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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In 2017, public interest lawyers sued California because they claimed that too many low-income Black and Hispanic children weren’t learning to read at school. Filed on behalf of families and teachers at three schools with pitiful reading test scores, the suit was an effort to establish a constitutional right to read. However, before the courts resolved that legal question, the litigants settled the case in 2020. 

The settlement itself was noteworthy. The state agreed to give an extra $50 million to 75 elementary schools with the worst reading scores in the state to improve how they were teaching reading. Targeted at children who were just learning to read in kindergarten through third grade, the settlement amounted to a little more than $1,000 extra per student. Teachers were trained in evidence-based ways of teaching reading, including an emphasis on phonics and vocabulary. (A few of the 75 original schools didn’t participate or closed down.)

A pair of Stanford University education researchers studied whether the settlement made a difference, and their conclusion was that yes, it did. Third graders’ reading scores in 2022 and 2023 rose relative to their peers at comparable schools that weren’t eligible for the settlement payments. Researchers equated the gains to an extra 25 percent of a year of learning.

This right-to-read settlement took place during the pandemic when school closures led to learning losses; reading scores had declined sharply statewide and nationwide. However, test scores were strikingly stable at the schools that benefited from the settlement. More than 30 percent of the third graders at these lowest performing schools continued to reach Level 2 or higher on the California state reading tests, about the same as in 2019. Third grade reading scores slid at comparison schools between 2019 and 2022 and only began to recover in 2023. (Level 2 equates to slightly below grade-level proficiency with “standard nearly met” but is above the lowest Level 1 “standard not met.”) State testing of all students doesn’t begin until third grade and so there was no standard measure for younger kindergarten, first and second graders.

The settlement’s benefits can seem small. The majority of children in these schools still cannot read well. Even with these reading improvements, more than 65 percent of the students still scored at the lowest of the four levels on the state’s reading test.  But their reading gains are meaningful in the context of a real-life classroom experience for more than 7,000 third graders over two years, not merely a laboratory experiment or a small pilot program. The researchers characterized the reading improvements as larger than those seen in 90 percent of large-scale classroom interventions, according to a 2023 study. They also conducted a cost-benefit analysis and determined that the $50 million literacy program created by the settlement was 13 times more effective than a typical dollar spent at schools. 

“I wouldn’t call the results super large. I would call them cost effective,” said Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the study, but attended a presentation of the working paper in November. 

The working paper, “The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms,” was posted to the website of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University on Dec. 4, 2023. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and may still be revised.

Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education who conducted the analysis with doctoral student Sarah Novicoff, says that the reading improvements at the weakest schools in California bolster the evidence for the so-called “science of reading” approach, which has become associated with phonics instruction, but also includes pre-phonics sound awareness, reading fluency, vocabulary building and comprehension skills. Thus far, the best real-world evidence for the science of reading comes from Mississippi, where reading scores dramatically improved after schools changed how they taught reading. But there’s also been a debate over whether the state’s policy to hold weak readers back in third grade has been a bigger driver of the test score gains than the instructional changes. 

The structure of the right-to-read settlement offers a possible blueprint for how to bring evidence-based teaching practices into more classrooms, says Stanford’s Dee. School administrators and teachers both received training in the science of reading approach, but then schools were given the freedom to create their own plans and spend their share of the settlement funds as they saw fit within certain guidelines. The Sacramento County Office of Education served as an outside administrator, approving plans and overseeing them.

“How to drive research to inform practice within schools and within classrooms is the central problem we face in education policy,” said Dee. “When I look at this program, it’s an interesting push and pull of how to do that. Schools were encouraged to do their own planning and tailor what they were doing to their own circumstances. But they also had oversight from a state-designated agency that made sure the money was getting where it was supposed to, that they were doing things in a well-conceived way.”  

Some schools hired reading coaches to work with teachers on a regular basis. Others hired more aides to tutor children in small groups. Schools generally elected to spend most of the settlement money on salaries for new staff and extra compensation for current teachers to undergo retraining and less on new instructional materials, such as books or curriculums. By contrast, New York City’s current effort to reform reading instruction began with new curriculum requirements and teachers are complaining that they haven’t received the training to make the new curriculum work.

It’s unclear if this combination of retraining and money would be as effective in typical schools. The lowest performing schools that received the money tended to be staffed by many younger, rookie teachers who were still learning their craft. These new teachers may have been more open to adopting a new science of reading approach than veteran teachers who have years of experience teaching another way. 

That teacher retraining victory may foretell a short-lived success story for the students in these schools. The reason that there were so many new teachers is because teachers quickly burn out and quit high-poverty schools. The newly trained teachers in the science of reading may soon quit too. There’s a risk that all the investment in better teaching could soon evaporate. I’ll be curious to see their reading scores a few years from now.

This story about the right to read settlement 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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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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A growing problem in American classrooms is that teachers don’t resemble the students they teach. Eighty percent of the nation’s 3.8 million public school teachers are white, but over half of their students are Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and mixed races. The small slice of Black teachers has actually shrunk slightly over the past decade from 7 percent in 2011–12 to 6 percent in 2020–21, while Black students make up a much larger 15 percent share of the public school student population. 

A Black teacher can make a positive difference for Black children. Research has shown that Black students are less likely to be suspended and more likely to be placed in gifted classes when they are taught by Black teachers. Studies have often found that Black students learn more from same race teachers.  

Teacher diversity statistics in 2020-21. Public school teachers are overwhelmingly white but most students are not.

There are many reasons for the paucity of Black teachers. But a June 2023 analysis of college students in Michigan highlights a particularly leaky part of the teacher pipeline: teacher preparation programs inside colleges and universities.

