The student was removed from the United States while visiting family over the holiday, despite having unresolved legal matters connected to their immigration status. Advocates and educators criticized the deportation, saying it should not have occurred before those issues were reviewed.

Following public scrutiny, government officials acknowledged errors in the handling of the case and said they are reviewing internal procedures to prevent similar incidents. Details about how the deportation was authorized have not been fully disclosed.

Unlike high-profile ICE actions involving raids or arrests caught on video, the student’s deportation occurred through administrative processes — a reminder that immigration enforcement often unfolds quietly, with immediate consequences for individuals and families.

Advocates say cases like this illustrate how enforcement decisions made behind the scenes can be just as disruptive as public operations. Students, they argue, are particularly vulnerable when removals happen during academic breaks, cutting off access to legal support and institutional advocacy.

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The student’s current status has not been made public, and officials have not said whether any steps will be taken to facilitate their return. The case adds to a growing national debate over immigration enforcement priorities, due process protections, and the ripple effects of bureaucratic decisions that can permanently alter lives.

The post US apologizes to student mistakenly deported appeared first on Salon.com.

Samantha Fulnecky, a junior psychology major, submitted a 650‑word reaction paper in a course assignment asking students to reflect on societal expectations of gender and children. The instructions allowed students to incorporate personal experience or perspective, but emphasized thoughtful engagement with the original article. Fulnecky’s essay instead leaned heavily on biblical teachings to argue for traditional gender roles, without citing empirical research or quoting specific scripture.

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The graduate assistant grader gave the essay a zero, noting that it “contradicts itself,” “heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence,” and contains passages that are “offensive.” The student claims the failing grade amounts to religious discrimination and a violation of her free-speech rights. She has appealed the grade and contacted state officials and religious-freedom advocates.

University faculty and academic observers note that while students have a constitutional right to express personal beliefs, instructors have the authority to assess assignments on their academic merit. In a social-science class like psychology, coursework is expected to demonstrate critical thinking and engagement with empirical evidence. Fulnecky’s reliance on personal ideology rather than scholarly reasoning has drawn attention as a potential academic concern beyond the free-speech debate.

The case highlights the complex balance in public universities between protecting students’ right to express beliefs and maintaining rigorous academic standards, particularly when assignments require scientific reasoning. OU has not publicly commented beyond acknowledging the grade appeal process.

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“In my in-person classes, there’s this tension of what they can and can’t say, [and] then we have a code of ethics to follow,” said Woodson, whose social work program’s embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion is at odds with the law. “Prior, I feel like my professors taught very [openly] and there were no questions, hidden tones.”

Nearly a month has passed since students returned for the 2025-26 academic year, and already some say they’re reeling from the effects of Senate Bill 1. The GOP-sponsored legislation, which eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion programs, scholarships and policies from public universities, among other measures, took effect in late June after a grassroots campaign to put its potential repeal to a vote in November failed.

A number of institutions had started complying with the bill months ahead of SB 1’s enactment, shuttering campus identity centers, terminating DEI staff and eliminating degree programs. Since returning to campus in August, students from universities across the state told Salon that they’ve lost much-valued support, funding and scholarships, and freedom to express themselves under SB 1. Some also fear the legislation will serve as a model for other states across the country, as GOP-led efforts to axe DEI provisions, sanitize U.S. history and reshape higher education through an ultraconservative lens take hold in places like Florida and Oklahoma.

Woodson said the bill has created a culture of self-censorship in her classes, threatened the accreditation of her program, and cheapened her academic experience.

“It definitely just feels like we have to tiptoe around things, which I think gets in the way of having productive conversations in class,” Woodson said. Students hesitate before volunteering their opinions in class, while faculty appear more cautious, even including disclaimers in their syllabi. “There’s this clear thing of ‘Can we talk about this? Like, am I going to be stepping on toes?”

SB 1, also known as the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, is a sprawling statute that Republicans billed as fostering academic freedom on the state’s college campuses. The bill regulates classroom discussions on “controversial beliefs” like immigration, closes campus identity centers for marginalized students and evaluates professors on students’ opinions of whether they created an unbiased classroom environment.

“Our Founders treasured diversity of thought so highly they made free speech our very first guaranteed right,” said state Sen. Jerry Cirino, the Republican lawmaker who authored the bill, in a January news release. “It’s time to bring that right back to campus.”

Its passage in late March — and swift authorization by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine a few days later — was enough to convince then-Cleveland State University student Dylan Repertorio to make his exit. He told Salon that he transferred to a university in Albany, New York, because he saw how the law would limit courses in foreign policy and political science that he was interested in, diminish the quality of his education and strip students of support systems.

“Part of the reason why I left as a whole was [because] my degree is not going to be worth as much,” Repertorio, now a junior studying emergency management and homeland security at another institution he declined to name, said in an interview. “I’m not going to be able to learn the things I want to learn when I’m paying for my degree. But also, why would I contribute to an economy in a state that doesn’t care about me? Why am I here?”

Repertorio said that the bill does the opposite of what Cirino claimed, “resulting in less freedom” for students. He believes such legislation will spread to other states as GOP lawmakers across the country, with help from the Trump administration’s pressuring of universities, attempt to push the boundaries of higher education further.

“If they could do this to higher education, it’s going to spread into other parts of people’s lives,” he said.

At The Ohio State University in Columbus, changes came as early as February, a preemptive response to both the expected passage of the legislation and the Trump administration’s executive orders on campus antisemitism and DEI that threatened universities’ research funding. The university has shuttered its Center for Belonging and Social Change and eliminated DEI offices and staff. Most recently, the school has banned students from writing on university sidewalks with chalk — a move critics believe is meant to quell pro-Palestinian speech on campus — and decorating their residence hall floors with a non-OSU-theme.

Eloni McClain, a pre-law junior studying neuroscience at OSU, said that while not directly impacted, she feels that her instructors can no longer openly discuss the scientific contributions of women and people of color, or “equality in science” without fear of repercussions, a huge loss — one coupled with the Black Student Association losing funding and the CBSC closing.

“It just feels like there’s less safe spaces for students to go to based on their identity,” McClain said.

