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Proactive campus policies, communication with students critical under ‘antagonistic’ federal actions, panel says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUqMDwwZbO8

How might federal funding to colleges change under the current federal administration? What to tell students who are worried their financial aid packages might be impacted by proposed changes to federal education funding? Is it possible to find common ground with President Donald Trump?

A panel of education experts on Tuesday provided few definitive answers to those questions, leaving several unanswered, reflecting the uncertainty facing many in education today as they examine how the Trump administration’s approach to higher education may impact them.

The panelists on an EdSource roundtable, “The future of California higher education under Trump,” described a barrage of executive actions — banning diversity efforts, withdrawing already budgeted funds, blacklisting colleges, canceling visas of international students and threatening college leaders — actions that Dominique J. Baker, associate professor at the University of Delaware, described as “antagonistic.”

Baker stated that while many of the funding threats and proposed changes to education come from the executive branch of government, it’s important to consider the role of “the entirety of our federal apparatus” when discussing the future of higher education in this country, including Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Panelists agreed that proposed changes to student loan repayment options and to the federal Pell Grants, which are awarded to students with exceptional financial need, would be detrimental to many students.

“If all of these policies went into place the way that they are currently written out, we would expect to see a stark drop in low-income students enrolling in higher education, whether that’s for the first time or students who had previously enrolled leaving higher education before they can earn any sort of credential or degree,” said Baker, in a blunt assessment of what could occur if the proposed changes to those programs are approved.

Panelist Cristian Ulisses Reyes, a master’s candidate in higher education counseling and student affairs at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who received the Pell Grant, said that threats to such funding are instilling fear in his peers.

“Students aren’t just numbers and policy debates,” Reyes said. “We’re the ones that are being directly impacted.”

Potential scenarios in case of cuts

Gregory A. Smith, chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, said that of around $64 million in annual federal funds, about $43 million goes toward financial aid for students, much in the form of Pell Grants.

The rest of the funds go to programming — about $3.5 million in yearly Title III grants from the federal Department of Education are geared toward the enrollment and retention of Hispanic students in STEM fields; the community college district is a Hispanic-serving institution.

If threats to funding continue, Smith said the San Diego Community College District needs to be prepared for these scenarios:
- The funding could be withheld altogether.
- The funding may remain intact, but the staff who process the payments may have been laid off during recent staff terminations at the federal Department of Education, which could lead to funding delays.
- “The most catastrophic version” of events, he said, would be if Congress amended Title III of the Higher Education Act, which would eliminate the Hispanic-serving institution’s STEM program.
And if any of these scenarios were to occur, “[the program] may need to look different, it may need to be funded differently, but we’re certainly committed to continuing the work in any of those three scenarios,” Smith said.

“Especially for a lot of the populations that we’ve listed — like low-income students, first-generation students — the administration’s attacks on student protections feel personal for many of us,” said Reyes, the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo master’s student.

Reyes urged colleges and universities to be more transparent with their students about discussions and involve them in decisions being made. “Institutions shouldn’t be making decisions about us, without us,” he said.

Relying on long-standing California policies

California has decades of practice in implementing anti-affirmative action policies after approving Proposition 209 in 1996, the panelists noted, as a reminder that the state is protected from some of the changes being made at the federal level.

“Legally, we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out what that looks like to not consider race in hiring, race in admissions, while still being equity-minded,” said Gina Ann Garcia, professor in the School of Education at UC Berkeley.

Affinity graduation ceremonies, for example, have been criticized by the federal administration as part of its attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Garcia, however, not only recently attended a cultural graduation, but said she feels supported by her university to say such graduations will not be canceled.

“We’re talking about a state that’s been anti-affirmative action for 30 years, so we’ve had 30 years to get in compliance,” she said. “We’re not really the state you want to come for, if they’re smart.”

Smith, from San Diego community colleges, echoed Garcia’s sentiments about feeling no fear when the federal Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter in February, threatening cuts in federal funding if schools did not eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

The letter has not changed their DEI programming, Smith said, but it has led to fear in their school community, and they are afraid about the security of these programs.

Smith also shared strategies his district has implemented to keep their students and staff informed, including:
- Discussions on what DEI activities are offered and why.
- Communicating that campus policies on civility, academic freedom, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech remain intact.
- Proactive action by their board in adopting resolutions related to institutional protection from certain government threats.
“It is really important in this moment that we say these are lines around which there is no negotiation, they are fundamental to higher education in America, they’re at the core of a free democratic society, and so there is no negotiation,” Smith said, echoing what Baker and others noted during their discussion. “We can’t give up any margin on it whatsoever at all without crumbling the entire foundation of our institutions.”

While the panelists agreed on this point, they also warned of a future in which the state’s present-day policies on education may change. Upcoming state elections, they said, will determine the direction California heads in regardless of who is in power at the federal level.

“We could swing in a few years … there are many red districts in California,” said Garcia. “It changes what happens as far as funding and commitments to education when we change political leanings.”
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21/05/2025
‘Bring it on,’ Kamala Harris says in fiery speech to teachers’ union

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the American Federation of Teachers’ 88th national convention,
Thursday in Houston.

Credit: AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez

It may well just have been a case of fortuitous timing, but Vice President Kamala Harris — the likely Democratic nominee for the presidency — gave her most full-throated address on Thursday since President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign Sunday to an auditorium filled with enthusiastic teachers.

watch or read the speech

Watch the speech here.

Read the transcript here.

She articulated what seem likely to be the principal lines of attack in what, for her, will be one of the shortest presidential campaigns in American history. She also reprised some of the education issues that have figured prominently in her career so far.

Speaking Thursday in Houston at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers, which, as she noted, was the first union to endorse her candidacy, her speech was in effect a paean of praise not only to teachers, but to everyone working in schools, from bus drivers to nurses.

As she has many times, she paid tribute to her first grade teacher at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley, Frances Wilson.

“I am a proud product of public education,” she said in a not-so-subtle rebuttal to former President Donald Trump and his allies’ disparaging descriptions of public schools as “government schools” intent on indoctrinating students with left-wing and “woke” ideologies.

Vice President Kamala Harris attended Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley in the 1960s. The school has been rebuilt since then.
Credit: Andrew Reed/EdSource

“It is because of Mrs. Wilson and many teachers like her that I stand before you as the vice president of the United States, and why I am running to become president of the United States,” she said.

“You all do God’s work teaching our children,” she told the teachers, all of whom are union members.

In what could become the signature slogan of her campaign, Harris framed the contest as one between the future and the past.