At the start of college, Michigan’s Black students are almost as interested in teaching as white students, the report found. But Black students are far less likely to complete teacher preparation programs and become certified teachers. There’s a surprisingly large drop in prospective Black teachers as they’re finishing their coursework and about to start teaching internships in classrooms. 

“There are a lot of potentially great educators who just aren’t making it to the classroom,” said Tara Kilbride, lead author of the analysis conducted by Education Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC), a research center at  Michigan State University.

The June 2023 research report, “Tracking Progress Through Michigan’s Teacher Pipeline,” analyzed prospective teachers of all races, and found that enrollment in education courses has been declining since 2010.  But two data points on Black undergraduates jumped out at me: their relatively high rates of curiosity about teaching and their extremely low completion rates in teacher certification. 

Kilbride and her colleagues analyzed 12 years of college student data, from 2010-11 to 2021-22, at 15 public colleges and universities in Michigan, where the majority of Michigan’s teachers receive their training. Researchers noticed that Black undergraduates were almost as likely as white students to take a teacher education class (13 percent of Black students versus 14 percent of white students). 

Only a fraction of the 34,000 Michigan students who took an initial education course progressed to student teachers, either by majoring in education or by adding a teacher preparation program to another field of study, often in the subject that they intend to teach. But the completion gap between Black and white students was large and striking. A mere 7 percent of the Black students who took a teacher education course in Michigan became student teachers, compared to 30 percent of white students who took these courses. To be sure, many students change their minds about becoming a teacher, but there’s no obvious reason why Black students would be changing their minds at such high rates.  

Researchers drilled into the data to try to understand what is going on. Part of the explanation is that Black students are dropping out of college in higher numbers. But students were abandoning teacher preparation in higher rates than they were leaving school. (In other words, the decline in prospective Black teachers far exceeded the Black college dropout rate.) Many of these Black students are staying in college and earning degrees. They’re just not completing their teacher training.

The researchers next looked at the timing of Black students’ departure from the pathway to teaching. During introductory 100-level courses and intermediate 200-level courses, Black students are sticking with education at almost the same rate as white students. But as students progress to advanced coursework in 300- and 400-level courses, Black students abandon teacher training in much larger numbers. Many Black students have completed five or more semester-long courses in education at this point. It adds up to thousands of wasted hours and tuition dollars.

The leaky teacher pipeline. Course progression rates for undergraduates in education in Michigan’s public colleges and universities by race and ethnicity.

Kilbride suspects that several hurdles are disproportionately impeding the progress of prospective Black teachers as they near the end of their coursework. High among them is a state requirement to complete 600 “clinical” hours of apprenticeships and student teaching, which are usually unpaid. Some university programs require more. That’s both a scheduling and financial challenge for Black students, many of whom are low-income and juggling a substantial part-time job alongside college.

“There’s also a time cost,” said Kilbride, EPIC’s assistant director of research. “Some of these programs require a fifth year for students to complete these clinical experiences. So that’s an extra year that they’re spending on their education, and not earning a wage.”  

Tuition alone for a fifth year of teacher preparation at Michigan State University, for example, runs $16,700.

Another obstacle is Michigan’s teacher licensure tests. The pass rates for Black students are much lower, and it’s unclear why. (Only 54 percent of Black test-takers passed the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification, compared to 90 percent, 87 percent, and 83 percent of their White, Asian, and Hispanic counterparts, respectively.)  Despite completing all or nearly all of their teacher training coursework, many Black students fail the test and leave the teacher preparation program before they even start their student teaching hours. 

Though the study took place only in Michigan, Kilbride says the loss of Black teacher candidates while still in college is likely a widespread phenomenon around the country. Michigan is a particularly good place to study the scarcity of Black teachers given the imbalance between the large Black population, the largest minority in the state, and the small number of Black teachers. Eighteen percent of public school students in Michigan are Black but only 7 percent of its teachers are.

Kilbride told me about several initiatives underway in Michigan to address the problems that Black prospective teachers are facing. There are new stipends – up to $9,600 a semester – to help low-income students with their bills while they are student teaching. Michigan State University recently shortened its five-year teacher preparation program to four years for all students who start in the fall of 2023. Kilbride says these and other reforms should be monitored to see if they help boost the number of Black teachers. 

The good news is that Black college students who overcome all the obstacles and make it across the finish line to become certified teachers are more likely to get jobs in public schools and stay in the profession. Almost three quarters of newly certified Black teachers taught in a Michigan public school within five years of becoming certified (compared to fewer than 70 percent of white teachers), and 44 percent taught for at least five years (compared to 38 percent of white teachers).

There are many approaches to boosting the number of teachers of color in U.S. classrooms. Of course, it makes sense to focus on doing more to retain the few Black teachers who are already there. But this Michigan report points to systemic problems that hinder the development of future Black teachers. They won’t be simple or cheap to fix. Defining the obstacles – as this study does  – is a good first step.

This story about teacher diversity statistics 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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Students’ race and ethnicity affect their chances of earning a college degree, according to several new reports on higher education released in January and February 2023. However, the picture that emerges depends on the lens you use. College degrees are increasing among all racial and ethnic groups, but white and Asian Americans are far more likely to hold a college degree or earn one than Black, Hispanic or Native Americans. 

Earning a college degree involves two steps: starting college and finishing college. Before the pandemic, white, Black and Hispanic Americans were enrolling in college at about the same rates, especially when unemployment was high and jobs were hard to find. (Asian Americans enrolled in college at much higher rates.) The bigger distinction is that once a student has started college, the likelihood of making it through the coursework and tuition payments and ultimately earning a degree varies so much by race and ethnicity. 