The bill passed the Ohio Legislature despite receiving a record number of opposing testimonies, prompting faculty at Youngstown State University to lead a seven-week, statewide legislative effort to put the future of the bill to a vote this November. The petition team fell short of the roughly 250,000 signatures needed to pass the ballot referendum — garnering just over 195,000 signatures — and the bill went into effect.

While those faculty members told Salon at the time that they would not be changing anything about how they do their jobs, students have noticed the changes to DEI policy YSU made to comply.

“On the first day, [in] every class I went to, a professor had to give a disclaimer, saying that they’re not trying to indoctrinate us or force us to believe anything,” said Samantha George, a senior at YSU. “And that was something that never really had to happen prior to this.”

George, who’s majoring in English education, told Salon her program’s been hard hit. Some of her professors appear nervous to speak too much or share a stance in their classes as they had before SB 1. Plus, the university has nixed what was once a required class on diversity and equity in the classroom from the program altogether, she said. A YSU lecturer separately confirmed that the class had been pulled. She also worries about how these rollbacks will affect her future as a teacher because nothing is stopping lawmakers from also attempting to extend such limitations to K-12 education.

“All it really feels like is them trying to restrict education to the people they think deserve it,” George said. “Removing DEI and all these other things that ensure people who maybe wouldn’t have the chance to get an education actually can go get one — it just feels like they’re trying to make education so inaccessible that people just can’t do it.”

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Nica Delgado, a graduate student of library science at Kent State University, told Salon that it feels like SB 1 has stolen “a lot of joy” from the campus. She and other students are feeling the absence of Hispanic Heritage Month events, chatter about the LGBTQ+ center’s rainbow run and the now-closed Multicultural Center’s annual kickoff that would have otherwise happened.

“It feels really lifeless and exclusionary, and the love that those centers had for their students — that love hasn’t found its place back to campus yet,” she said in an interview. “As someone who is so involved with the Multicultural Center, it kills me. It breaks my heart.”

Delgado said she lost a world of support she’d fostered in the Multicultural Center as an undergrad, including Cupida Transiciones, a program for incoming college students of color. SB 1 has also eliminated scholarships she had planned to apply for to offset the cost of her master’s degree, forcing her to take out a $20,000 loan after previously completing her bachelor’s at the institution debt-free.

“The legislators that pushed this through took something from our students in Ohio that they will never understand, and they took programs from us that truly saved lives and kept people in school,” Delgado, president of the Kent State Ohio Student Association, said.

“It’s doing such a disservice to history, and it’s doing a disservice to the future of Ohio,” she added.

The post GOP’s “free speech” law leaves students afraid to talk appeared first on Salon.com.

Since the 2023 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, researchers have been scrambling to collect data on how many students are using AI regularly, what they’re using it for and how it’s impacting their education. In a May 2025 report, the Chronicle of Higher Education estimated that 86% of students in 16 countries use AI, 56% of American college students, and a whopping 92% of UK students. The year-over-year increase has been dramatic: A survey of K–12 students conducted in 2024 found that use of LLMs doubled since the year before. A study of 558 college students conducted by Intelligent revealed that three out of every four college students believe that using AI to find answers to test questions, write essays and summarize textbooks is cheating — and that about 69% do it anyway.

Teachers are calling in the cavalry, and the cavalry is blue books. The folks at Roaring Spring, a family-owned company that’s been printing paper products since 1887, are probably tired of being on the blower all day with people like me wanting to know how many units they’ve moved this month. But the company is also taking a well-deserved victory lap: A huge banner on the landing page of the Roaring Spring website enthuses, “The Blue Book is Making Headlines.” And come on — a humble exam notebook becoming one of the biggest stories in U.S. manufacturing seems like the kind of feel-good story we could all use.

The advent of widespread LLM use among students has put educators in a difficult place: On the one hand, they’re aware that it’s a tool that can help students do research, draft outlines, and consolidate data; on the other, they also know that many students are going well beyond that. The trick is to discourage students from becoming dependent on the tools to do their work without forcing themselves to moonlight as AI cops, and for many, blue books are the first line of defense.

Very few educators seem to want to demonize AI tools wholesale; rather, what they want is for students to understand what they lose by outsourcing their thinking, writing and imagination to it. And currently, many of them feel like they’re trying to hold the ocean back with a broom. “I hate that I’m teaching from a defensive place,” admits one adjunct professor I spoke with, who preferred not to be named. “It feels hopeless. You suspect your students are using ChatGPT or Copilot for their assignments, so you run their work through AI-detection software, which is also AI, and not always accurate.” Building more in-class discussions into the schedule has helped develop what she believes is a generally accurate AI-dar: “You start recognizing student work where different papers will have things in common — certain words, certain sentence constructions. You get a sense for it. I’m not grading on vibes.” But that doesn’t mean it’s not tiring and even demoralizing. “I just don’t think they care,” she says. “And I don’t want to get worn down to a place where I stop caring.”

It’s a sentiment that pervades listservs, Reddit forums and other places where classroom professionals vent their frustrations. “I’m not some sort of sorcerer, I cannot magically force my students to put the effort in,” complains one Reddit user in the r/professor subreddit. “Not when the crack-cocaine of LLMs is just right next to them on the table.” And for the most part, professors are on their own; most institutions have not established blanket policies about AI use, which means that teachers create and enforce their own. Becca Andrews, a writer who teaches journalism at Western Kentucky State University, had “a wake-up call” when she had to fail a student who used an LLM to write a significant amount of a final project. She’s since reworked classes to include more in-person writing and workshopping, and notes that her students — most of whom have jobs — seem grateful to have that time to complete assignments. Andrews also talks to her students about AI’s drawbacks, like its documented impact on critical-thinking faculties: “I tell them that their brains are still cooking, so it’s doubly important to think of their minds as a muscle and work on developing it.”

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Last spring’s bleakest read on the landscape was New York Magazine’s article, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” which included a number of deeply unsettling revelations from reporter James D. Walsh — not just about how widespread AI dependence has already become, but about the speed with which it is changing what education means on an empirical level. (One example Walsh cites: a professor who “caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt ‘Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.’”) The piece is bookended with the story of a Columbia student who invented a tool that allowed engineers to cheat on coding interviews, who recorded himself using the tool in interviews with companies, and was subsequently put on academic leave. During that time, he invented another app that makes it easy to cheat on everything. He raised $5.3 million in venture capital.