“In this moment we are in a fight for our most fundamental freedoms,” she said, pausing dramatically. “And to this room of leaders, I say, bring it on.”

She repeated “bring it on” three times, as the audience roared “bring it on” back to her.

She said the choice was clear between “two different visions” of America — one focused on the future, and another on the past, and “we are fighting for the future.”

Teachers, by the very nature of their work, are engaged in creating America’s future.

“You see potential in every child,” she said. “You shape the future of our nation.”

“While you teach students about democracy, extremists attack us on the right to vote,” she declared.

And she criticized Republican resistance to gun control, less than a week after a 20-year-old inexperienced gunman nearly assassinated her likely opponent with an AR-15 rifle.

“They have the nerve to tell teachers to strap on a gun in the classroom, while they refuse to pass common sense gun safety laws,” she said.

Harris also took on some of the ideological issues raised by Republicans and the far-right that have roiled the education landscape.

“While you (the teachers) teach about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn, and to acknowledge our nation’s full history, including book bans,” she declared. “We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books.”

The vice president doubled down on the Biden administration’s ambitious efforts to ease the burden of student loan debt — efforts that have been stymied by lawsuits brought by Republicans and their allies blocking his most ambitious loan forgiveness plans.

She described a teacher in Philadelphia she met recently who had been paying off her student loan for 20 years but still had $40,000 to pay off, despite being part of the public service loan program that has been in place for years.

“We forgave it all,” she said.

Her appearance before the AFT, the second-largest teacher’s union (with almost 2 million members) after the National Education Association, may also have been fortuitous for practical reasons.

In addition to their financial contributions, teachers’ unions have a large network of volunteers they can draw on to go out into communities, knock on doors, and make phone calls to mobilize support for the candidates they back.

Both unions have now formally endorsed her.

It is that kind of backing that will make a big difference in the outcome of what almost everyone, regardless of their political affiliation, acknowledges is likely to be a close race.

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19/05/2025
More outreach and access are needed in adult education, panel says

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-TxSs3XHpA

Despite efforts across various sectors, adults throughout California continue to struggle to access education opportunities that can be critical for their family’s economic mobility.

The panel at EdSource’s roundtable, “Adult education: Overlooked and underfunded,” discussed how adults and their families can benefit from adult education, the common barriers to access and ways to overcome them.

“During the pandemic, our emergency room took in some of our most at-need people and triaged them to the right medical care that they need,” said John Werner, the executive director of Sequoias Adult Education Consortium at Thursday’s discussion. “Adult schools do very similar work with education.”

Barriers to adult education

Panelist Francisco Solano grew up in Mexico, where he earned a high school education but had no interest in continuing his schooling. About 16 years ago, he came to the United States and found himself working for salad-packing companies.

He eventually enrolled in adult education classes at Salinas Adult School and is now wrapping up a doctorate in molecular biology at UCLA.

But the road through his adult education was “exhausting” and “not convenient at all.”

“That’s what I see with my peers,” Solano said. “They are not able to get out of that lifestyle because it’s so difficult for them to be able to have a job that secures rent and food for the families and, at the same time, find time and resources to go to school or try something else.”

Solano also believes that larger companies do not want migrants like him to succeed because that would take away a source of cheap labor.

Rural areas — where barriers associated with time and distance are greater — have a high need for adult education.

Steve Curiel, the principal of Huntington Beach Adult School, said not enough conversations about adult education are held at the policy level because most people in elected positions are unlikely to understand the critical role it plays, having experienced more traditional educational journeys.

Raising awareness and marketing

Carolyn Zachry, the state director and education administrator for adult education at the California Department of Education, stressed the importance of raising awareness and sharing stories like Solano’s among potential students.

“That gives the courage to come forward and to walk in those doors of that school,” she said. “And once they’re inside those school doors, then that school community wraps around them and really supports them.”

Werner also emphasized the importance of actively seeking students. He mentioned specific efforts to speak to individuals at local community events, like farmers markets and flea markets. A TV or radio presence can also be helpful, he said.

Helping communities overcome barriers

Numerous organizations are enacting measures to expand access to adult education, including creating remote and virtual options as well as providing child care for students while they are in school.

Several panelists agreed that virtual learning can be a helpful way to bring educational opportunities to adults at home — though Kathy Locke, who teaches English as a second language in Oakland Unified, emphasized the importance of in-person instruction, so adults can learn the skills they need to succeed online.

“The more marginalized, the greater your need in terms of English level, the harder it is to access the technology to be able to use the technology to do distance learning well,” Locke said.

To improve access to online learning, Curiel said the Huntington Beach Adult School has provided laptops and channels for internet connection.

Providing child care is another way to help reduce barriers for adults.

“Our classes provide babysitting for our students to be able to come with their children. Their children go to child care, and then they’re able to come and learn,” Locke said.

“I think that as a district, we really named that as a barrier and really put our money where our mouths were, I think, and made that a priority to get adults in our classrooms, so that they can do the learning that they need.”

Broader benefits of adult education

Adult education also helps support a child’s education, the roundtable panelists agreed.

For example, a child’s literacy benefits when parents attend English language classes, Locke said. And parents are more likely to be involved with their child’s education later on.

“If you want to help a child in poverty, you have to help an adult in poverty,” Werner said. “Only the adult can go get a job tomorrow.”

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19/05/2025
Communication with parents is key to addressing chronic absenteeism, panel says

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q12tG9pvhpM

Students who are missing too much school might be facing mental health issues, poverty and housing insecurity — issues that might seem daunting if not impossible for the school system to tackle by itself.

But relatively simple strategies, such as improved communication with parents via phone calls, emails or postcards, can be effective while costing little, according to a panel convened by EdSource on Wednesday called “Getting students back to school: Addressing chronic absenteeism.” Communication alone can motivate parents to improve their children’s attendance — and it can also help schools understand the causes of chronic absenteeism.

“Engagement is mostly free,” said Jessica Hull, executive director of communication and community engagement for Roseville City School District in Placer County. “It doesn’t take any money to sit and listen to the barriers that exist for our families.”

Researchers and educators know what a serious problem chronic absenteeism is, but parents don’t, according to Amie Rapaport, co-director of the Center for Applied Research in Education at University of Southern California (USC). Rapaport calls this the “parent/expert disconnect.”

“If parents don’t know that their children are struggling in school, then they’re not going to be seeking intervention or support for their child,” Rapaport said.