First, let’s begin with enrollment. There are two ways to look at this. One is to see how the demographic makeup of college campuses has changed over time, becoming less white and more Hispanic. The pie charts below were produced in January by the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that provides data reporting services to colleges. In conjunction with these services, it monitors trends in higher education by aggregating the data submitted by more than 3,600 institutions, representing 97 percent of the students at the nation’s degree-granting colleges and universities. Earlier this year, the organization launched a DEI Data Lab site to put a spotlight on how college enrollment, persistence and completion vary by race and ethnicity.

In 2011, as the pie chart on the left shows, more than 60 percent of the nation’s 20.6 million college students were white, according to an estimate by the National Student Clearinghouse.  By 2020, the year represented by the pie chart on the right, the total number of college students had fallen to 17.8 million and the share of white students had dropped by almost 9 percentage points to 52 percent, still a majority. During the same period, the share of Hispanic students grew from 14 percent to 21 percent, and the share of Black students remained constant at just under 14 percent.  Asian students increased from 5 to 7 percent of the college population. This represents all undergraduate college students, both younger students entering straight after high school and older nontraditional students, studying full-time and part-time, and attending both four-year universities and two-year colleges. 

The 2011 figures are rough estimates because only one out of five colleges reported race and ethnicity of students to the Clearinghouse. Today, more than three out of five colleges report on the race and ethnicity of their students to the Clearinghouse. (For the original version of this pie chart, click here.)

How should we think about these college enrollment numbers? Do they largely mirror each racial and ethnic group’s share of the population? I was surprised to learn that the answer is yes – with a few caveats. Asian Americans are slightly overrepresented on college campuses and Hispanic Americans are slightly underrepresented. 

I created this chart below, comparing the National Student Clearinghouse’s college enrollment data for 2020 with the young adult population, as reported by the U.S Census, so you can see how closely college enrollment tracks actual demographics.

Another way to look at college enrollment is to see how many young adults enroll in college. The chart below, by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows that the college enrollment rates of Black and Hispanic young adults improved after the 2008 recession, and approached the college going rate of white Americans. Roughly 60 percent of young Black, Hispanic and white Americans are trying for a college degree. The college going rate for Asian Americans is much higher; more than 80 percent enroll. The zigs and zags in this chart show how college going among Hispanic and Black Americans is influenced by business cycles. 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics obtains enrollment data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of households conducted by the Bureau of Census. Here is the chart on the BLS site. 

When jobs are plentiful, many low-income students may join the labor force and defer their higher education. That especially reduces enrollments among Black and Hispanic young adults, among whom poverty rates are higher. When unemployment is high, more young adults enroll at college, particularly at two-year community colleges. Most recently, during the pandemic, many young Americans deferred college to help support or take care of their families. Some students chose to wait until in-person classes resumed. 

Going to college is one thing; finishing it is another. This fourth chart, produced by the Lumina Foundation, shows that over time, more Americans of every race and ethnicity are earning college degrees. The Lumina Foundation is a private foundation that seeks to increase the number of adults with college degrees and other credentials, and was formed through the sale to Sallie Mae of USA Group’s assets that were used to create and collect monthly payments on student loans.* It is also among the many funders of The Hechinger Report. 

Share of adult population, ages 25-64, with college degrees

This chart above, originally published here on Jan. 31, is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. It tracks the percentage of adults 25 to 64 with two-year associate and four-year bachelor’s degrees. The share of Americans with a college degree rose from 38 percent in 2009 to nearly 46 percent in 2021 – an increase of eight percentage points.  

Every race and ethnicity saw gains. The eight-percentage point gain was the same for both Black and white adults. 

But racial gaps continue.  In 2021, there remained an enormous 40 percentage point difference between Asian American adults, among whom 66 percent have a college degree, and Native American adults, among whom only 25 percent have a college degree.  Among Black adults, 34 percent have college degrees. Among Hispanic adults, it’s 28 percent and among white adults, it’s 50 percent. 

Improvements in college attainment can seem slow because graduation rates are much lower among Americans over 35. It takes years for higher college graduation rates among younger adults to raise overall college numbers. College attainment rates have jumped the fastest among young Hispanic adults under age 35, rising from below 20 percent in 2009 to above 30 percent in 2021. Courtney Brown, the chief data and research officer at Lumina, credits a variety of support programs, from tutoring to food pantries, and the convenience of online courses to explain why more young people are graduating, despite rising tuition costs. “Colleges are trying to serve students better,” said Brown. “Even the way they staff colleges, not all on getting enrollments but having more success coaches available and counselors helping students get to the finish line.”

Still, Brown acknowledges that it’s been difficult to make a dent in the stubborn gaps in college attainment between people of different races and ethnicities.  “Unfortunately, everyone is increasing,” Brown said. “And so we are not seeing those gaps reduced.”

The National Student Clearinghouse’s DEI Data Lab also shows this completion problem starkly. 

This chart tracks cohorts of students who began college at the same time and calculates how many of them earned any college degree within six years. Among students who started college in the fall of 2010, 62 percent of white students completed a degree by the summer of 2016, compared with only 39 percent of Black students. That’s a giant 23 percentage point gap, and a sign that a disproportionate number of Black students are dropping out of college in debt. Completion rates improved considerably for students who started college in 2015, but large gaps remain. Almost 70 percent of white students completed a degree by the summer of 2021, but only 45 percent of Black students hit this milestone. The Black-white college completion gap actually widened slightly from 23 to 24 percentage points.

The reasons for why completion rates remain much lower for Black, Hispanic and Native American students are complex. These students are more likely to attend community colleges, which have lower funding per student and fewer support services. Many students weren’t adequately prepared in high schools to handle college-level coursework, especially in math. 