Educators are at cross-purposes with AI companies because, well, they want students to actually learn. AI companies, by contrast, want to blanket every aspect of young people’s lives with AI products. When students are asked about AI use, one of the benefits they reliably point to is time efficiency; the research and writing LLMs let them avoid work that they consider a waste of time. The problem is that the more AI can do, the more assignments and processes students might decide are a waste of time.

It’s not coincidental that the biggest booster of LLMs as a blanket good is a man who, like many a Silicon Valley wunderkind who preceded him, dropped out of college, invented an app and hopped aboard the venture-capital train. As a leading booster of AI, Sam Altman has been particularly vocal in encouraging students to adopt AI tools and prioritize “the meta ability to learn” over sustained study of any one subject. If that sounds like a line of bull, that’s because it is. And it’s galling that the opinion of someone who dropped out of college — because why would you keep learning when there’s money to be made and businesses to found? — is constantly sought out for comment on what tools students should and shouldn’t be using. Altman has brushed off educators’ concerns about the drawbacks of AI use in academia and has even suggested that the definition of cheating needs to evolve.

But Altman also regularly speaks out of both sides of his mouth, enthusing to media outlets that Gen Z is “the luckiest generation in all of history,” despite confessing his own reservations about the technology to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law in 2023. In encouraging regulation of AI, he warned of AI’s potential to cause “significant harm to the world,” including by generating massive amounts of disinformation: “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” In more recent congressional testimony, he admitted, “I worry that as the models get better and better, the users can have sort of less and less of their own discriminating process.”

Founders like Altman have told us, implicitly and explicitly, that they see money as more valuable than education, and they have a lot invested in conflating the newness of the technology with the necessity of it; framing AI as a revolution rather than a product is their stock in trade. Suggesting that unethical behavior is suddenly not really unethical because it’s in service to this revolution isn’t about what’s good for students, but about what’s good for business. (Then again, should we really be surprised when tools that would not exist without the theft of copyrighted content are used to enable and justify further unethical behavior?)

Cheat-code culture is real, and students who see their peers using AI to get assignments done in a fraction of the time they spend on research, organization and writing are likely to end up feeling like suckers. But there’s also evidence that students recognize that they learn and retain more when the process is as important as the outcome. In a Substack piece titled “Blue Books Reimagined,” Danielle Kane, a professor of Sociology at Purdue University, recalls the semester she decided to open her mind to AI and let her students use it for drafting writing assignments. “It turned out to be my worst semester of teaching,” she wrote. “Whether due to the use of AI or unchecked device usage during class, students were completely disengaged, making meaningful discussions nearly impossible.”

Meeting a fellow professor who was using blue books less as exam repositories than as classwork and process journals was transformative for Kane: “[S]tudents were encouraged to see the blue books as a creative outlet to demonstrate their mastery of course readings, ideas and practice writing in a loosely structured format . . . This step away from specific writing conventions was intended to encourage students to focus on thoughts and to trust their own ideas and creativity.” Blue books led them to understand the difference between accumulating information and deciding what information is useful to their specific needs. When class ended for the semester, many students chose to keep their blue books.

The blue-book renaissance is a Band-Aid on what educators see as much deeper and entrenched rot, but it’s a start. And there is something satisfying about the return of blue books as a bulwark against AI tools: a David-and-Goliath moment where a small, family-run paper company is embraced as a corrective to the noisy, showboating industry that’s invaded our lives with nonconsensual force. Maybe the blue book is the tangible reminder that technology in the classroom isn’t an either/or proposition, but a both/and one. One Reddit user sums it up: “I went back to blue book exams last year and am so happy I did. My students learn and they appreciate having to learn. And it’s like . . . you know you could learn all the time if you didn’t use ChatGPT, right?”

The post Writing by hand!?: Teachers are going old-school in the fight against AI appeared first on Salon.com.

Had I called my new roommate several weeks before move-in day to establish a color scheme for our sheets and quilts, I assume the response would have been a very loud dial tone. It was a different time, but I didn’t realize just how different until last week, when someone in my group chat mentioned the Facebook group DormRoomMamas and I slipped down a rabbit hole into the billion-dollar realm of dorm room planning and makeovers. It’s a world where mothers of incoming college freshmen want someone to just tell them the correct number of towels and sheets to shop for, what air purifier has the highest Amazon ratings, and how many framed family photos are appropriate to smuggle into their child’s new living space. It’s a land of mood boards titled “Ottomans for girls,” triple-digit checklists of dorm room “essentials” and terminology like “bed party” and  “fridge bridge.”

@theasmithh1 Freshman year dorm😆💖 so blessed @scarlett #minorhall #olemiss #dormtransformation ♬ TELEKINESIS – Travis Scott

It’s a blur of Woozoo fans, Hulkin bags and throw pillows appliqued with CALL YOUR MOM, provided by a mom who hasn’t given you a reason to call yet because she’s right there with a hex wrench, precise room measurements for peel-and-stick wallpaper, and very strong opinions on how to fold underwear. Some of these mothers are professional dorm room stylists (a string of words that probably shouldn’t exist) paid to execute room redesigns that seem more appropriate for luxury Airbnbs than for rooms whose signature scent will be ripe feet. But more of them appear to treat easing the transition from home to college as a calling beyond paid work that compels them to spare little expense in reifying their roles as providers for and protectors of young people on the cusp of change.

I was vaguely aware, during my time in dorms and off-campus apartments, that there was a place called Target that sold closet organizers, cute duvet covers, and framed “Starry Night” prints, but these spaces seemed more often to accumulate furnishings organically — a graduating senior’s futon here, a rug from AmVets there. Dorm rooms were sites of evolution, not re-creations of home; they were liminal spaces where posters, electronics, tapestries and strings of lights shaped like fish or chili peppers were visual shorthand for who their residents were or hoped to become. Dorm decor was a precursor to social media that let students unobtrusively survey their peers’ musical taste, affinity for sports, interest in partying, Greek affiliation and propensity to refer to movies as “cinéma.” If you wanted to sprawl out on a couch, well, that’s what the library was for.