That appears to be what is happening. Rapaport’s research as part of a new USC report on school absenteeism found that fewer than half of the parents of chronically absent students were worried or concerned about it. But research has found that chronic absenteeism can cause a cascade of academic problems for students throughout their schooling.

The pandemic played a role in diminishing parents’ belief that school attendance is valuable, according to Thomas S. Dee, professor of education at Stanford University Graduate School of Education. He said this “norm erosion” has been a national phenomenon.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen nearly 20 years of test score gains evaporate,” Dee said. “We’ve seen an accelerating youth mental health crisis that’s attested by a declaration from the American Academy of Pediatrics, (and) a rare public health advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General.”

Schools are still seeing the effects of the pandemic on their students, even as federal funding to address those problems is drying up, Dee noted. For schools to address this crisis, they need interventions that are easy to scale and don’t cost a lot of money — and have research to back it.

“I think if I were to encourage people to leave today’s webinar with one piece of information, it’s that most promising (intervention) is low cost, scalable parent engagement through outreach, through texting, through postcards,” Dee said.

The way that educators frame the problem to parents is important, according to Hull. That can mean celebrating when a student who has been absent returns to school. But it can also mean explaining why missing a couple of days each month can take a toll on a student. Avoiding jargon or confusing language is also key.

When confronted with a chronic absenteeism rate that soared to 26% from a prepandemic level of 6%, Roseville City School District began a campaign to educate parents about the importance of attendance. One piece of that was designing an infographic, in parents’ home language, that explained what chronic absenteeism is and the consequences of too many unexcused or even excused absences.

Dee said that the state could also play a role by integrating data about attendance with a text messaging system, for instance, alerting parents that their student is missing too much school.

“But California’s a place that’s put a heavy emphasis on local control, and so it’s down to our many districts and schools to navigate those challenges,” Dee said.

Some schools might see that certain issues — such as school safety, transportation or economic or health barriers — are especially prevalent in their communities, Dee said. Understanding what those issues are from the community is important. That, too, requires parent engagement.

Communication needs to be a two-way street, according to Jennifer Hwang, a Los Angeles Unified parent. LAUSD educators initially brushed Hwang’s concerns aside when she told them her son was struggling with attendance, due to anxiety and neurodivergence. Hwang wishes that her school had simply listened to her concerns when she first raised them.

“It took a while for me to just go in constantly, reach out to the teacher and reach out to the school. If that initial reaction would have been much more helpful, then I don’t think that he would have been as absent as he was,” Hwang said.

Zaia Vera, an education consultant with Sown To Grown, credits conversations with students for inspiring a novel way of addressing attendance. Students said they were struggling with money and that they needed adults who cared about them. So Oakland Unified conducted an experiment while Vera was the head of social-emotional learning.

For 10 weeks, the district provided mentors and $50 a week to encourage students to improve their attendance. It paid off with improved attendance that continued well beyond the experiment.

“The key finding here was that the money incentivized the students to come to school, but it was the relationships that they built that kept them there, and coming back,” Vera said.

Research demonstrates that good relationships with teachers are key for encouraging students to come to school — and so are factors such as the school environment and the quality of instruction, Dee said.

But Dee cautions schools to not get too overwhelmed trying to tackle all the problems that can exacerbate chronic absenteeism, especially at a time when school finances are tight.

“The notion that (schools) should do all the things seems really problematic,” he said. “I’m seeing things like, ‘Well, maybe to promote attendance, you should fix housing and security or solve the American health/healthare system.’ I think that’s great advice for a state legislator or federal legislator, but not appropriate for districts and schools.”

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14/05/2025
ACLU says Cal State Long Beach sound amplification rules ‘unconstitutional’

A teach-in on Palestine at Cal State Long Beach on May 2, 2024.

Credit: Courtesy of Ben Huff

California State University, Long Beach is facing accusations that a policy limiting amplified sound on campus violates free speech rights and has been selectively enforced to single out faculty members who criticized the university.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California last Thursday sent a letter to campus leaders on behalf of two faculty members it said received notices warning that they violated the school’s sound amplification policies during a teach-in about Palestine last spring.

Cal State Long Beach regulations for devices like megaphones and microphones “are unconstitutional as written, and there is good reason to suspect that warnings … may have been issued because of disagreement with the professors’ political speech,” ACLU attorney Jonathan Markovitz wrote.

Cal State Long Beach spokesperson Jeff Cook said in a statement that the university respects “the perspectives expressed in the letter from the ACLU but (disagrees) with several of the characterizations made. As our review of the letter continues, we also reaffirm that campus policies related to ‘Time, Place and Manner’ are viewpoint-neutral.”

The confrontation at Cal State Long Beach highlights the potential for backlash as universities around the country place a new emphasis on rules around how, where and when people can assemble on their campuses this fall, a reaction to a wave of pro-Palestinian protests last spring. University officials frame revamped guardrails as promoting the peaceful exchange of ideas in continuation of past practices, but critics argue the restrictions will chill free speech.

The California State University Chancellor’s Office last month debuted a systemwide time, place and manner policy in response to legislation requiring schools in both the Cal State and University of California systems to notify students of free speech rules on their campuses at the start of the academic year.

Cal State Chancellor Mildred García additionally notified campus presidents in an Aug. 27 letter that activities like forming encampments and occupying buildings “are also prohibited by law and by systemwide directive.” García’s letter has sparked pushback from the California Faculty Association, which argues the university system is imposing new standards of employee conduct unilaterally, failing to give the faculty union an opportunity to bargain.

The ACLU letter was sent on behalf of professors Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson and Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, who in May co-wrote an article with four other Cal State Long Beach faculty members condemning the university’s ties to Boeing and other defense contractors.

“My understanding is that, while many faculty members used amplified sound while participating in the teach-in that provides the ostensible basis for the warning emails, the only faculty members who received these warnings (the Alimahomed-Wilsons, Araceli Esparza, Steven Osuna, Azza Basarudin) were the co-authors of the article,” Markovitz wrote. “I hope that this is mere coincidence, but the correlation is at least notable.”

The letter asks the university to stop enforcing its sound amplification restrictions and repeal them until they can be amended “to comport with constitutional requirements.”

Looking back to the spring

Both the university’s current sound amplification policy and the policy in effect last spring require advance permission to use any kind of amplification. University policy also sets a decibel limit and specifies times and places where amplification is permitted.

The matter discussed in the ACLU letter stems from a May 2 teach-in held at the campus.

