studies instruction and defunds initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion in the state university system. A similar bill has passed the Texas legislature and is awaiting signature from the governor. 

To Shoniqua Roach, an assistant professor of women’s studies and African American studies at Brandeis University, it makes sense that Spelman’s comparative women’s studies program would feel protected and safe during such politically tumultuous times. 

“Black feminism was born out of impossible conditions,” Roach said. “Our field has only gotten more resilient in the face of chaos and the face of crisis.”

Roach said that many of the concepts being targeted by conservative lawmakers originate from Black feminist scholars, including the idea that Black people and people from other historically marginalized groups have had a different experience in the United States from others, and that they deserve systemic changes to prevent further mistreatment and to repair damage done. These ideas are core tenets of women’s studies and intersectional feminism, and challenges to them are not new.

“It’s a pretty creative, rigorous, resilient and incredible time for Black feminist theory, which doesn’t surprise me because as a field, we’ve always already been under siege,” Roach said. “I’m already excited to see the creativity that is born out of this chaos.”

Black feminist theory in part argues for human empowerment, but specifically for empowering Black women, one of the most marginalized groups in the United States, Roach said. She is seeing more scholars take advantage of the opportunity to share Black feminist thought beyond academia, which “is an incredible creative, political and intellectual achievement.”

Ariella Rotramel, a professor at Connecticut College and the vice president of the National Women’s Studies Association, believes political pushback comes as a direct result of social justice progress being made. 

For example, Rotramel said, if more people start acknowledging racism and its material effects on health and wealth, then it’s more likely to be addressed. And they see attempts to restrict gender-affirming health care for transgender children as evidence that there are enough parents that love and support their trans children for people to feel threatened by it, Rotramel said.

Rotramel said that they, like most educators, teach theories, and students do not have to agree with every single thing they teach.

“It’s a competing imagining of what our world should be,” Rotramel said. “Of course, I think you always have to believe that the best things about people and humanity will win and people will realize there are ways to care and ways to respect differences.”

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• Teachers, deputized to fight the culture wars, are often reluctant to serve

• Lessons about Native American history are at risk of disappearing

• What do classroom conversations about race, identity and history really look like?

• LGBTQ+ college students struggle to cope with anti-LGBTQ+ violence    

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By Olivia Sanchez

INTERGALACTIC WILDLIFE SANCTUARY— One minute I was making my way through a San Diego conference center swarming with ed tech visionaries and investors. The next, I was sitting in a dark, eerily quiet room being outfitted with a giant headset, goggles, headphones, and hand controls, and praying it had all been sanitized first.  

Suddenly, I was floating through the lush Alien Zoo in an ethereal gondola. I was surrounded by beautiful, colorful, dinosaur-like creatures that seemed to exist in perfect harmony. A god-like voice warned me that a species called the spotted glider was dying at an unusual rate.  

To prevent the spotted gliders from going extinct, the voice instructed me to tag and track a sick-looking glider. When it died, I used the hand controls to pick up the creature, and suddenly, the glider’s body was right before my eyes. I used the hand controls to make an incision, and compare its organs to healthy organs to identify what caused the glider’s death. It became clear that there were tumors on the glider’s lungs, and that it was suffering from a contagious lung cancer.  

My trip to the Alien Zoo wasn’t just for fun or a total abuse of my role as an education journalist. It was the opportunity to experience what about 8,000 students at Arizona State University are already doing on a weekly basis as a part of their introductory biology courses. Replacing traditional labs, this new technology from Dreamscape Learn is used to reinforce the foundational life science concepts they are learning in the classroom.  

Dreamscape Learn is a product of DreamWorks and Arizona State University, combining the narrative storytelling of Hollywood with educational principles to engage students and revolutionize the way they learn, said John VandenBrooks, associate dean for immersive learning at Arizona State University. 

Students still attend traditional biology lectures, and in addition to their virtual reality labs, they spend about three hours a week analyzing what they encountered in the Alien Zoo, VandenBrooks said. 

“We use that narrative engagement to drive the more rigorous quantitative work that students had to do in between,” VandenBrooks said. “That gives students a set of transferable skills, because they’ve had to solve novel problems they can’t Google the answer to that they care about solving.” 