To say that’s changed in the decades since doesn’t quite capture the scale of the consumer-facing shift. Big-box chains like IKEA, Target and Bed Bath & Beyond began marketing heavily to college students in the 2000s, innovating programs that let buyers purchase from one location and pick up at another and publishing standalone Back-to-School catalogs. Alongside them, design blogs and the rise of Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest midwived the modern dorm aesthetic, which combined low-priced, easy-to-assemble starter furniture with friendly textiles, fun colors, and adaptable, modular storage solutions. And the rise of campus brand ambassadors recruited by clothing, electronic and energy-drink companies meant that each school year brought an infusion of consumers who could guide their impressionable peers into the sightlines of Red Bull and American Eagle in return for swag or even salaries.

@ibbdesign Watch this dorm room Get IBB’d! Our Instant Basic to Beautiful mantra can be applied to any space! It’s always important to focus on function as well as form especially in smaller spaces like dorm rooms and apartments. Getting creative with storage solutions and finding versatile multifunctional pieces is imperative – but make it aesthetic too! As an #interiordesign major and a daughter & granddaughter of interior designers, @jayliegeyer had a clear vision for her freshman #dormroom & we had so much fun helping her execute the design. We’re currently working on more projects with college students & can’t wait to share some sneak peeks with you! *all items available thru @ibbdesign #dormroomdesign #dormroomdecor #dormtour #tcudorm #dormdesign #instantbasictobeautiful #dorminspo #getIBBd #teamIBB #IBBDesign ♬ MILLION DOLLAR BABY (VHS) – Tommy Richman

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In 2011, an enterprising college student looking to bring a bit more style to student housing joined forces with her mother, the cofounder of a creative agency, to found Dormify, an online dorm-decor retailer that leveraged peer-to-peer marketing via trunk shows, YouTube haul videos and more. In 2015, Target introduced its Made For U College Styler, a digital tool that used quiz results and data scraped from customers’ social-media profiles to put together shoppable, sample dorm rooms. The venerable home-design blog Apartment Therapy introduced Dorm Therapy in 2023 as a destination for everything from shopping checklists and DIY guides to dorm room tours and shoppable roundups. And no ceiling has yet emerged for the market. Despite the expected impact of a “demographic cliff” that began emerging after the Great Recession led to a dip in the American birth rate, the number of incoming college students increases year over year. Spending on furnishing and outfitting dorm rooms, meanwhile, nearly doubled between 2023 and 2024, from $6.7 billion to more than $12 billion.

What groups like DormRoomMamas highlight is the emotion that undergirds this consumer phenomenon. College is generally a time when young adults individuate from their families and hometowns, but a lot of mothers (and it is, for the most part, mothers driving this trend) are putting a level of expense and effort into setting up their kids’ dorm rooms that, inadvertently or otherwise, reinforces rather than loosens the proverbial apron strings. These women approach dorm room makeover season with the set-jawed precision of a military campaign: Their mission is to replicate a sense of home in an 8’ by 12’ box, and they’ll be damned if they’re caught flat-footed, without enough under-bed storage and cheery framed YOU GOT THIS! prints to get the job done.

(Lock Stock/Getty Images) A mom helps her daughter decorate her college apartment.

It’s never actually made explicit, but a running joke in these TikToks is that the students don’t necessarily seem to be requesting the excess. One clip that has racked up more than a million views begins with pink-and-blue bubble text that warns “Mom, don’t go overboard with my dorm decor” over a POV shot of a mostly bare room. Images shuffle in time with anticipatory piano notes and a countdown clock: dorm-supply checklists, half-assembled furniture and snapshots of the mother and daughter through the years. It ends in the passenger seat of a car, presumably about to depart for campus, homing in on a young woman scrolling her phone and eventually offering a tight, distracted smile to the camera. Guess who didn’t listen to the plea about not going overboard?

And, like so much else in an influencer-driven economy, the bar for what’s considered essential to college-dorm life gets higher each fall. In some cases, literally: the use of multiple bed risers to create increasing amounts of storage space has seen beds rise to Princess-and-the-Pea heights, often requiring one separate piece of furniture that allows students to make contact with their mattresses and another to match the exaggerated height. But the sense of competing with other parents to best prepare their new students is pervasive. One mother who began trading texts with the mothers of her son’s soon-to-be roommates detailed the experience in Business Insider, writing that the text circle “turned what should be a rite of passage into something that feels a little more like a wedding registry.” As the other parents “started filling their Amazon carts with things I never even considered buying my sons,” and the roommates themselves offered little input, author Tanya Bricking Leach found herself rethinking who those ever-rising expectations are for.

DORM SWEET DORM: Mom of three goes viral for turning college dorms into dream rooms. pic.twitter.com/oZhaIdL5o1

— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) August 26, 2025

I get it: With two years before my own kid starts college, I’m aware that one of the less embarrassing ways to express that visceral blend of love and loss is with tangible, purpose-built products that are both evidence of care and undeniable improvements on past eras of dorm living. (What I would have given for a laundry backpack.) And there are plenty of dorm room inhabitants who are thrilled with the results of their dorm room mama makeovers. But it seems like a couple of things can get lost in focusing on the aesthetic and consumable aspects of the home-to-school transition.

One is individuality. Social media’s category of viral dorm room inspo is heavily female, each room’s jaw-dropping glow-up seeming to share the same components — matching headboards, desks repurposed as vanity tables with Hollywood-style makeup mirrors and more. DormRoomMamas’ gender-specific mood boards and themes (bows! ruffles! wineglasses! Yes, wineglasses!) have an identikit femininity, and the focus on marketing a rigid binary to parents can feel like a rerun of how retailers sell parents on preparing a nursery, right down to accepting that each well-considered element in the room is going to get puked on sooner or later.

The other thing lost in aggressively parent-led dorm design is that college itself is a place where attempting and maybe not always succeeding and carrying on anyway is the whole point. It’s hard not to consider what messages rising expectations for dorm prep send to young people in their first days of real independence. “You should never have to experience unfamiliarity,” and “You will always have what you need exactly when you need it” don’t seem like the best takeaways for this stage of young adulthood. As someone who sobbed openly at my kid’s middle-school graduation, I’ve already learned that there’s no skating by the existential overwhelm of raising a child in a time when you can only hope to one day let them go by choice. But anticipating every possible instance of vulnerability my child might face and pre-emptively padding it with stuff won’t do anything to dull a primal, instinctual vigilance.