The student-organized demonstration started with a march from the school’s upper campus to its lower campus, where a group of hundreds gathered for a teach-in outside an administration building, the five professors named in the ACLU letter said in a group interview. They recalled that roughly eight to 12 speakers shared remarks using a megaphone or a microphone.

“The whole time, we had mic and megaphone problems,” Osuna said. “It wasn’t very loud. So that’s the part that’s really funny to me – we all kept on trying to tell people, ‘Can you hear us? Can you hear us?’”

Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson, Esparza and Basarudin shared remarks about why Palestine is a feminist issue, while Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Osuna gave a talk describing the university’s connections to Boeing. The latter presentation became the basis for an opinion piece the five professors and a colleague published on May 20 in the website Mondoweiss, which argued that the university’s close relationship with Boeing makes it complicit in the violence in Gaza.

The five professors said that on Aug. 19, the first day of the fall term, they each received emails notifying them that they had violated the time, place and manner policy and would risk formal written reprimand or other disciplinary action if they did not comply with it in the future.

“They waited all this time to send us this message on the first day of the semester,” Osuna said. “It’s kind of letting us know, ‘We have our eyes on you.’ That’s the feeling.”

Osuna said that a similar warning email sent to a sixth person was rescinded because there wasn’t evidence to show they had used a microphone.

A free speech argument

Markovitz argued in the letter addressed to Associate Vice President Patricia A. Pérez last week that Cal State Long Beach’s amplified sound policy is unconstitutional because regulations affecting speech must be narrowly tailored.

While some limits on amplified sound may be legitimate, he wrote, it is “clearly impermissible to require advance permission for any use of amplification anywhere on campus.” He argued that the campus’ volume limitations could be used to prohibit shouting or chanting without amplification, even if that is not the university’s intention. And he said the time limitations are “poorly written and unclear,” making it difficult to decipher when and where amplification is allowed.

“The policy’s lack of clarity is a serious problem in its own right, because it makes it impossible for members of the University community to know when they might be in violation of the policy, or when they will be denied permission for amplified sound,” Markovitz wrote. “The risk of arbitrary enforcement is especially pronounced because the policy provides no guidelines indicating when the required requests for advance permission will be granted or denied.”

Markovitz’s letter also expressed concerns that the university has not enforced its sound amplification consistently, but rather is using the policy to discriminate against faculty members based on their political views.

“The inference of viewpoint discrimination or retaliation is bolstered by my understanding that faculty have regularly used amplified sound at union rallies without obtaining advance permission, and without receiving warnings of (time, place and manner) violations later on,” Markovitz wrote. “Again, I hope that the apparent inconsistent application of the university’s amplification has been merely an honest mistake, but I am concerned that hope may not be justified.”

‘A fabric of our university’

Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson said she and other faculty who received the emails have used megaphones at previous teach-ins and protests, including an event following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

“Teach-ins have been a fabric of our university,” she said, “and have never been policed in these ways.”

“Our students see this, too,” Alimahomed-Wilson added. “So what does it mean when all our students are like, ‘Oh, those professors have gotten doxed over this. Now, those professors are getting criminalized over this. They’re getting charged.’”? I think the impact is really chilling.”

Alimahomed-Wilson and her colleagues said their support for student protesters is an extension of their duties as faculty members: research, teaching and service to students.

“We teach our students about justice, about the military-industrial complex, about settler-colonialism, and if we don’t speak out against what is happening right now, we’re not doing our job,” Basarudin said.

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12/05/2025
Pandemic recovery in schools will be a ‘long slog,’ says sobering national report

Student mental health was declining even before the pandemic, research has shown.

Alison Yin for EdSource

Nearly five years after Covid-19 began, a national report released Tuesday shows that recovery from the pandemic for students will be a “long slog.”

“The State of the American Student,” a report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) states that the findings are “sobering, daunting, and discouraging,” and that the slow pace of recovery from the pandemic has left an indelible mark on education, with long-term implications for students’ income, racial inequity and social mobility in the United States.

“If policymakers and educators do not get serious about ensuring these students have access to proven interventions, then we will continue to see the educational impact of the pandemic reverberate for many years, both in our schools and in our economy,” the report stated.

For the last three years, CRPE — a research organization out of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University — has released annual reports examining the academic, social, emotional and mental health effects of the pandemic on students. CRPE Executive Director Robin Lake said the reports were an attempt to ensure that schools wouldn’t go back to business as usual before students were “made whole.”

Fears that the pandemic would widen pre-existing opportunity gaps have come to fruition, according to the report’s summary of a wide span of research. The report focuses extra attention on certain groups: young children, disabled students, English learners and homeless students, and students who still lag far behind from where they would have been if not for the pandemic. Lake added these groups were largely not well served by schools before the pandemic began.

The report takes a sweeping look at the issues that have been harming students’ recovery since 2020, including chronic absenteeism, staffing shortages, poor teacher morale and student disengagement. These are all signs pointing to a pandemic recovery effort that will require a “long haul.”

Struggling students need more attention

Currently, schools are facing “gale-force” headwinds trying to address these challenges, the report states. Pandemic-era funding is drying up, declining school enrollment is stretching district finances, and many educators are facing burnout. But the worst part is that the problem is underappreciated, Lake said.

“Perhaps the most concerning thing to us is how little discussion there is about these problems,” Lake said.

Politicians are not talking about pandemic recovery, especially when it comes to the groups that have been struggling the most, she said. For instance, CRPE pointed out how some states, including California, do a poor job communicating data about how students have fared since the pandemic.

Additionally, parents do not seem to know just how far behind their children are — thanks in part to grade inflation and some schools’ poor communication, Lake said.

USC’s Center for Economic and Social Research conducted interviews with the parents of disabled students.

One parent did not learn from the school that their child was failing two courses, making him ineligible to graduate from high school: “I didn’t know until we were in the process of graduation,” the parent told interviewers.

The number of students who are served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has skyrocketed in recent years. It dipped during the peak of the pandemic when school campuses were closed, but surged again as students returned to the classrooms. It’s not clear why, but different theories have emerged.

While it states that kindergartners who have not attended preschool are more likely to have academic and social struggles, including a rising number of behavioral issues and speech delays, the report notes that students who start school behind their peers may be being over-identified as having a disability or that the high numbers could be because students who might have simply been treading water in a previous era are now being correctly identified as having a disability.

The problems faced by disabled students exemplify many of the biggest struggles of pandemic recovery efforts in schools. Disabled students’ academic performance has long lagged behind other students, but that gap has widened in the wake of the pandemic. The teacher shortage is particularly acute among special education teachers, now that they are needed most. Meanwhile, some effective efforts, such as tutoring, are not reaching disabled students. Low expectations for students with disabilities is a crisis that has failed to garner proper attention and resources, Lake said.