A poll of Black college students by Gallup-Lumina, released on Feb. 9, found that 21 percent of Black students report feeling discriminated against frequently or occasionally at the college they are attending, and that 45 percent have considered dropping out in the past six months. Black students in bachelor’s programs are far more likely to juggle family and work responsibilities alongside their studies. 

“Black students are encountering so much more discrimination, and they have multiple responsibilities that no other race or ethnicity really has,” said Lumina’s Brown. “A lot of it is that Black students are more likely to have children. Working full time, having children and trying to get a bachelor’s degree at the same time is just obviously overwhelming.”

On Feb. 2, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released the most recent college enrollment numbers for 2022. Undergraduate enrollment for both white and Black students fell for the fifth straight year, while enrollment of Hispanic and Asian students at public two-year colleges improved. However, their numbers are below pre-pandemic levels. For example, there were roughly 975,000 Hispanic students enrolled in public two-year colleges, also called community colleges, in the fall of 2022, up from 944,000 in the fall of 2021, but considerably down from 1.14 million in 2019. (Click here and navigate to the demographics tab for these fall 2022 charts.) 

And here’s a startling data point: Black student enrollment at two-year community colleges declined by a staggering 44 percent, from 1.2 million in 2010 to 670,000 in 2020, according to a Sept. 2022 report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank that studies policies affecting Black Americans.

Fewer students at college now certainly means fewer college-educated adults in the years ahead. And that is not a promising future. 

* Correction: An earlier version incorrectly said that Lumina was founded through the sale of Sallie Mae, instead of USA Group’s sale of assets to Sallie Mae. USA Group was sold, not Sallie Mae. 

This story about higher ed data 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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Students who are learning English often face extreme barriers to getting an education in the United States.

From kindergarten through 12th grade, they’re entitled by law to the resources it takes to get them the same education as their English-proficient peers, but what they receive varies drastically depending on where they live. As a result, about 67 percent of English Learners earn a high school diploma, compared to about 84 percent of the general population.

For those who make it out of high school, the path to college — and what happens to them there— is largely uncharted and unregulated. In the worst cases, without support and guidance in navigating the system, English Learners end up wasting time and financial aid eligibility taking remedial classes, when they could succeed in mainstream classes with language support.

“I always thought that there has to be a more dignified way of learning English, or learning another language, than being told that you’re just not good enough.”

Yasuko Kanno, associate professor of language education, Boston University

“Students go from being visible and marginalized to sort of being invisible,” said Shawna Shapiro, an associate professor of writing and linguistics at Middlebury College and the author of a New America report highlighting best practices for helping English Learners transition to college. “Both of those are a problem.”

To successfully make the transition from high school to college, English Learners and their families often need extra support. Shapiro’s recommendations fall into three categories: integrate English Learners into classes with students who are not English Learners; resist separating them from English-proficient students or tracking them into certain career paths; and collect more robust data on these students. Many of the strategies need to begin in K-12, because if students can’t be successful there, they’re unlikely to succeed in college.

Related: Six questions teachers must ask to help English language learners succeed

Shapiro and other linguistic experts agree that in order to improve the situation for English Learners — about 10 percent of K-12 students in America — the narrative among educators about what it means to be an English Learner has to change.

“If you’re in college and no one recognizes that you’re multilingual and not only do you need certain types of support, but you have something to offer to diversity and global citizenship in higher education, that’s also a missed opportunity,” Shapiro said. “Instead of ‘fixing’ them as the problem, preparing them and equipping them to solve the problem.”

Changing the narrative

Yasuko Kanno, an associate professor of language education at Boston University, has a personal stake in the education and investment in English Learners — she was one.

After growing up in Tokyo, Kanno attended an international boarding school in the United Kingdom, where the strategy for English Learners was “sink or swim,” she said. 

“The only way to be recognized was to learn English, and your first languages and cultures just didn’t matter at all. I survived that, I guess, I swam,” Kanno said. “I always thought that there has to be a more dignified way of learning English, or learning another language, than being told that you’re just not good enough. Or that you’re not intelligent enough if you don’t speak English.”

Though the services for English Learners have generally improved since Kanno was in school, she worries that attitudes haven’t changed enough. She still occasionally hears from students whose experiences are all too similar to hers — about 30 years later. 

Though English Learners graduate from high school at lower rates, Shapiro said the problem is not that they are learning English, it’s that the education system views their lack of English as a deficit, rather than considering what they have to offer, including their first language, their culture and their academic abilities.

Integrated classrooms

Students who are learning English should, as much as possible, be integrated into classrooms with students who are English-proficient, Shapiro said. But this often doesn’t happen. High school students who are learning English are funneled into special sections of courses like history or math with other English learners, classes that have the same credit and description as the mainstream class, but not the same academic rigor. This means their GPAs or test scores don’t always accurately reflect their readiness for college.

Student preparedness for college also depends on how long they have been classified as English Learners. A long-term study of English Learners in Texas found that students who tested out of English language instruction in three years or less performed better on state standardized testing and students who remained in English language instruction classes for five or more years “lagged behind significantly in every grade.”

Resist siloing and tracking

Extra English language classes alone may not help students become college ready, Shapiro said. As with other students, their learning is affected by their life outside of school. Family situations or financial stressors, physical or mental health challenges and other factors contribute.

To address all the factors in a student’s life, Shapiro said schools need to be communicating with the families of English Learners early, instead of only testing the student for English proficiency.

School administrators and teachers need to meet with families and get a more holistic understanding of the student, including their strengths, goals, expectations for education, challenges and fears, she said.