Of course, there is plenty of space between a dorm room with a sparseness that spotlights the unfamiliarity of a new environment and one that’s filled to bursting with the material evidence of parental involvement. And what the media amplifies in the flurry of pieces on back-to-school hyperconsumption isn’t necessarily the norm. (For the record, my son’s answer to the question “Would you let me plan the design of your hypothetical dorm room?” was a polite but very firm “No.”) Shopping away the uncertainty of the near future has become the unquestioned norm, but being honest about what can and can’t be guaranteed with a picture-perfect new home seems like an important lesson.

The post Parents, don’t make your kid’s dorm room about you appeared first on Salon.com.

That was normal. Teenagers and college students flooded the workforce when school let out. And smart managers made room for us. The good ones even let us stay on through the year, working around our class schedules.

That model? Almost extinct.

Now, it seems that many employers want full-time “entry-level” employees with open availability, long-term commitment and adult-level reliability. But without the pay or benefits to match. It’s no surprise that the first thing to go was flexibility. What student can swing a 40-hour workweek when classes resume in August?

Often restaurants and the hospitality industry, for example, still carve out space for young workers, thanks to shift-based chaos and constant turnover. But mall jobs? Grocery gigs? Local one-offs that used to train the neighborhood teens every June? Gone. Or automated. Or consolidated under scheduling apps and algorithms that often ignore anyone who can't commit year-round or full-time.

It’s not that Gen Z doesn’t want to work. Many do. Many need to. But in a job market shaped by corporate efficiency and post-pandemic labor tightening, summer jobs no longer make economic sense for businesses or, increasingly, for the students themselves.

Instead, summer is now a strategic season. Unpaid internships. Carefully curated volunteering. Freelance side hustles. “Building a brand.” Students are still hustling, but frequently without a paycheck, a schedule or the foundational experience that comes from wrangling customers, clocking in and learning on the fly.

So when you see a teen or college kid bagging groceries or waiting tables this summer, give them some credit. They’re not just working — they’re preserving a vintage tradition.

Like landlines. Or cargo shorts. Or jobs that end when school starts.

The post Where did summer jobs go? appeared first on Salon.com.

The simmering Hulu young adult drama, created by Meaghan Oppenheimer, is a sexed-up romp that centers on the excruciatingly toxic on-and-off relationship between college students Lucy (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen (Jackson White). Stephen is the manifestation of every single evil ex-boyfriend you or your best friend has had, and Lucy can't get enough. Everything Stephen touches ruins Lucy's life, creating conflict in her future academic success and her friendships with her best friends, Pippa (Sonia Mena) and Bree (Cat Missal). The sophomore season of the Hulu hit has built a cult following with Gen-Zers online, who tend to curse out Stephen and Lucy's toxic tendencies.

In the show's second season, the "Tell Me Lies" friend group continues to deal with highly sensitive issues like emotional abuse, drunk-driving deaths, disturbing student-teacher affairs and burgeoning sexualities, while also tackling college drug-induced date rape. The harrowing storyline is a reality of the late aughts in the U.S. when college campuses across the country reckoned with a growing number of sexual assaults, and continue to do so. Cases like Standard University student Brock Turner's conviction for sexually assaulting a woman and ultimately serving six months in jail and three years of probation made national news. His sentence was decried by countless people — including his victim — as too lenient. That's just one case out of numerous reported campus sexual assaults, but so many assaults on campus also go unreported.

In the second episode of the new season, Lucy's friend Pippa is assaulted by Chris (Jacob Rodriguez), the brother of Lucy's best friend Lydia (Natalee Linez), at a party. Diana (Alicia Crowder) discovers Pippa passed out and undressed, with a guilt-ridden Chris beside her, after unlocking a door. As the season unfolds, Pippa struggles to cope with the assault, her breakup with former quarterback Wrigley (Spencer House), and her growing attraction to Diana.

In an interview with Salon, Mena talks of the heavy episode and the ways she hopes to see her character Pippa grow into her power. 

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How do you feel like late ‘00s college culture affects the way the characters act and the essence of this YA show?

It affects everything, just because you're kind of a product of everything you consume and the culture. I mean everything from the way that they use social media — the Blackberry, the Facebook albums. In prepping the show, I watched a lot of "The Hills" and "Vanderpump Rules." That show stressed me. With makeup and stuff and with costumes, we're constantly sending references back and forth and pulling Pinterest mood boards of, like, Britney [Spears]. I wasn't in college in 2008, obviously, but I remember what it was like to be a girl and to be a person of color in a very white environment. And I think drawing on all of that, to me, it's just really interesting because Pippa is so aspirational as a person. I think I spent a lot of time thinking about what she would be looking at and then looking at the gaps between Paris Hilton versus herself. It leaves a lot of striving to do, which is fun.

What about a character like Pippa interested you from the jump?

She's a weird one. I think I can relate. I imagine a lot of people can relate to feeling like you don't know who you are at that age. And she's got a lot of confidence, but a lot of self-loathing, and a lot of embarrassing, like, "I couldn't be enough, so I'll just be something that people want to be, because who would want to actually look at me?" Which I can totally relate to. So I found that really interesting . . . all of the different characters that she puts on and moves that she makes trying to just win. She's very ambitious in a weird way, yeah, even though, like, what is she striving for? I don't know.

I’m really interested in this show’s ability to make each relationship that the girls have kind of radioactive. In the case of Stephen and Lucy's turbulent relationship, how does it affect the larger female friendship with Lucy, Bre and Pippa this season?

It's that classic thing when your friend has a terrible boyfriend and initially you're like, he sucks. And then you're like, if I keep telling you how s**t he is, you won't talk to me anymore. So you kind of start to walk on eggshells. I think the show is about people who are just awful at communicating, and so it's a lot of unsaid things. And like wanting to take care of your friend, also being pissed at your friend for giving the time of day to somebody who has not f****d her over, but f****d me over. It kind of colors everything. I think that was a big thing for Meaghan [Oppenheimer], how their relationship permeates.

Pippa starts off the season being really alienated by her classmates because of her breakup with Wrigley. There are a lot of lonely teenage characters in this show, but do you think Pippa is the most insular?

Obviously, I identify with her the most. I'm like, yeah, Pippa has it the hardest. But I do think it was a really rough storyline in the season. We as the show don't really spend a lot of time with her by herself, so we mostly see her, you know, throughout the season — choosing not to share what happened with her, choosing not to tell anyone what's going on. And so we see that she's extremely alone.