At the end of each section, students are tested with real-world problems that are similar to what they’ve encountered in the Alien Zoo. 

Michael Crow, president of Arizona State, said the technology creates a memory of learning that isn’t associated with a rigid, structured way of learning science. 

“What happens is, we teach science and math in the way that scientists and mathematicians learn it. Which means that it’s being taught to 25 percent or less of the population in a meaningful way,” Crow said.  

Data from an in-house study done last spring indicates that this new technology seems to be working; students in the Dreamscape Learn lab version of introductory biology were 1.7 times more likely to earn an A in the class than those enrolled in the traditional model. And the study found that across gender, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (measured by Pell grant eligibility), students enrolled in the Dreamscape Learn version earned higher median scores on lab assignments than their counterparts who were not. The only subgroup that did not score higher was honors college students, whose scores stayed the same across both groups.  

Nidhi Hebbar, co-founder of the EdTech Equity Project, which advises companies and schools about education technology, said, “it’s hard to ever say that a technology has no racial bias in it, just because our technologies are built by people and on top of the world that we live in. But the fact that they’ve kind of considered some of these things, I think, is really good.” 

In virtual reality technologies, she said, it’s important to consider whether the contexts being represented might be more familiar to some students than others (unlikely with the Alien Zoo!) and, if people are represented, that they accurately represent the demographics of the students who are using it.  

This technology can also be an immersive classroom, where professors can transport their students anywhere in time, space or scale. When I tested it, we bounced from the Colosseum to the inside of a cell membrane to King Tut’s tomb to the surface of Mars, all in a matter of minutes. 

I was mesmerized by what I was seeing in the immersive classroom, but became distracted when I looked down at my hands and they were white! My skin is light brown, so this rendering looked totally foreign to me. This is a small detail in the grand scheme of what I experienced using this technology, but one that I haven’t forgotten weeks later. (In the Alien Zoo, my hands appeared gloved.) Hebbar said that, even though students might not identify a lack of representation as problematic, it can send negative messages to them over time and affect their learning.  

As a journalist, I do my best to keep my opinions to myself. I’m making an exception here, however, because my reflections might help our readers better understand this technology and how it could work for students.  

I was shocked by how bearable the virtual dissection was. My first dissection experiences are, unfortunately, seared into my memory. They took place in regular reality, in a tiny middle school in Southern Oregon where, at dissection time, the entire hallway reeked of formaldehyde. We had to dissect a jellyfish and an earthworm. I hated every minute of it. Virtually dissecting a make-believe animal that didn’t have to die was way less troubling.  

And, it was very easy to focus in the Alien Zoo. I couldn’t think about anything except what was right in front of me. I couldn’t check my phone. I wasn’t worried about what other people thought of me. But I also had no idea what was actually going on around me. If someone had had a medical event or a bad guy had entered the room, I don’t think I would have been able to tell.  

The Dreamscape Learn technology has already advanced from when I tried it out in late April, said Josh Reibel, CEO of Dreamscape Learn. They are now able to do the same level of immersion with slightly less hardware, he said. And they don’t plan to stop with the Alien Zoo. They are developing a narrative-driven chemistry curriculum that will take place on earth but will include some science fiction elements.  

The vision, he said, is to make this technology widely accessible so that students of every background can reap the benefits they are seeing at ASU. To do that, they are trying to slim down the amount of expensive hardware required and offering a no-code development option, so that teachers can create their own immersive classrooms and take students wherever is most relevant to their curriculum. 

• How ed tech can worsen racial inequality  

• With virtual reality, students get a glimpse of different careers  

• Using virtual reality to help students with disabilities  

• How one high-poverty district is adding virtual reality to its classrooms 

The post My trip to the Alien Zoo: virtual Biology 101 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In a 1987 opinion piece in The New York Times, William Bennett, former President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, explained how he thought federal policy was partly to blame for rising college tuition. Under the headline “Our Greedy Colleges,” Bennett wrote that  “increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase … Federal student aid policies do not cause college price inflation, but there is little doubt that they help make it possible.” In other words, Bennett argued, when colleges are aware that students have easy access to cheap loans to pay their bills, they’re more likely to hike prices.