Related: Immigrants learned English in half the time when they were held back in third grade 

These conversations can also serve to educate the student’s family on how the U.S. education system works. Families benefit if they understand all the options for their students, from career education to workforce training programs to college, and how to pay for them. 

This, Shapiro said, could help push back against tracking students into certain career fields or pathways just because they are English Learners. “We’d want to see proportional representation of English Learners in all of those programs, not just in a certain subset of programs,” she said.

Once Spanish-speaking English Learners get to college, administrators sometimes think they just need to translate their website and fliers into Spanish in order to engage them and make information accessible to their families, said Deborah Santiago, CEO of Excelencia in Education.  But the families may have little experience with the American education system and may not understand the information, regardless of language.

Instead, she suggested colleges hire community liaisons to find out where the families of English Learners go for resources in the community and meet them there with information they need.

Collect better data

Right now, Shapiro said, colleges have few incentives to collect robust data on English Learners. Instead, these students are typically accounted for based on other identities they hold, like being a student of color, an international student, or a first-generation college student. 

In order to better serve English Learners, Shapiro said, educators and policymakers need to better understand their needs and how to meet them, as well as what they want out of their education. 

This story about English Learners in college 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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There’s an irony to the uproar over the claim that institutions of higher learning are advancing critical race theory to suppress white people. The reality is that many colleges and universities still struggle to make amends for their racism — or even recognize that amends need to be made. While researching and publishing facts about an institution’s ties to slavery is important and praiseworthy, this should be the bare minimum for colleges and universities that are committed to racial justice. Once past wrongs are identified, these institutions should develop and implement plans for restitution.

Racial reckonings are happening at many colleges and universities across the United States. The University of Richmond is now taking steps to mark and protect a burial ground for enslaved persons, which previous leadership knowingly desecrated. Students, faculty and staff have also lobbied to remove two names from school buildings — the name of a slave owner, who is considered one of the founders of what became the University of Richmond, and the name of a segregationist who advocated for eugenics. While the university created signage marking the burial grounds, and is discussing ways to further memorialize the dead, the university’s board has refused to remove the names of the slave owner and of the eugenicist — a noted historian — from the buildings, despite sustained pressure.

Reparations are the most progressive and meaningful actions universities can take.

At a time when many of the nation’s public-facing institutions are grappling with what it means to become anti-racist, an increasing number of colleges and universities are finally acknowledging that white supremacy has been encoded into their land, built into their environment, and culture.

But in too many cases, acknowledging the racism at their institution’s roots has been mere lip service, while action that could bring justice to victims and begin to right the wrongs of the past is halting or nonexistent.

Related: Student debt cancellation isn’t regressive, it’s anti-racist

 Over 80 institutions of higher education — including the University of Richmond — have joined the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium, created and led by the University of Virginia. The consortium builds on the pioneering work of Brown University, which began studying its own complicity in slavery in 2003 for a report published in 2006. And recently, Virginia legislators passed a law that requires five public institutions — the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, Longwood University, Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia Military Institute — to “make reparations through scholarships or community-based economic development and memorial programs.”

These colleges and universities, along with others elsewhere, are hoping that reparations in the form of preferred admission as well as scholarships and other financial aid will not only atone for the past but also help address issues of inequitable access to higher education and financial disparities in paying for that education. While there are still plenty of questions surrounding whether this approach will produce tangible results, the legal accountability is a welcome feature that will go a long way in ensuring meaningful action.

Reparations are the most progressive and meaningful actions universities can take. But the implementation of reparations is an ongoing challenge. For example, Georgetown University officials made headlines in 2019 when they announced the creation of a $400,000-a-year reparations fund after it was widely reported the school had once sold 272 enslaved men, women, and children for the equivalent of $3.3 million in today’s dollars in order to remain financially solvent. Georgetown, which is a participant in the USS consortium, plans to invest this money to benefit descendants indirectly, through strengthening community services including health clinics.

But to the descendants of those enslaved persons, $400,000 a year in community investment is a paltry sum, particularly given the university’s $1.5 billion endowment. Georgetown students have critiqued the plan on the basis that it “transforms the fund intended to repay a debt into a philanthropy effort.” As one student put it, “The fear is that the university will use these funds for their own purposes … The university is trying to control the narrative, and we’re trying to prevent that.” Georgetown students created their own proposal for handling reparations: 66 percent of the student body voted to levy a $27 student fee to be paid directly to the descendants. But the university has thus far chosen not to pursue this approach.

Related: If you don’t want critical race theory to exist, stop being racist

Making direct cash payments to descendants is the most straightforward approach to reparations. If higher education leaders decide on a different approach, the burden is on them to demonstrate how their alternative approach will produce tangible results. Moreover, leaders often act as though universities — particularly those with large endowments — must choose between paying reparations or pursuing community development efforts to respond to local racial disparities in health, wealth and education.

That is a false choice. They can and should do both.

As we wrote in a recent Brookings report, institutions like the University of Richmond have the capacity to do heavy-lifting in addressing racial disparities through their sheer size as an employer — to say nothing of their ability to leverage their assets and procurement and contracting power. There is no reason why colleges and universities cannot pursue a multi-pronged approach to reparations and racial justice.

Nevertheless, while the mechanics of reparations are important, we cannot allow the best to be the enemy of the good — especially when that means lost momentum.

For every college or university that is demonstrating meaningful commitment to restitution, there are many others with an explicit history of being complicit in slavery and white supremacy that are now quietly hoping to avoid accountability altogether. Without unrelenting pressure, many leaders in higher education will be forever content with forming task forces, drafting reports and publishing committee recommendations — while never taking the bold action required to formally address the injustices of the past. In the words of a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, most universities “will do as little as they can get away with.” It is our job to ensure that these schools do the most, not the least.