Then the character is sexually assaulted by Lucy’s best friend’s brother, Chris, and it changes everything for Pippa. What was it like getting in her headspace?

It's pretty dark. I felt a lot of responsibility to both take care of the character, Pippa — which I can't do, which is sort of like a weird thing — and also to take care of the storyline. It's interesting the way that it happens in the show because it does sort of fade into the background in a weird way, in that it's not discussed, and there's just so much happening in the show. It was quite nerve-wracking to feel hope that everything that she's going through is still reading, because, like I said, it's a show of people who are horrible communicators.

So it's a scene where we're all just like, "Let's get ready to go out!" But you want to have both things reading, right? Because that is also true to life. People go through horrible things — especially things like assault at that age, or any age — and you're like, "I'm good," and you go live your life. 

Pippa spends a lot of time avoiding what happened to her and only taking solace with Lucy, Diana and sometimes Wrigley — how do those relationships anchor her?

Lucy is trying to show up for Pippa and not doing a very good job. Obviously, I think Diana is probably giving Pippa what she would need, but she doesn't want it, which is an interesting thing to think about. Later on, we see what they're like together, and there is a moment when Pippa realizes, "Wait, you see me?" It kind of reminds me of those friendships you have where you're both in just a really dark place and you don't really talk about it. You just sort of spend time together. I found that to be really sweet as well. It's maybe the least lonely [relationship], even though they're not talking about what's going on.

Another thing that I tried to build in a lot — because she doesn't do anything really with what happens, she just kind of holds on to it — was really trying to build through this season that there are so many opportunities where she could and where she almost might [do something about it] and then she keeps choosing not to. So it felt active, like it felt like someone who's continually making this choice and isn't a passive person.

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In the time frame of the show, college campus assaults were a festering issue on campuses across the U.S. Why did this story feel like it was important to address? Why was it the right storyline for Pippa this season?

That was something that [Oppenheimer] came to me with and they're like, "This is what we've come up with." One thing that we talked about that I really appreciated — I'm very afraid of watching myself, so I actually haven't seen most of the show — was I liked the way that we find out. We see what happens, but we don't actually see the event.  I think not knowing exactly allows people to fill in what makes the most sense or is most compelling to them. Also, I think it gives Pippa, and women in general, a sense of privacy that I really appreciated.

There is a scene in episode seven where Lucy co-opts Pippa’s assault as her own as everyone talks about another allegation made against Pippa's assaulter. How do you think Pippa actually felt at that moment? 

It's unimaginable. Usually when things like that happen — unless you're a very reactive person — people usually shut down and are just like, "What the f**k is going on?" It usually takes a while for things to settle. What's really exciting, I guess, about the way that Pippa's arc is in season two is that we don't get to see a lot of catharsis really at all. We don't get to see a lot of action. We don't get to see a lot of private moments with her, but they've loaded her up so much. There's this assault that happens. There's Lucy co-opting it. There's Wrigley outing her. There's the death of Drew. She's truly operating at 150%.

I think if we come back for a season three, it'll be so interesting to see what she does with that. Because they've given her this huge gift of just the most someone could be going through and we see later that she's kind of OK. How does she get there? It's a show about people who make really crazy decisions to get there, and so I think it's going to be so fascinating to see how they build that for her. Because also we're only with them for this semester. A lot of times these things take a minute. Trauma and all of that s**t — It's very mysterious. It works through you, and then it decides to suddenly be like, "Hi!"

This unexpected friendship and romantic relationship with Diana also unfolds as Pippa is dealing with some pretty heavy trauma. What's it like for Pippa to navigate these feelings for Diana, her sexuality, and also try to grapple with what she’s just been through?

It's really confusing. Regardless of who you are, it's always scary and confusing and exciting, but just weird. Pippa's queerness is something that we're seeing her discover. I don't necessarily think she was in high school, maybe super aware of how queer she was. Then if you add it back to 2008 and they go to a fratty school — it wasn't cool to be gay back then. So I think adding that adds just another layer of she's not someone who's like, "f**k it. I don't care. I am who I am." That's another layer of just anxiety and fear.

Why doesn't she want to go there with Diana? Is it because Diana has seen Pippa through this really traumatic experience?

I think that becomes an interesting basis of their friendship because Diana — initially, before the assault — is like "I don't actually care what you think, because I hate you, because it f****d over my friend." So she feels really free to be herself because she doesn't care. Then that sort of creates an interesting base for them because it's one of the few people that Pippa is repeatedly herself with when she doesn't really want that intimacy, but it's just built in.

By the end of the season, she also rekindles her relationship with Wrigley. Is their relationship one of the healthier ones on the show? And if so, why do you think that is?

There's not a lot of manipulation or trying to get anything out of each other, which is groundbreaking for "Tell Me Lies." It's not great what he does. That scene where he comes and is so sad after the bar is really heartbreaking, but it's also kind of crazy. He totally f***s her over and then he comes to apologize and she spends the whole scene being like, "I'm sorry. It's okay. I got you, I'm gonna fix it."

Ultimately, what joyful experience would you like for Pippa to have next season?

I'm just really excited to see Pippa come into her power. Her way to that will be probably quite messy but I mean, people deal with assault in so many different ways. They can disappear or charge forward. I think it'll be really interesting because she really is at a point now where she's got to start doing something because she is gonna be OK. I feel like she's about to make some wild decisions, and I'm pretty curious and excited to see what those are. 

All eight episodes of "Tell Me Lies" season two are available to stream on Hulu.

The post “Tell Me Lies” star Sonia Mena dives into their character’s darkness and power appeared first on Salon.com.

“I enrolled in Glendale Community College [after high school] and took classes there,” he said. “I wasn’t happy with how the college curriculum was laid out. I felt stuck and was not happy with my decision to go to college.”

On the last day of the semester, he toured the Arizona Automotive Institute. In August, he graduated from its year-long Diesel Heavy Truck Program.

“[I] fell in love with the hands-on aspect of learning how semi-trucks and heavy equipment work,” he said. “So ultimately, I made the decision to follow my passion.”

Trade, vocational programs booming

According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the number of students enrolled in community colleges with a vocational focus continues to climb. In the last year, enrollment has increased more than 17%. From 2021 to 2024, more than 129,000 students enrolled in a community college with vocational programs. 