One parent interviewed for the report said that getting help for their disabled students required constant fighting. “Multiple times, they promised in-person, in-school tutoring — which they just were understaffed and were never able to find anyone,” the parent said.

Another parent said that without speech therapy, their son with epilepsy fell behind in school during the pandemic.

“He fell further behind because my husband and I tried our best, but we can only do so much if you’re not a teacher, which is very frustrating,” the parent said in an interview.

Recovery solutions are straightforward

The strategies that helped schools recover have “not been rocket science,” Lake said.

Many schools have been successful with programs such as tutoring, high-quality curricula, extending learning time and improving communication with parents. Some schools are making these strategies a permanent part of the school experience, which is good news: Tutoring and small-group instruction are some of the most powerful tools schools have at their disposal, the report states.

But scaling can be tricky, and many of the students who need help the most are not getting it, CRPE notes. Fewer than half of students who most needed that help enrolled in summer school, according to a Rand study, and just 1% of eligible students in Louisiana enrolled in a tutoring program for struggling readers.

The report recommends focusing on the specific needs of struggling students, such as students with a disability or English learners, rather than so-called average students. Addressing the issues that these students are struggling with will pay dividends for the broader student population, Lake said.

Some schools are demonstrating that recovery is possible, even if it’s not the dominant story right now. Students and educators alike are struggling, but there is a renewed understanding of the crucial role that school plays in a community. That has led to some schools rebuilding and strengthening that institution.

“During the pandemic, you remember, there was so much talk about more joyful education, more engaging, more flexible,” Lake said. “We think that that has actually taken hold.”

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11/05/2025
UC, Cal State, community colleges should work together to boost transfer rates, auditor says

The Transfer and Reentry Center in Dutton Hall at UC Davis helps transfers get acclimated to their new environment.

Credit: Karin Higgins/UC Davis

Few students who intend to transfer from California’s community colleges do so successfully. To reverse that trend, the state’s public college systems will need to work collaboratively.

That’s the finding of a report released Tuesday by the California State Auditor, which, at the direction of the state Assembly’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee, examined the state’s community college transfer system.

Only about 1 in 5 students who entered community college between 2017 and 2019 and intended to transfer did so within four years, the audit found. Rates were even lower for Black and Latino students, as well as for students from certain regions of the state, including the Central Valley.

Many students struggled to navigate what critics call a complex transfer system in California, with variations in transfer requirements across the University of California and California State University systems, the audit found.

The report recommends that UC and CSU work with the community college system to streamline the transfer process. UC should consider widely adopting the associate degree for transfer (ADT) model that is already in place at CSU, and the systems should also share more data, according to the audit’s recommendations. The Legislature could also step in and appropriate funding to help CSU and UC better align their transfer requirements.

Complexity leads to low transfer rates

Students wishing to transfer often face obstacles that prevent them from getting to a four-year university. If students are considering multiple four-year universities for transfer, that often means a different set of requirements for each.

For example, the auditor reviewed six potential four-year campuses to which a community college student studying computer science could transfer: UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, CSU San Marcos, San Diego State and Stanislaus State.

The course requirements vary greatly across the four-year campuses. UC San Diego and San Diego State require potential transfer students to complete a course in intermediate computer programming, whereas the other four campuses do not. UC San Diego is also the only campus to require an additional calculus course. Meanwhile, that campus does not require students to take differential equations, but UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara do.

The audit calls out the ADT as a promising model at CSU, but even that has shortcomings, the report notes. The ADT, created in 2010, is a two-year degree that is no more than 60 credits and is fully transferable to CSU.

Although completing the ADT guarantees a student admission into CSU, it does not guarantee students admission to a specific major campus. That’s a problem, the audit notes, because transfer-intending students are more likely to enroll if they’re admitted to their preferred program.

UC, meanwhile, has not adopted the ADT at all and instead relies on its own transfer programs, such as the transfer admission guarantee. That program does admit students to specific campuses and majors, but not all campuses participate in the program, and for those that do, some majors are excluded. UC’s three most selective campuses — Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego — are the three that do not offer the transfer admission guarantee.

Among the transfer-intending students who entered community college between 2017 and 2019, 21% transferred within four years and less than 30% did so within six years.

Among Black students, between 16.1% and about 17.3% successfully transferred within four years for each cohort. For Latino students, between 14.5% and 15.6% in each cohort transferred in that time frame. That compares to more than 28% of white students in each cohort and as many as 30% of Asian students.

There were also differences depending on a student’s location.

The audit found that community colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego regions, for example, had higher transfer rates than colleges in the Central Valley, Inland Empire and northern parts of the state.

“One factor contributing to this difference may be the distances between community colleges and CSU and UC campuses in those regions. Students are more likely to transfer to a nearby university for a variety of reasons, including challenges associated with relocating,” the audit states.

That’s true for students at Lassen Community College in northeastern California, according to an administrator there. The administrator told auditors that “proximity is a major barrier” for transfer-intending students. The closest CSU or UC campus is Chico State, which is still more than a two-hour drive. In fact, about three-quarters of students who did transfer from Lassen went to an out-of-state university.

Streamlining transfer

The report offers several recommendations to lawmakers and the public college systems that could streamline the transfer process.

Auditors recommend that lawmakers consider providing funding to the colleges to align requirements and make the ADT more widely accepted across the state.

The community colleges and the four-year systems could also do their part to improve the ADT. For the community colleges, that means analyzing why certain community colleges don’t offer the ADT for some majors. CSU, auditors recommend, should do the same for campuses that don’t accept the ADT for certain majors and then determine whether their reasons make sense.

UC should either widely adopt the ADT model or, for campuses unwilling to do that, ensure that their transfer options “emulate the ADT’s key benefits for streamlining course requirements,” auditors say. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom did sign Assembly Bill 1291 to create a pilot program at UCLA in which students beginning in 2026-27 will get priority admission if they complete an associate degree in select majors. The pilot will eventually expand to more campuses, though some students and advocacy groups criticized the legislation because it won’t guarantee students admission to their chosen campus.

The audit also recommends better data-sharing between the three systems.

The community college system could share data with UC and CSU about students who intend to transfer, which UC and CSU could use to better tailor their advice to those students.

Additionally, UC and CSU could share more data with the community colleges about the students who successfully transfer, which could help the community colleges better evaluate their transfer efforts and determine which ones are most effective.