In the end, acknowledging previous wrongs is a crucial first step in establishing racial justice. But now it’s time for universities complicit in slavery to put their money where their mouth is, and pay the restitution that is owed.

This story about reparations 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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Three new reports on student achievement during the pandemic all point to larger declines in math than in reading and widening gaps between the haves and have-nots. But describing exactly how students are doing academically is proving to be a challenge when school closures and pandemic experiences varied so wildly from state to state and family to family.

The data we currently have omits vast numbers of low-income children, who have been the hardest hit by the disruption. That’s because low-income students were less likely to attend in-person school, where diagnostic assessments were given, or take an online assessment at home. None of the currently available data is nationally representative. There’s also no information on the achievement of high school students, who are at risk of dropping out of the education system. Still, as imperfect as the figures are, they paint a dismal picture.

In a July 27 report, consulting firm McKinsey & Company calculated that 800,000 elementary school children were five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, on average, compared to similar students before the pandemic. Those learning loss estimates are based on how students performed on i-Ready assessments administered in school in spring 2021. (The test, produced by Curriculum Associates, is one of many diagnostic tests used at schools to track student progress and identify children who need extra help.) Roughly speaking, that’s the equivalent of half a school year. The McKinsey report predicted that this generation of less-educated students could potentially reduce the size of the U.S. economy by $128 billion to $188 billion a year as they enter the workforce “unless steps are taken to address unfinished learning.”

The following day, July 28, the nonprofit test maker NWEA issued a more detailed report, which not only confirmed that students, on average, learned a lot less than usual during the pandemic, especially in math, but also documented how low-income, Black and Latinx students were falling further behind academically. 

NWEA didn’t express how behind students were in terms of months, as the McKinsey report did, but reported that students tended to score 8 to 12 percentiles lower in math, depending on the child’s grade, and 3-6 percentiles lower in reading compared with the spring of 2019. What this means, for example, is that the average third grader who took the test in 2021 dropped from the 55th to the 43rd percentile in a national ranking of math achievement. (NWEA’s customer base skews more white and more suburban than the nation’s school children which is why its “average” third grader started out at 55th percentile and not the 50th.)

“These are big numbers and a serious problem,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, who has been tracking estimates of how student achievement has slid during the pandemic.

NWEA readily admits it’s understating the problem because many low-income students didn’t take its spring 2021 assessment, which was offered in person and online.

The NWEA report analyzed more than 3 million students in third to eighth grade who took its spring 2021 Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment, another diagnostic tool used by schools throughout the year. It captured the academic performance of more than 10 percent of the U.S. public school population in 12,500 public schools that administered the test before and during the pandemic.

Many teachers across the country reported not teaching everything they usually do in a normal year and students wouldn’t be expected to learn what teachers didn’t teach. It isn’t surprising that students are falling further behind in math than in reading. Students primarily learn math at school but once they learn how to read, they can read at home and improve their comprehension skills independently.

It’s important to emphasize that students didn’t slide backwards, for the most part. NWEA documented that student achievement generally improved during the school year of 2020-21 but at a slower rate. White students learned somewhat less in 2020-21 than they usually do but NWEA noticed far sharper drops in how much Latinx and Black students learned during the pandemic school year. (Test maker NWEA used these race and ethnicity categories in its report: White, Asian American, Black, Latinx, and American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN).)

With different learning rates, the academic gaps between students of different races and ethnicities worsened. The achievement of Latinx students, who were already trailing white students by two or so years academically before the pandemic, dropped twice as much as for white students during the pandemic. For example, the average Latinx third grader fell almost 17 percentiles from the 43rd percentile on a national yardstick in math in 2019 to below the 27th percentile in 2021. Their white peers, by contrast, fell nine points from the 63rd to the 54th percentile. The gap between the two widened from 20 to 27 percentile points. 

Scores for a student in a low-income school, where at least three out of every four students live in families that are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, dropped about three times as much as for a student in a high-income school, where fewer than a quarter qualify for the lunch program. For example, third graders in a low-income school dropped 17 points in math from the 39th to 22nd percentile  — well below grade-level proficiency. In a high-income school, student scores dropped six points from just over the 70th to the 64th percentile. 

“The gaps are becoming chasms,” said Lake. “In some studies, some students suffered no learning loss at all. Other students are in dire circumstances.”

Lake’s organization gathered a group of testing experts around the country to review learning loss calculations and issued a report in July, highlighting 12 different estimates from 2020 and early 2021. Lake characterized these estimates as the “tip of the iceberg” because experts are predicting that student achievement will have actually slipped far more after factoring in students who haven’t yet taken the diagnostic tests. 

It’s useful to have a sense of the broad scope of the problem. But nailing down the precise loss for the average American student isn’t nearly as important as figuring out what each student needs. That’s the only way for schools to figure out which children should get the most attention and how to target the right resources to them.

Urging schools to take three to four months to catch up in math, for example, won’t be the right fix for most students. A first grader might need more help with reading. A high school student might need counseling to leave full-time work and return to school.  

“Policymakers need to zero in on understanding the variation and not settle with a blanket solution for everyone,” said Lake.  “The answer is going to be dramatically different from kid to kid.”

This story about learning loss 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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Imagine you’re a parent relocating to a major metropolitan area. The quality of the schools will likely factor into your decision about where to live. Googling around, you might look at websites such as GreatSchools and Niche to compare academic ratings, demographics and family income among school districts. 

The devilish details of this data matter. An intriguing online experiment suggests that displaying some types of academic information, and withholding others, might influence parents to make different decisions about where to live and send their kids to school. 