This theory became known as the “Bennett Hypothesis.” Since then, as Uncle Sam created and expanded direct student lending programs, the Bennett Hypothesis has been hotly debated. Now, a team of economists has found evidence that subsidized loans have been a major reason why tuition has soared in one sector of higher education:  graduate school. 

The federal government limits how much it loans undergraduates.  But in 2006, the Republican-controlled Congress effectively eliminated all limits on loans for graduate school with the creation of the Graduate PLUS loan program. Students could borrow as much as their graduate programs cost, including fees, books, supplies and living expenses. The idea was to help more middle- and low-income Americans afford graduate programs, ranging from master’s degrees in education and social work to professional degrees in law, business and medicine. Doctoral students generally receive tuition waivers and stipends, but funding has always been far more limited for professional degrees and many graduate students previously relied on expensive loans from private banks. Advocates argued that the prospect of these bank loans kept many low-income Americans from pursuing a graduate degree.

Borrowing for graduate school has since soared. Graduate students constitute only 16 percent of postsecondary students, but they received almost half of the $95 billion in new federal student loans issued in 2021-22, according to the most recent data available. And when you look at the entire stock of $1.6 trillion in outstanding federal student loan debt, it’s estimated that 40 percent of it was used to pay for graduate school. The numbers are big because graduate students take out big loans. It’s not uncommon for a medical student to borrow more than $100,000. Almost two-thirds of Americans with the largest student loan balances, exceeding $50,000, borrowed to attend graduate school. 

A team of three economists from Columbia, Vanderbilt and Brigham Young universities had access to a trove of data in Texas and they calculated how the universities in that state charged more tuition when students were able to borrow more from the federal government. The posted cost of attendance (also known as list price or sticker price) increased one dollar for every dollar that students borrowed in Grad PLUS loans. But that overstates the loan-driven inflation because, at the same time, admissions offices were ramping up their practice of price discrimination, wooing some students by slashing their bills with grant and “merit aid” offers. The actual net price that many students paid was considerably lower than the posted tuition price.  Factoring that in, the inflationary effect of unlimited graduate student loans was actually more modest, a 64-cent increase in net price of attendance for every dollar borrowed. For every additional $1,000 that a graduate student borrowed from the federal government, the university effectively took $640 of it for itself.

“Overall, our results demonstrate that schools do in fact respond to increased loan access by increasing tuition,” the researchers wrote in a study, “PLUS or Minus? The Effect of Graduate School Loans on Access, Attainment and Prices.” I read a preliminary draft version of the study, dated February 2023, which was publicly posted online by one of the authors. The authors revised their calculations in April 2023 and I am using their latest figures here.

Tuition certainly would have increased even without federal loans. To disentangle how much of the tuition hikes could be attributed to the availability of easy and cheap student loans after 2006, the economists essentially divided all the universities in Texas, both public institutions such as the University of Texas and private institutions such as Rice University, into two groups. One group included universities that served a higher share of graduate students who were already borrowing as much as they could from the federal government before 2006 (roughly $18,500 a year in Stafford loans). The second group included institutions that primarily served graduate students who were borrowing less. Some graduate programs charged less than $18,500 a year and students generally didn’t need to borrow more. In theory, their students should be unaffected by the ability to take out unlimited loans because they already had room to borrow more.

Before 2006, both groups of universities had hiked tuition at the same pace. But after 2006, there was a schism. There were much larger tuition hikes at the more expensive universities where many students had been at their borrowing limit. These institutions raised their prices more and their students borrowed more to pay these bills. By contrast, there were much smaller tuition hikes at the second group of universities where fewer students had been maxing out their federal loans. 

The authors contend that the universities had “captured” some of the additional federal funds for themselves. Students who were already saddled with the most debt had to take on more debt to pay higher bills. 

The economists looked to see if there were other benefits from unlimited graduate school loans. Unfortunately, they didn’t find any. The policy didn’t increase the number of students enrolled in graduate programs in Texas universities. It didn’t improve the demographic composition of new graduate student cohorts. There were the same percentages of Black, Hispanic and Native American students after the 2006 policy change as there were before. Gender composition was the same too. 

The ability to pay college bills didn’t help more students complete their graduate degrees; graduation rates stayed the same. There was little evidence that students’ earnings in the workplace were any higher after graduate school.