Sonya Christian, chancellor of the community college system, said in a letter responding to the audit that the system looks forward to working with UC, CSU and lawmakers to implement the report’s recommendations, but said there could be challenges, including with data-sharing.

Christian said consistent and timely data remains a “persistent challenge” for the system because of its decentralized nature, which requires each of the 73 local community college districts to individually report data to Christian’s office.

“The lack of a common data platform hampers our ability to collect timely and reliable data on transfer rates and gaps and hinders our ability to be able to accelerate transfer for the students of California through real-time data sharing with four-year system and institutional partners,” she said.

But, Christian added, she has made it a priority since becoming chancellor last year to improve those processes and “let the data flow.”

“I look forward to carrying forward recommendations around improvements to our data, research, and system-wide policy leadership,” she added.

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10/05/2025
New Cal State Bakersfield president says campus should see Kern County’s education problems ‘as our own’

Vernon B. Harper Jr.

Courtesy of California State University, Bakersfield

Vernon B. Harper Jr. is scratching the word “interim” from his nameplate at California State University, Bakersfield.

Harper, who has served as the university’s interim president since the end of 2023, was named CSUB’s permanent president on Wednesday, the second day of a Cal State board of trustees meeting dominated by discussions about the financial pressures facing the university system. The system is projecting a $400 million to $800 million budget gap in 2025-26 as state leaders signal their intention to reduce funding for CSU.

CSU Bakersfield has been able to prevent students from feeling the effects of a reduced budget, Harper said, buoyed by growing enrollment this school year. His focus is on making what he calls a “pivot towards the community” — expanding programs to boost the number of Kern County high school graduates and community college transfer students who enroll at CSUB. The Central Valley is growing rapidly but has lower college attainment than the rest of the state.

Harper envisions the university taking a more active role alongside local K-12 schools to increase the number of students who meet A-G requirements, the coursework that makes students eligible to start college at a Cal State or University of California campus. Only 36% of Kern County high school graduates completed such coursework in the 2022-23 school year, according to state education data, compared with 52% of high school graduates statewide.

“That’s the real transition that the institution is making. It is to accept those problems as our own,” Harper said. “We’re partnering with our K-12 providers and making sure that we’re doing absolutely everything we can to raise that statistic. We’re not just going to sit back passively and watch our community go in a direction that we don’t want it to go.”

One example of the work Harper hopes to get done: CSUB’s teacher education program is forming a task force with the Kern County Superintendent of Schools Office and the Kern High School District in a bid to increase the number of students who are A-G qualified, he said.

The campus is also experimenting with ways to get local students thinking about college even before they leave middle school. It recently started a pilot program with four middle schools and four high schools in which students as young as 12 will receive notices that they are guaranteed admission to CSUB so long as they meet A-G requirements.

“We’ve seen that with young people, especially in under-resourced populations, their vision is truncated by their circumstance,” Harper said. “Whatever we can do, we have a responsibility to do, to extend that vision as far as it can go.”

The past decade has seen rising graduation rates at CSUB. Among first-time, full-time freshmen who entered Cal State Bakersfield in 2017, 49% graduated in six years, an almost 10 percentage-point increase from 2007. But the school has not caught up to some of its Cal State peers. Systemwide, the six-year graduation rate for the same group of students in the fall 2017 cohort was roughly 62%.

Harper said that the intervention that seems to have the most impact on improving graduation rates is pairing students with an academic adviser who works with them throughout their time at CSUB, guiding them through unforeseen challenges, like switching into a course that fits the student’s work schedule.

“As much as we can invest in that activity, the more positive outcomes that we (see),” he said.

The university is also experiencing some of the same longstanding graduation equity gaps that exist across California higher education. The six-year graduation rate among Black students who entered CSUB as freshmen in the fall 2017 cohort was 40%, lagging Asian, Latino and white students.

Harper has backed several CSUB initiatives to attract and retain Black students. Harper said that community college students at Bakersfield College who participate in the Umoja program, which includes courses on African American culture as well as mentorship and academic counseling, will find they can continue receiving similar support now that CSUB has its own Umoja program for transfers. The campus plans to open a Black Students Success Center in the spring and has already hired a group of faculty members whose work is focused on minoritized communities, Harper said.

Harper’s tenure as CSUB’s permanent president begins at a moment when the California State University system is raising financial alarm bells.

Cal State leaders are anticipating that a $164 million increase in revenue from tuition hikes will not be enough to alleviate other stresses on its budget. The system expects that state general fund revenue will drop nearly $400 million, according to a September budget presentation, and that $250 million in compact funding will be delayed. The university system also faces rising projected costs, including for basics it can’t avoid like increased health care premiums and utilities expenses.

Speaking at a Sep. 24 meeting, trustee Diego Arambula said the university system has “almost been too effective at making these cuts year over year over year” without explaining to legislators the impact those budget reductions are already having on students.

“We are doing everything we can to make them as far away from students, but a hiring freeze is a hiring freeze, and that does impact students if we’re not bringing someone into a role that we know is important,” Arambula said. “It’s impacting our staff, who are taking on more to try and still meet the needs of the students who are here.”

CSUB officials last spring said they planned to cut the school’s 2024-25 net operating budget by about 7%, citing a decline in enrollment and increased salary and benefits costs. The school had less than a month of funding in its rainy day fund in 2022-23, slightly less than the net operating budget across the CSU system at that point.

But Harper said enrollment this year is up between 4% and 5%, driving tuition growth that is alleviating some budget pressure. The campus also has made temporary cuts to areas that aren’t student-facing, he said, such as professional development.

“We’ve been able to really, really shield any negative effects on students,” Harper said.

Harper succeeds Lynnette Zelezny as president. He was previously Cal State Bakersfield’s provost and vice president for academic affairs. He will receive a salary of $429,981 and a $50,000 housing allowance.

Harper was first hired at CSUB in 2016. Prior to his arrival at Cal State Bakersfield, he worked at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, Wilkes University of Pennsylvania and the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from Pennsylvania State University, a master’s degree in rhetoric from West Chester University and a doctorate in human communication from Howard University. He served eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve.

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10/05/2025
Upgrading facilities can make schools safer and more sustainable, panel says

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGqkDmCeweo

From securing school entrances to making campuses more resilient to climate change, districts throughout the state are looking to voters to upgrade their facilities.

An EdSource Roundtable on Tuesday, “Election 2024: How voters can help repair California schools,” discussed what a $10 billion state bond and $50 billion in local construction bonds on the November ballot could make possible.