Data on student achievement, such as average test scores, prompted a preference for school districts that are wealthier and more white, researchers found in the new online study. By contrast, data about how much kids learn at school each year — how fast test scores grow — nudged survey respondents to prefer school districts that are poorer and less white. That’s because children in affluent areas tend to test well and children in poorer districts score much lower, on average. But impressive test score growth can happen even at poor schools where students are low achieving.

“We know that growth is a better measure of educational quality than achievement,” said David Houston, an assistant professor of education at George Mason University, who conducted the online experiment together with Jeffrey Henig at Teachers College, Columbia University.  (The Hechinger Report is an independent media organization based at Teachers College.)

“It’s not all that shocking when you give people growth information, they tend to choose higher growth schools, which on average, not every time, aren’t always the whitest and wealthiest schools,” Houston said in an interview.

Of course, this was just a hypothetical online exercise and it’s not clear that anyone would really make these moving decisions. But it’s interesting how academic information can reinforce and possibly unwind entrenched divisions between race and class in our schools and neighborhoods. The study, “The Effects of Student Growth Data on School District Choice: Evidence from a Survey Experiment,” is slated to be published in the August 2021 issue of the American Journal of Education and was posted online in June 2021.  

“We do *not* believe that a minor tweak like changing how we measure and report school & district performance is the secret key to ending decades of school segregation,” Houston tweeted about his study. “In a society with multiple layers of systemic racism, more dramatic reforms are necessary.” He added that “small improvements to the status quo are still worth pursuing.”

In the experiment, researchers surveyed 2,500 adults online and asked them to imagine choosing a school district for their child in five metropolitan areas:  New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix. 

In the New York area, participants chose from New York City; Yonkers; Jersey City, New Jersey;  Patterson, New Jersey, and Toms River Regional School District, also in New Jersey. Median household income and the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced price lunch were listed, along with the racial and ethnic makeup of the students. In Toms River, an affluent suburban district, the median income exceeds $80,000 and 80 percent of the students are white. On the other end of the spectrum is Paterson, where median income falls below $32,000 and 5 percent of the students are white. (See image from the experiment below.)

The researchers randomly assigned respondents to view additional information for each district. One group was shown the average achievement level and national rank.  A second group saw how many grade levels a typical child grows each year and the national rank of this growth score. A third group saw both achievement and growth. A fourth group, which saw only the demographic and income data, was used as a comparison.

Researchers purposely narrowed the choices to districts where academic achievement and growth don’t always move in tandem. In Toms River, students are among the top 20 percent highest achieving students in the nation but the average student grows 0.93 grade levels each year, learning less than the majority of U.S. children in a school year. In Paterson, the academic achievement of students is in the bottom 10 percent in the nation but students grow more than a whole grade level each year.

Those who were shown academic achievement, but not growth data, tended to choose districts where household income was $2,300 higher, the number of students who are eligible for free and reduced price lunch was 2 percentage points lower, and the number of white students was 2 percentage points higher. In other words, people picked whiter districts after seeing academic achievement data compared to just seeing the number of white, Black, Hispanic and Asian students.

By contrast, participants who saw growth data, but not academic achievement, tended to choose districts with about $2,900 lower household incomes, 2 percentage points more students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and about 4 percentage points fewer white students.

When both student growth and achievement were displayed, they seemed to cancel each other out. Respondents picked the same district that they would have picked if they hadn’t had any academic information and all they knew was the racial composition of the students and family incomes. 

This study was inspired by earlier Stanford University research that measured school effectiveness by teasing out what’s actually happening in schools from the socioeconomics of the students in the schools. The school system that rose to the top, according to this measure, was Chicago, where the majority of students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price lunch. Students typically entered third grade well below grade level in reading and math but almost caught up to the national average by eighth grade. Academic growth like this was not as strong in many wealthier school districts. 

Houston wondered what parents might choose if they were told how effective schools are, using this Stanford yardstick. Would they still pick the highest achieving school? Or might they pick the school where kids are learning more? 

What makes this analysis complicated for parents is that student achievement is important too. Students don’t only learn from their teachers and their lesson plans but also from their peers. An extensive body of research shows the power of peer effects. That’s why high achieving schools can often be high growth schools too. Princeton, New Jersey, is a good example of a school district where students test well and show above average academic growth each year. 

Data on student academic growth is reported by 42 states and the District of Columbia on their annual school report cards, according to the Data Quality Campaign. However, it’s often hard for parents to see this growth information. Sometimes it’s buried in Excel spreadsheets. Another six states measure growth but don’t report it publicly. California and Kansas are the only states that don’t measure it. GreatSchools includes academic growth measures on its website and it recently started weighing student growth more heavily in the overall score it places on each school. 

Houston is currently repeating this online experiment, asking people to choose schools instead of districts to see if his results replicate. That could help improve school choice systems where families can choose a school within a school district.

My take is from this experiment that parents might choose a more diverse school if they are told about student growth but not test scores. It’s not practical to hide those. You need to know annual test scores first in order to calculate how much they have grown. 

What’s clearer to me is that public reporting of academic achievement for every school has exacerbated the residential and educational divisions in our society. The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act that required annual testing was intended to help spotlight and improve schools where student performance lagged. The unintended consequence was that this data also put a spotlight on the highest achieving schools. Families wanted to send their children to them and that increased demand for the houses in those neighborhoods. As housing prices soared, those neighborhoods became less affordable to middle class families. The neighborhoods with high achieving schools became ever pricier and higher achieving in a self-perpetuating cycle of wealth and privilege. Ignorance may have been better for our society. 