One major caveat is that the researchers analyzed only graduate programs that existed before the policy change to document how they changed afterwards. We don’t know from this study if new graduate programs significantly increased access to graduate school or diversified their student ranks. This study ended with students who entered graduate school in 2009-10; it’s possible that the hoped-for benefits of unlimited lending kicked in afterwards.

The saddest part of this analysis is how the availability of loans saddled students with more debt, and there are hints that this burden was especially borne by Black students. In the study, the authors documented how universities used grant aid to woo prospective graduate students and there are indications that very little of this aid was targeted to Black students. That left many Black graduate students taking out larger loans to pay higher tuition bills than their white, Asian American and Hispanic peers. White and Asian American students effectively had the lowest tuition increases. Hispanic students fell in between. 

Well-intentioned policies can backfire. Access to cheaper loans was supposed to create more opportunities for Americans. But this study found that this didn’t happen in practice. 

The Texas study looked only at loans to graduate students. The results are very different for undergraduates. In their previous research, the authors of this study found that the increase in undergraduate loan limits had been very helpful to students. They documented significantly higher rates of college graduation and post-college earnings in the workplace. Several studies have found that federal lending has helped community college students. Access to credit can make a positive difference.   

But just because a policy works in one area of higher education, undergraduate degrees, doesn’t mean it will work for all areas. Education financing is complicated. As policy makers in Washington debate extending more financial aid for non-degree certifications – short-term programs in a professional field –  they would be well-served to read this study and think through whether or not it is likely to be another example of the Bennett Hypothesis.

This story about graduate school loans was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

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How much is a college degree worth? Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce calculates that a bachelor’s degree will confer an average lifetime earnings of $2.8 million. Not too shabby, but we’ve all heard tales of college graduates mired in student debt, living at home and unable to rise beyond a barista. Employment prospects depend greatly upon which college you attend and what you study. 

Some states, from Florida to Washington, have built college websites for high school students and their parents to show what recent graduates actually make in the working world. It can help families decide among institutions and even compare the financial payoff between studying business versus journalism (heaven forbid!).

But a new study finds that these salary figures, designed to motivate students to go to college and major in lucrative fields, are off – sometimes significantly so. A July 2022 analysis from economists at the U.S. Census Bureau and the University of Michigan found that the financial payoff for attending the most prestigious public universities in each state, known as flagships, was actually 10 percent higher than the salary figures that states publish. 

States have access to wage data from their unemployment insurance programs, which only cover workers who remain in the state. Individual states have no way of tracking earnings of graduates who move out of state. That means a University of Iowa engineering graduate who flocks to Silicon Valley and earns an impressive starting salary of $150,000 isn’t factored into Iowa’s data of how much a bachelor’s or an engineering degree will get you in the labor market.

“The graduates that leave tend to be higher earning,” said Kevin Stange, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “And so that’s why you’re going to misstate the earnings of people if you just look at those who stay.”

Stange’s co-author, economist Andrew Foote of the U.S. Census Bureau, had access to earnings records in all states and the two researchers were able to link them to students’ education records in five states: New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio and Colorado. The paper, “Attrition From Administrative Data: Problems And Solutions With An Application To Postsecondary Education,” is an early draft, circulated in July 2022 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has not been peer-reviewed.

Understating the payoff for elite institutions could make a difference in students’ choices. One study found that many low-income students didn’t attend Texas’s flagships even when they were guaranteed admission. The idea behind the college websites was that parents and students would make better decisions that could lift families out of poverty if they had access to salary information. But this study suggests that the salary information that states are publishing may be too incomplete to influence families to act in the way that policymakers hoped.

The University of Colorado Boulder is a good case in point. The state reports that its bachelor’s degree students typically earn almost $55,000 a year five years after graduation, compared with about $51,000 a year at one of the state’s less prestigious four-year institutions. A prospective student might reasonably conclude that the $4,000 in extra future pay a year isn’t worth the extra student loan debt and distance from home.

But the actual payoff for going to the University of Colorado Boulder is actually almost $8,000 more a year and an average salary of nearly $59,000, according to Stange. That’s because 45 percent of all University of Colorado, Boulder, students leave the state within five years of graduation, with many jumping to the West Coast and earning more than those who remain in Colorado. 