The mounting cost of traditional college could be a reason. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, an on-campus student's average price for a public, four-year college degree was $27,100 for the 2022-2023 school year. At the end of four years, the same student will have paid $108,400 for their education if there haven’t been any changes to tuition, fees, room, board or other costs. Tuition increases by about 8% per year, according to Finaid.

Trade and vocational programs vary widely in cost. The National Center for Education Statistics says the average tuition at two-year institutions ranges from $4,000 per year at public institutions to $19,500 at private ones. The Arizona Automotive Institute program cost Forst $24,500. His parents put $10,000 towards his education, and rather than take out traditional student loans, Forst now pays $732 every month, interest-free, to AAI. He says he has about $5,000 left until his loan is paid off.

“I didn’t receive any scholarships or grants along the way, so I am paying completely out of pocket,” he says. “My scenario is not the same as everyone's. A lot of my classmates had help with grants and some had help from other sources to pay for their school.”

Trades offer job security, less debt 

In McAllen, Texas, Juan Castillo, 25, attended South Texas Vocational Technical Institute, where he completed the HVAC program in August. The cost was about $14,000, but his financial aid covered half of that. 

“Money was never a factor,” he said. “I knew what I wanted to do. The great thing about this school was how they bought all the necessary tools for the HVAC [program]. What’s left of my student loan is $7,000, which I’ve been paying off with every paycheck.”

While trades might not seem glamorous, they’re almost always in demand. Think about what’s around your home and community: air conditioning, lights, plumbing, appliances, and even how your home was built in the first place. Those jobs are always going to be needed. 

While not fully recession-proof, trade jobs tend to have fewer layoffs than other industries. You’re four times more likely to face a layoff in a high-paying profession like tech or business than you are in building, manufacturing and similar jobs, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Earning a lot of money, especially after racking up a lot of college debt, sounds enticing. But according to Crunchbase, more than 191,000 workers faced layoffs from tech companies in 2023 and into 2024. Many prefer the job security that trades give them.

While Forst and Castillo tried traditional college before enrolling in trade schools, Castillo wishes he had entered his program much sooner.

“If there's one thing I would do differently, it would be going to trade school after high school,” he said. “I dropped out of community college due to not knowing what I wanted out of life and here I am today, enjoying what I do. I would say that you should try new things and take the risk.”

The post Gen Z heads to trade school as college costs rise appeared first on Salon.com.

Today, the college finance landscape is like one of those video games where there is peril at every turn in the form of murderous interest rates and a precipitous middle area where folks are too poor to pay full price but too rich for aid. Tuition prices seem like they added on extra zeroes just for fun. Everybody needs some cheat codes to optimize their education dollars — especially if cost is the make-or-break factor in going to school.

College is one of the biggest investments we can make in time, energy and money — and saving for it can help soften the blow. The most common mistake people make, including my family, is waiting too long. "Starting early, even with small contributions, can make a big difference in the amount accumulated by the time college rolls around," says Sonia Lewis, "The Student Loan Doctor," who helps people navigate their educational debt.

Lewis notes the other challenges people face: underestimating costs and not considering room and board, books, fees and other expenses; not having an emergency savings account; and disregarding loans, grants and other ways to pay for college.

Where to start

Every student and their family should fill out the FAFSA form — even if you think you make too much to qualify for aid. "You don't know what you're going to be eligible for," says Lynette Khalfani-Cox, aka "The Money Coach," a finance writer and expert on college savings. “Even though the rollout was a hot mess,” the FAFSA's simpler format and SAI (student aid index) has changed how financial need is calculated, allowing millions more families to be eligible for aid, she adds.

Planning your 529

One common savings vehicle favored by both Khalfani-Cox and Lewis is the 529 investment plan, which offers tax-deductible withdrawals for qualified educational expenses. It's also portable, meaning that if it turns out your kid is, say, a coding genius and will skip school and go straight to work, you can use those funds for a different family member — or even yourself.

"Many states offer additional incentives, such as matching contributions or tax credits," Lewis says. If you use the money for something other than education, you will face a tax penalty. You can also lose money in a 529, as in any other retirement account, and this can be mitigated by starting early to optimize compounding interest, calculating risk tolerance according to the child's age and working with a knowledgeable advisor who can help you through volatile times.

Perhaps your child has a custodial account to which birthday checks or allowance goes. Know that these are among the most disadvantageous places to put college savings because they weigh more in the need formula. So, if there's $5,000 in the child's savings account, that would account for 20% of assets. That same amount in a 529 account would only be assessed at 5.6%, Khalfani-Cox explains. Retirement accounts are not counted in this formula, but be careful about raiding them to pay for college. You have fewer working years than your child does to recoup those costs.

Some people keep a ROTH IRA to pay for college. This makes sense because you can withdraw principal, tax-free at any time and use it for other purposes. Again, you should work with a financial planner to lessen risk, especially as you come closer to paying that first tuition bill.

4 ways to get a free or less expensive education

The best way to save money on college is to not spend it at all. Khalfani-Cox advises families to start looking for free money and opportunities before taking out loans. Here are some avenues she suggests exploring:

• Be free: Some prestigious institutions don't charge a dime for tuition, such as Cooper Union in New York and the Curtis Institute for Music in Philadelphia. If your family income is low enough to qualify, most of the Ivy Leagues offer a free ride for accepted students. The military branches don't charge for valuable training, and many community colleges are a fraction of the cost (if not free), as are some colleges overseas. If you're working for an employer who will pay all or part of your education, or if you're in a public service job with tuition reimbursement, this might be an excellent way to avoid those costs.
• Do the two-step: Many students start their college careers at a community or online college, then transfer credits and finish at a four-year college.
• Collapse time: AP classes in high school earn college credit, and if you can complete your degree in three years, you'll save on an entire year's room and board and other fees. Some colleges also offer discounts for summer classes and special three-year programs.
• Rack up scholarships: Nearly every corporation offers scholarships, especially for families of employees. The College Board has a comprehensive list. The key here is to plan early and understand qualifications and deadlines.