This story about academic growth 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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Before the pandemic, a growing number of colleges stopped requiring applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores, as a way to increase diversity on their campuses. But researchers are finding that the test-optional policy isn’t substantially raising the share of low-income students or students of color at colleges that have tried it.

The latest study, published in the peer-reviewed American Educational Research Journal in April 2021, found that test-optional admissions increased the share of Black, Latino and Native American students by only 1 percentage point at about 100 colleges and universities that adopted the policy between 2005-06 and 2015-16. The share of low-income students, as measured by those who qualify for federal Pell Grants, also increased by only 1 percentage point on these campuses, compared to similar schools that continued to require SAT and ACT scores.

“We’re moving the needle a little bit but it’s a drop in the bucket for what we need,” said Kelly Rosinger, an assistant professor of education at Penn State and a former admissions officer at the University of Georgia, in reaction to this study. Her earlier research on a group of selective liberal arts colleges, which had adopted test-optional policies before 2011, didn’t find any diversity improvements on those campuses.

Rosinger said not to expect “dramatic gains” in diversity from eliminating testing requirements because the other qualifications that admissions departments weigh, such as extracurricular activities and advanced high school courses, “tend to privilege the same students who are privileged by test scores.” Well-to-do families can pay for extras like sports and music lessons and high schools in wealthier neighborhoods are more likely to offer advanced coursework. 

Going test-optional did increase the share of women, who already made up a majority of students on these campuses, by 4 percentage points. Test-optional policies especially benefited women because they’ve historically had lower test scores than men but higher grades. 

In 1970, Bowdoin College was the first college in the country to go test-optional. A small number of liberal arts colleges followed suit not only to foster diversity but also because it appealed to an anti-testing sensibility. The test-optional movement gathered steam in the 2000s as concerns mounted over the fact that wealthier students could hire tutors, take the tests multiple times and post higher scores.

The latest study, conducted by Christopher Bennett when he was a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University, homed in on 99 private colleges and universities that opted to waive testing requirements between 2005-6 and 2015-16. Some were small, highly selective liberal arts colleges, such as Bennington College, Smith College and Wesleyan University. Others were less selective and some were larger research universities with graduate schools, such as American University in Washington, D.C., and DePaul University in Chicago. No public universities were included in this study because not enough state schools with competitive admissions had gone test-optional before the pandemic.

Bennett made an effort to capture how much more diverse the 99 colleges became as a result of the test-optional policy. This kind of analysis is tricky since many colleges were becoming more diverse in recent decades, even if they didn’t adopt a test-optional policy. That’s because the percentage of Latino high school students was soaring and more low-income Americans were applying to college. To isolate how much student diversity could be attributed to test-optional policies, Bennett first calculated that the share of students who were Black, Latino or Native American increased from 13 percent to 17 percent at the 99 schools after adopting test-optional admissions. That’s a 4 percentage-point increase.

He then compared these diversity gains to what happened at a similar group of colleges that didn’t adopt test-optional policies until after 2015-16. Their racial and ethnic diversity also increased by about 3 three percentage points even as they continued to require SAT or ACT scores. The difference between the two was a slight 1 percentage point. Similarly, the share of low-income students who were Pell Grant recipients rose from 25 percent to 28 percent at the test-optional schools. But that 3 percentage point gain whittled down to 1 once it was compared against similar colleges that were still requiring test scores. That’s why Bennett determined that the test-optional colleges increased their diversity only slightly more than similar colleges that were still requiring applicants to submit test scores.

Many colleges that went test-optional have boasted that their Black and Latino student population increased by double digits. Indeed, that did happen. Bennett found a 3 to 4 percent increase in the enrollment of Pell Grant recipients from low-income families and a 10 to 12 percent increase in enrollment of Black, Latino and Native American students. But there were so few of these students to start that even these large increases didn’t change the demographics of the campus all that much. And that’s why the total share of students of color only shifted by 1 percentage point. My best analogy is low-fat milk. If you increase the amount of fat by 50 percent, that sounds like a lot more fat. But your total milk fat might rise from 1 percent to only 1.5 percent. It’s still skimmed milk.

The starting line also helps explain why the share of women went up by a lot more. Women already made up more than 50 percent of college students and so even a relatively small increase could raise their total share by a noticeable amount.  

Another surprising finding is that only 20 to 30 percent of students took advantage of test-optional admissions, according to Bennett’s rough estimate. The majority of applicants continued to submit test scores. Bennett said the low uptake also helps explain why it didn’t result in a big increase in diversity. “We shouldn’t really see effects that are enormously large if very few students are actually taking advantage of the test-optional option,” Bennett said

During the pandemic most colleges and universities went test-optional because students couldn’t sit for exams in person. Florida’s public universities were one of the few big exceptions and still required SAT or ACT scores. It will be interesting to see how the diversity of the 2021-22 freshman classes change when all the data are in. If colleges remain bastions of privilege, that could slow the momentum of test-optional admissions. Colleges had to hire many more admissions staffers and application readers to sift through applications without test scores. Test scores are an efficient way to reduce the applicant pool. Based on this pre-pandemic research, it may seem that the small diversity gains from test-optional admissions are not worth the cost. 

Akil Bello, senior director of advocacy at FairTest, which believes that standardized testing is flawed and misused, argues that colleges shouldn’t reinstate SAT and ACT requirements after the pandemic even if test-optional admissions prove not to raise the diversity of the nation’s college campuses very much. “You’re removing a barrier, and it does no harm to students,” said Bello. “What’s the point of keeping this barrier?”

I believe that many college leaders sincerely want to improve diversity. If small fixes like test-optional admissions don’t work well, and more radical solutions like affirmative action are under legal attack, there are no obvious answers for college admissions departments.

This story about test-optional admissions 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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