The extra payoff for going to Pennsylvania State University may be even greater. Stange said that fewer than half the bachelor’s degree graduates of its state flagship remain in state.

College graduates of state flagships had the largest discrepancies between published and actual salaries. But the researchers also noted two other areas where state data understates college payoffs:

• Communications and engineering majors at four-year institutions. 

• Two-year community college students who earn associate degrees in career and technical fields, such as computer science, health and business. They actually earn 19 percent more than high school graduates, not 18 percent. Most of these graduates remain in state but a few relocate for higher paying jobs elsewhere.  

Another website, College Scorecard, which was created by the federal government, avoids the in-state data problem. It links wages that are reported to the IRS across the country. But it only tracks the wages of students who received federal financial aid or loans. At many state flagships, the majority of students don’t receive federal aid or take out loans; their future earnings aren’t in the Scorecard data at all.

Consider the University of Colorado Boulder again. The College Scorecard says that its graduates earn $60,740 after 10 years. But that refers only to the 29 percent of students who took out student loans. Even Colorado’s understated data puts the 10-year salary figure at $70,850.

These online tools are helpful but should only be a rough guide the connection between college choice, fields of study and future salaries. A good rule of thumb: the more prestigious the college and sought after the major, the more understated the dollars.

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

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State and county officials used to think bachelor’s and graduate degree students deserved more money than those pursuing two-year associate degrees, but during the pandemic they changed their minds. 

Public two-year community colleges achieved a new budgetary milestone in fiscal year 2021 as they reaped 6 percent more money per student from state and local governments than public four-year institutions did for their regular operating expenses: $9,347 versus $8,859 for each student. That’s a reversal from 2019 when two-year students received 5 percent less than four-year students.  

These numbers were supplied by an association of officials who oversee public colleges and universities in their states, called the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), which released a higher education finance report in June 2022. The funding figures exclude additional state and federal money for university research, agricultural projects, medical schools and hospitals in order to put a spotlight on funds that are available for students’ educations. Community colleges don’t receive these sorts of funds. 

“All public institutions need more funding for operations, but community colleges are particularly reliant on state and local funding,” said Sophia Laderman, who leads research and policy analysis at the association. “Community college students are more likely to be low-income and students of color and this can help close equity gaps.”

Even with increased state and local funding, much less is spent on community college students in total. The difference is tuition. Tuition collected from community college students adds up to only about 20 percent of what community colleges spend on their educational operations. Almost 80 percent of community college revenues come from state and local funds. 

Public four-year colleges, by contrast, charge far higher tuition and ultimately spend more than double their state and local funds on their students. Flagship universities attract big donors and can dip into their endowments. “They can still provide a much better education,” said Laderman.

As an aside, I was struck by how much less we as a nation spend on public higher education than we do public school for younger students. Per pupil funding of kindergarten through high school students averaged $15,711 during the 2019-20 school year, according to the most recent data from the Department of Education. Then again, it makes sense for the government to spend more on children’s education which is mandated by the state. College is optional. 

Lawmakers have historically funded public four-year institutions that confer bachelor’s and graduate degrees, such as the University of Texas, more generously than two-year colleges, such as Austin Community College, which award associate degrees and educate more than a third of undergraduate students across the country. When the 2008 recession hit, both community colleges and four-year universities alike were hit with big budget cuts. 

As the economy recovered, however, state lawmakers restored funding to community colleges, which positioned themselves as places for blue-collar workforce training. In addition to appropriating more money directly to two-year colleges, lawmakers created many new free community college programs and scholarships, which now operate in hundreds of cities and counties and statewide in almost 30 states. By contrast, a conservative backlash against “liberal” academics tamped enthusiasm for funding increases at more elite four-year universities. 

Community colleges also gained from regional real estate booms, which increased property taxes that flow to two-year colleges.

Funding for community colleges, already on the upswing, then surpassed that of four-year universities during the pandemic. State lawmakers had discretion over how to spend a portion of their federal stimulus money and steered a big chunk to community colleges. Some states dug even deeper into their own pockets. Washington, for example, increased its funding of community colleges by 27 percent in 2021, as it introduced a free community college program. By comparison, the state boosted funding of its four-year colleges by 6.5 percent that year. 