“To make the choice of going to an uncomfortable learning condition in our schools, or to stay at home … .is a choice that students should not have to make,” San Lorenzo Unified Superintendent Daryl Camp said during Tuesday’s discussion. “Students should be able to learn in an environment that’s comfortable for learning.”

Funding for school facilities

This November, California voters will decide whether to support school districts getting money for facilities through two avenues: a $10 billion state bond and, depending on individual location, a local bond measure.

State construction bonds require a 50% majority to pass, while local bonds need 55% of the vote.

The statewide bond — which would be approved by voters passing Proposition 2 — would give $8.5 billion to K-12 schools and another $1.5 billion to California’s community colleges. Voters haven’t passed a bond of its kind since 2016.

Of the funds for K-12 schools, $4 billion will be allocated toward modernizing, retrofitting and rehabilitating buildings, according to Sara Hinkley, the California program manager at UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities and Schools. Meanwhile, $3.3 billion would go toward new construction, and smaller amounts are designated for charter schools and career technical education.

But according to Hinkley, the vast majority of funding for school facilities in California comes from local bond measures.

Districts can also apply to have the California School Facilities Program match those funds on a project basis, but that money is set to expire in early 2025 unless voters pass Proposition 2 to add funding to it for the first time in eight years.

“I know a lot of districts have put measures on the ballot in November in hopes of being able to apply for and secure some of that state funding,” Hinkley said at Tuesday’s discussion. “And for a lot of districts, that is really the only way they’re going to be able to fund some of these projects.”

The difference bonds could make

Del Norte Unified School District has a motto: Keep the wet out.

In 1964, the district’s schools were rebuilt following a tsunami and flood. Now, Brie Fraley, a district parent who was on Tuesday’s panel, said some of the schools have leaky roofs and open ceilings.

It has been 16 years since the district in the state’s far north had a bond measure on the ballot — and Fraley is concerned about the lack of support so far.

“Unfortunately, we did a poll, and the majority of the community members here are not in favor of Measure H that the school board trustees are putting on the ballot,” Fraley said. “So I’m really concerned about access to statewide resources if our community isn’t supportive of it.”

Many districts have already benefited from passing local bond measures, the panelists agreed.

As a result of poor infrastructure and frequent break-ins, Hallie Lozano, a panelist who is a literacy coach at Dyer-Kelly Elementary in Sacramento County’s San Juan Unified, said their school was completely rebuilt after input from teachers, families and students.

They made the school entirely indoors, built it so visitors had to check in at the front office, added spaces for counselors and other interventionists and ensured there were enough bathrooms.

“It makes you feel more valued as a professional,” Lozano said during Tuesday’s discussion. “I think it makes students feel more valued as students, and the families recognize that we’re really giving everything we can to our students and the community.”

She added that the upgrades have also helped with teacher retention.

“Every year, somebody was leaving, or a few people were leaving,” she said. “And now we rarely have people leave unless there’s a promotion, or somebody’s moving out of the area. But it’s not something that happens like it did.”

Sara Noguchi, the superintendent of Modesto City Schools, said the local bond measure would help the district upgrade the 50- to 90-year-old facilities to 21st century standards.

At San Lorenzo Unified, Superintendent Camp is hoping voters pass a local bond measure to help bring air conditioning to its schools amid rising temperatures — in addition to safety and technological upgrades.

“The climate situation is real. It’s apparent. I feel it every day I visit classes, especially on the heat wave,” he said. “It’s not every day, but the days that it’s hot, I have to say, yeah, it’s a challenge getting students to be there and to stay there.”

Other considerations

As voters decide whether to pass their state and local bonds, superintendents have to weigh their schools’ needs with declining enrollments.

But Camp said a smaller enrollment doesn’t necessarily mean fewer schools. Instead, he said some facilities could be converted to purposes such as “wellness rooms” to meet the social-emotional needs of students.

Camp added that many schools will also need to make sure they have the facilities to accommodate 4-year-olds in transitional kindergarten.

Making sure the distribution of state funds is equitable is another concern, the panelists agreed, because wealth disparities between districts are vast.

“When I think about equity, I think about what is fair,” Fraley said during Tuesday’s discussion. “And then, if California wants to be the best in our academics, we need to be fair to all students, so that we all have a fair chance at meeting our academic goals.”

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09/05/2025
‘Academic probation’ sends message to students that college isn’t for them, research says

Students at Fresno City College

Credit: Ashleigh Panoo/EdSource

When a college student’s GPA dips below 2.0 — lower than a C average — schools often send a notice meant to serve as a wake-up call: Improve your grades or risk losing financial aid and being kicked out of college.

But the way that universities and colleges deliver this wake-up call could be backfiring and pushing students to give up on higher education altogether, according to new research.

That’s what California Competes, a nonpartisan policy and research organization, concluded in a recent report on “academic probation.” The policy report was born out of a study that relied on interviews with over 50 “comebackers” — students who returned to higher education years after stopping out — from Shasta College and Sacramento State.

Academic probation wasn’t on the radar of researchers until the comebackers, brought on to co-design the study, raised academic probation as a serious issue that led many students to give up on their studies.

Su Jin Gatlin Jez

“I was very surprised that this came up from the students, but this is why we center students in our work,” said Su Jin Jez, California Competes CEO, in an interview with EdSource.

Jez said students perceived being put on academic probation as a message that they aren’t cut out for higher education, not as a wake-up call. This was especially true when an automated notice did not offer clear next steps for a student to begin to turn their academic career around.

This is an issue that affects a lot of students. One national study by the Center for Analysis and Postsecondary Education and Employment found that 1 in 5 first-year students on Pell Grants were at risk of losing their grants due to low GPAs. But there’s no California-specific data about these students — something California Competes would like to see changed.

Laura Bernhard

The organization calls on the state to create a task force to examine academic probation policies at California public universities and promote practices that will help students. It also calls on each of the state’s higher education segments — community colleges, the CSUs and the UCs — to address this issue. That is happening already.

“There is interest. There’s growing recognition of the need to make these changes,” said California Competes senior researcher Laura Bernhard. “I think that’s exciting.”

Bernhard acknowledges it can be tough to roll out sweeping policy changes in a higher education system as decentralized as California’s, but there are signs of progress. During the study, the University of California announced that it would be following one of the study’s recommendations: calling it “academic notice” rather than academic probation, a phrase that makes getting D’s or F’s sound like a crime.