Ironically, some of the increase in per-student funding was also driven by misfortune. Community colleges hemorrhaged 827,000 students during the pandemic as young adults chose work over school. Some government funding is tied to the numbers of enrolled students but some isn’t. With fewer students, there was more of that untied funding to spread among remaining students.  

Laderman cautioned, however, that this aspect of the increase was not a boon for community colleges. They still had to cover many of the same bills as they had before the students left, from faculty salaries to custodians and electricity. Many are struggling financially. 

Per student funding would have gone up even without the decline in student enrollment at community colleges. Laderman calculated that state and local education appropriations per community college student would have increased by half as much, or 7 percent, if enrollment hadn’t declined. 

It’s unclear how higher education finance will fare going forward. If a recession hits and unemployed adults return to school, that could increase funds for community colleges. But lawmakers may also be pressured once again to cut funding if tax collections run dry.

This story about community college funding was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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While Brittani Williams was busy working toward her bachelor’s degree, the student loan debt she was quickly accruing rarely crossed her mind. Her focus was on her coursework.

A first-generation student, Williams relied on loans to fund her college and hopefully, help change the course of her family’s lives.

After she had her degree in hand, it was time to start paying. The reality of her debt finally hit her.

Now a doctoral student in education leadership policy at Texas Tech University, Williams often thinks about the student loan debt she is still accruing. And for Williams, a higher education senior policy analyst at the advocacy group Education Trust, the personal is also professional. 

She’s studying the way people like her — Black women borrowers — are burdened by college debt more profoundly than any other demographic group.

Related: Black student parents are at the epicenter of the student debt crisis 

Nearly two-thirds of the $1.7 trillion in student debt in America is held by women, and Black borrowers are more negatively affected due to systemic racism, according to a report Williams coauthored, “How Black Women Experience Student Debt.” Her work is an extension of research started by Education Trust in 2020 with a National Black Student Loan Debt Study survey of 1,300 Black borrowers and the subsequent Jim Crow Debt report, which identified college debt as a racial and economic justice issue.

Williams and her coauthor, Victoria Jackson, Education Trust’s assistant director of higher education policy, said that Black women are marginalized due to their race and gender, putting them among the lowest earners in the labor market. The racial wealth gap leaves Black women with fewer resources to pay back their loans because, Williams said, for Black women, more degrees do not necessarily equal more money.

“We see these degrees to be vehicles of upward mobility. And then the stark realization is we get these degrees and the car is broken,” Williams said. “That mobility piece is not there.”

The recently extended pandemic pause on federal loan payments has given Williams some reprieve. But broadly, Black women are asking for actual solutions not what Ameshia Cross, Education Trust’s assistant director of communications for higher education, called “kicking the can down the road.”

The Education Trust report highlighted the experiences of women who recount various struggles with debt. One told of bargaining with herself about whether a graduate degree would be worth it and whether she would be able to pay off her debt. Another said she was trying to raise children while getting degrees and was eventually sent to collections because she couldn’t pay the money back. A third said her credit score was so affected by her debt, she couldn’t get a car loan and then could only get jobs near public transit. 

“There are only two things that can relieve someone: either cancel their debt or give them the money to pay the debt back.”

Ivory Toldson, NAACP

Ivory Toldson, the director of education, innovation and research at the NAACP, said he first started to notice the disproportionate impact on Black women borrowers about a decade ago when he realized that Black women were earning more college degrees but Black men still made more money. 

Now, he studies the impact of student loan debt on the ability of Black people to advance economically, he said. The ultimate goal is to close the racial wage gap. 

“Women in general, Black women in particular, they need a college degree to even have a chance,” Toldson said. “So the way to get a college degree, especially if you’re first generation or low income, is you have to take out loans.”

Related: Why white students are 250% more likely to graduate than Black students at public universities 

Toldson, the NAACP and Education Trust agree on potential solutions to alleviate the burden on Black women.

“There are only two things that can relieve someone: either cancel their debt or give them the money to pay the debt back,” Toldson said.

If there isn’t cancellation in Washington, the Education Trust report calls for improvements to federal income-driven repayment plans to make it easier for borrowers to pay back their debt and shorten the time it takes to get debt forgiven.

To prevent more Black women from ending up so burdened by college debt, Education Trust and the NAACP suggest increasing the size of the federal Pell Grant so that it covers a greater portion of college costs, and making college more affordable in general.

Without these actions from Washington, said Cross of Education Trust, the unfair cycle will continue.

“It’s consistently pushed in our community that college is financial freedom, college is economic freedom, and they’re not feeling that on the other side of it,” Cross said. 

“Black female students just aren’t seeing that and right now, even with the accumulation of degrees – the bachelor’s, the master’s – you have to make yourself more competitive in a field to get more money. You end up on the other side of this suffering.”

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

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Every few months, readers interested in higher education see yet another article on “college majors that lead to the highest incomes.” Topping the lists, at least for starting salaries, are STEM fields such as engineering (all kinds), computer science and applied mathematics. Liberal arts fields such as English and history routinely come in far below, suggesting that a life of genteel poverty awaits those who enjoy Jane Austen.

To be sure, prospective college students, and their parents, are rightly concerned about their financial futures, and picking a lucrative major seems like a straightforward choice that promises good results. “Declare a petroleum engineering major,” these articles imply, “and your future is secured.”

But it’s not that simple. Majors have both academic and personal prerequisites, and it’s not clear that they matter much anyway.

Picking a college major isn’t a free, unfettered choice. It’s tightly limited by the 18 years of life that preceded it. Relatively few high school graduates have the education — or the inclination — for the years of college math and physics that engineering requires. And among those who take on those challenges, simply making that single decision does not mean they will wind up in a high-paying STEM career. Over the years I’ve known scores of young people who “decided” to be pre-med students, only to crash on the rocks of those huge science requirements.

At the same time there are students who do have the technical skill for STEM majors, but lack the inclination or even the basic personality to commit to those subjects and careers. During my college teaching career, I worked closely with several theater majors, smart people who did well in calculus class, but who dreamed of becoming actors in New York or Los Angeles.

They are in those locales today, still hoping, and often working in the entertainment industry — although usually not onstage. They know it’s a long shot to be a performer, but they love that entire world. They want to be a part of it.

To have recommended that they major in applied math and go on to work as a corporate accountant would have been like suggesting a personality transplant. It wasn’t going to happen.

Related: OPINION: Why college majors are another form of implicit bias in higher education

The good news is that a college major in itself isn’t decisive. Remember that lots of computer gurus never even took computer science courses in college, because those courses didn’t exist. There are other ways to gain technical skills.

And I know (for instance) an undergraduate studio art major who went on to become an investment banker and a lead partner at Goldman Sachs; another art major (sculpture) whose career involves custom-machining experimental equipment for physicists; a philosophy major who has spent 50 years as a professional musician; and countless lawyers who majored in every liberal arts field you can name.

Very few of my own sociology students became professional sociologists. They became teachers, executives in businesses and nonprofits, political activists, management consultants, lawyers and administrators of all sorts. A major in college, it turns out, can often be a minor factor in life.

“To have recommended that they major in applied math and go on to work as a corporate accountant would have been like suggesting a personality transplant. It wasn’t going to happen.”

Of course, to become a doctor or a nurse you need to learn biology and chemistry, and you have to attend nursing or med school. If you want to be an engineer, by all means take engineering courses. Many professions require technical skills that must be learned in school. But if you’re worried about income, it’s your occupation that matters, not your college major.

Most employers don’t care what your major was, and plenty of lucrative professions have very flexible undergraduate requirements. Here’s my own recommendation, after 40 years of teaching in a liberal arts college with lots of successful alumni: Pick a major that you’ll love and learn in, with the best teachers you can find. Study broadly and deeply with other serious students and find a caring mentor.

There’s no doubt that scientific and technical skills provide a reliable path into the job market and a relatively riskless approach to economic security. But even in technical fields, the really big rewards, including leadership positions and the salaries attached, often go not to the most technically proficient but to nimble thinkers with strong people skills.

A good understanding of how people and organizations work, a respect for different approaches to tough problems and an ability to clearly communicate your ideas — all characteristics of serious students in the liberal arts — are perennially valuable skills in organizations of all sorts. Four years spent studying them carefully will generate priceless returns.

Daniel Chambliss the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Hamilton College, and the co-author of “How College Works” (Harvard University Press).

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

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