In this Q&A, Jez and Bernhard detail what they have learned in their research and, specifically, what they want to see happen in California. It has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

What typically happens when a student’s GPA drops below 2.0?

Bernhard: Most schools use an automated system where a student will receive a form email notifying them of this status. Campus policies vary. California Community Colleges are required to notify students when their GPA falls under this threshold.

There is not a systemwide process, which is one of the things we wanted to flag. So the student experience varies pretty widely. It’s also going to vary based on if they’re in a targeted program that receives specialized advising, such as student athletes or people who are in an honors college, but in a lot of ways it’s left to the student. I don’t think we do a lot.

What is the problem with telling a student they are on academic probation?

Bernhard: The first, perhaps the most obvious one, would be the link to the carceral system. That can be very triggering for many people.

One of our institutional partners was reviewing their website about academic probation, and she was taken aback by the language. After they are given notice, the first image students see is a cop holding a stop sign saying, “You’re on probation.” She was horrified. Then she remembered 20 years ago, she was one of the people who helped write that policy. It was just a real moment of, “Oh goodness, what have we done?”

Jez: I think previously there wasn’t a lot of concern about a letter with that kind of language because people assume students were on academic probation because they couldn’t hack it. Because they truly weren’t college material. They couldn’t handle the coursework.

Fast-forward to today, there’s a growing understanding that students can be academically capable and excellent — and still not be getting good grades. There are all of these factors in students’ lives that impact their academic performance. Institutions want to figure out how they can help students navigate those sorts of life circumstances, so that they can succeed in the classroom. For that reason, institutions are really wanting to make sure they have the right tone in these letters.

So are some of these assumptions based on an outdated vision of who a college student is?

Jez: Traditionally, we’ve had a student who is full-time focused on academic studies. You wouldn’t think of life outside of school being a major factor for them. So if they weren’t performing academically, it was because there was some academic shortcoming.

But now most students have heavy workloads, particularly at community colleges and the CSUs. Over 400,000 students in California have children. It’s just a very different student. I think we’re beginning to tackle our policies one by one as we look back and sort of realize they don’t work anymore.

Besides that phrase “academic probation,” what are some other problems with those automated notices sent to students when their GPA dips?

Bernhard: Usually just the length. It’s long, it’s verbose, it’s wordy, it’s complex. There’s jargon. It’s not clear what steps I need to take. It’s not clear who I need to reach out to. It’s not personal. It can tend to use deficit-minded language: “You’ve done something bad; you are on probation; you are in trouble.”

Instead, things can really be flipped. It can be short; it can be clear. It can be: ‘This is temporary. This is a setback. This happens to a lot of people. We all struggle sometimes.” We can normalize this behavior. ‘These things happen sometimes. It’s out of our control and here are the steps you can take. We care about you as our person. Please talk to us. Reach out.”

I think a lot of colleges have also realized that, in addition to sending an email, we can text, we can call, we can have tables on campus. We can have an academic event with more personal outreach, which we realize is bandwidth-heavy. But sometimes that makes a huge difference for people.

This policy analysis mentions that nationally, 1 out of 5 first-time college students receiving Pell Grants end up with a GPA below a 2.0. Is there any statewide data on that?

Bernhard: I think that’s one of the biggest issues. It’s not a publicly shared data point in most cases. It’s usually within an institution. It’s hard to get good, comprehensive, systemwide statewide information about students who have a certain GPA. We obviously believe in the power of data, so that is something we would love to be able to collect and analyze.

Jez: I would love to see that, as the launch of the Cradle-to-Career data system happens, we have students’ GPA information.

Is there any kind of pushback to these changes you’re suggesting? What’s the attitude among campus leaders?

Jez: Across the three systems, I will say that there’s a growing recognition that this is a really critical issue that needs improvement. And so we’re seeing attention to this at the systemwide level.

At the campus level, there are a number of campuses that are just picking it up and sprinting with it. In many ways, our work has been thinking about how we get a more consistent, comprehensive approach, so we can pick up on campuses leading the way, learn from what they’re doing, and then sort of broaden it across the system. So the systems are all in and then the campuses are in.

You’re calling for a statewide task force. Why would that be helpful?

Jez: Unlike literally every other state in our country, we don’t have a coordinating entity that would be thinking about these issues statewide, centering the student and the students who are attending multiple institutions. It’s critical, then, that we pull it together — in these more ad hoc ways, sadly — to be able to address this.

We are hopeful that there will be a proposal in the next 12 months, maybe even the next two or three months, that will tackle this.

Was there anything that surprised you as you researched this issue?

Bernhard: I think we could have named 17 other things that we think would have led people to stop out and make returning to complete their degree more difficult. I don’t think academic probation would necessarily have been on that list.

The other thing I just really wanted to tout is that this feels, to me, like a relatively easy win. It’s essentially free. It feels small, but it could be incredibly impactful for students. There really hasn’t been pushback, because it just feels very common-sense. Now it’s just like, “Great, how do we get momentum, take action and make this change statewide?” I feel like in a year when we’re sort of feeling financially constrained, I think we should take the win.

A lot of what you’re talking about and pushing for is systemic change, but I want to close by asking you what your message would be to students on academic notice or probation right now.

Jez: When we’ve done previous research and we’ve talked about academic probation, what we hear from faculty and staff is they really saw it as an early warning sign, like “Hey, pay attention.” And then what we heard from students was the opposite. It was more like “You don’t belong, you’re not college material.”

So I think that a student should know that this status doesn’t mean you’re not college material and you don’t belong and you can’t do it. I think of it more like a wake-up call. Obviously, there are some students where some sort of crisis happens in their life, and they need to get through that moment and then get back on track. And when they hit that crisis, it’s really important to reach out to their institution because they can take incompletes or withdraw or there are other strategies that make it so that this doesn’t have an impact on their GPA.

If it’s something that’s sort of like a bigger issue where they’re having to work full time and trying to figure out how they balance their studies, reach out to your institution. There are also a number of community-based organizations that can support students. Also, many struggles aren’t visible, but students are far from alone in grappling with this. In many ways, it is a very normal experience. Students can successfully, absolutely make it out of this temporary status.

It’s really like the institution’s obligation to help the student. It is not like, “Go figure it out, student.” The institution needs to help figure out with the student, “How do we support you to success?

My last recommendation is a general customer service one. If you call customer service and the person’s not helpful, I wouldn’t try to convince that person how they should help you. Sometimes, you just hang up and find someone else. Our institutions are pretty big, so there are lots of people. Find a person that can get to your issue and that’s willing to help.

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07/05/2025