When you still need loans

We have seen the havoc wreaked when people don't understand their repayment terms and pay their loan amount several times over in interest. Loan forgiveness is currently a wobbly political subject. "I don't think that you should take out any loans with the anticipation or the expectation that it will absolutely be forgiven," Khalfani-Cox says. Be realistic about what your terms are — and make sure you understand conditions for repayment, deferment and forgiveness.

Finally, it's important to think about the return on your investment. "Borrowing determination should equal career compensation," Lewis says. "A wise college investment is to only borrow what the field you're pursuing is estimated to pay you in return."

The post A cheat sheet for saving on college costs appeared first on Salon.com.

I had just dropped my daughter off for her first year of college. Finally, it hit me: This was her gig, not mine.

For years I had gone to every preschool, elementary, middle school and high school meeting. At every symposium on learning through play, every panel on teenage angst, every forum on how to build grit, I was there, all ears and taking copious notes along the way.

In an instant, I witnessed the culmination of all those years. Twenty Amazon boxes deposited in my daughter's dorm room and left scattered on the twin XL bed, my final deliverance. The mattress was wrapped in a strange institutional rubbery plastic sheath, but that wouldn't defeat me. I had carefully researched everything that would turn this environment into collegiate cottagecore: the right pastel teal LED desk lamp (with a bendy arm and three color settings), the fan that claimed to fill a hot shoebox of a room with soothing white noise and cooling breeze, the must-have shower caps for curly-hair that if washed too often wound up resembling something the Vikings wove into sweaters.

These were the details I self-medicated with during the lead-up to freshman move-in day. I moaned and groaned about the ridiculous minutiae with all my mom friends, but secretly I loved every video about 12 ways to decorate with fairy lights. My daughter wasn't into this decor stuff, but I was — and what better way to escape the harsh reality of my one and only child flying the coop and the harsh light it shined on every other aspect of my life?

I told my daughter — who was a bit anxious about her new adventure (where were those notes on grit?) — that college was like an island in a sea of being home. Did I honestly think so? Not really, but maybe it would minimize the hugeness of the moment, plus I liked thinking about it that way. It was better, at least, than thinking about the alternative. Being home would now be an island in the rest of her new and independent existence.

The fact of the matter is I'm a bit jealous. It began with the tours of verdant campuses, huffing and puffing (why is every college built on a hill?) as the sound of young a cappella voices echoed in my brain. I truly loved college. I mean, college was stressful, sometimes depressing and often a bit of a slog, but it was also the only time of my life when I was encouraged, nay mandated, to be a philosopher. And people actually wanted to listen.

Now, I'm an empty nester with an as-yet unpublished novel in a marriage where we can finish each other's sentences. Not in that soulmate-y, romantic kind of way but rather in that we're-repeating-ourselves-a-lot kind of way.

Yet I still have philosophies. I do, and one is called "the rule of threes." You have a first impression, then an opposite second impression, then deeper knowledge just gets you back to your first impression. My husband thinks it's cool, but he's heard it a hundred times (and by the way, he thinks he's the one who invented it).

When my daughter was a newborn, I remember meeting parents with one-year-olds and thinking, "Whoa, a year old. That's big. Getting to that. For a mother. I can't imagine."

Now that my daughter's 18, I think, "Whoa, 18. That's big. Getting to that. For a mother. I'm old."

As a copywriter at an ad agency, I had a creative director who used to declare in his British accent — which gave everything added import and eloquence — that every ad campaign needed an "organizing principle" to connect the many print ads, radio spots and TV commercials. The phrase marked a very bright and shiny time in my early 30s when I was a career girl on the move, living single downtown and dating. It was a time when every presentation sparkled with the possibility of a glamorous TV shoot, and every first dinner with a guy could wind up with me wearing a pouffy white dress.

Today, I went on a walk with a friend. She turned to me and said, "I get how you're feeling. Even if she just came home and shut the door to her room, your daughter was the organizing principle of your day."

That expression. It had evolved from something that inspired me to try and create work that wowed an industry and won awards to words that represented my life as a perhaps too fully-invested parent.

In that moment, however, I realized it had been good to have these organizing principles in my life. What would be the next set of goals and aspirations around which I would wrap my day? Suddenly, it was all up to me.

Plus, my daughter has discussed grad school. Whoa, grad school. That's big. Getting to that. For a mother. Are grad students too old to decorate with fairy lights?

The post A funny thing happened on the way to the rest of my life appeared first on Salon.com.

Created for students, by students, Zot Bites is a notification system that invites people to collect leftover food after a catered event on campus: Those who opt in receive a text alerting them where and when the food is available. The program is the work of the UC system’s Global Food Initiative fellows, part of an effort to address both the problem of food waste from UC campuses and an ever-growing concern among students across the country: food insecurity. Zot Bites was inspired by similar initiatives in California, such as the Food 4 UCSF Students app and Cal State Fullerton’s Titan Bites, to tackle an emerging crisis one meal at a time.

During the fall 2020 semester, the first full term during the pandemic, nearly 30 percent of students at four-year colleges and universities were struggling with food insecurity, according to a study conducted by Temple University. For those at two-year colleges, the number was even higher — with more than 40 percent of students reporting that their access to adequate food was limited or unreliable. The crisis may now be even worse, as the government has ended the pandemic-era SNAP benefits that helped an estimated 3 million students by loosening the eligibility requirements. As a result, many students will lose the monthly food allowances that they have relied on for years — and some have argued that reverting back to the old requirements may deter prospective students from enrolling at all. 

Food insecurity — defined as the lack of consistent access to enough healthy food — is often under-examined and under-addressed in the population of college students. The cause behind this crisis is complex, involving factors like increased education costs, rising living expenses and economic shifts in the college environment. Mirroring the significant disparities in food access more broadly, first-generation students, students from low-income households, students of color and disabled students are at higher risk of becoming food insecure than their classmates.

The impacts extend far beyond the lack of access to nutritious food. To make their food dollars stretch, students often choose cheaper processed foods like boxed and packaged items and overconsumption of added sugars, trans fats and refined grains means food-insecure students are at higher risk of developing obesity. They can also face worsened health outcomes such as poor psychosocial health and higher risk of chronic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. This all profoundly impacts their ability to succeed: A study at one university found that food-insecure students had an average GPA of 3.33, while students who do not have to worry about food had a 3.51 average. Given the combination of the effects of this crisis, affected students often fail classes, delay graduation or even drop out of college.

There is some irony here. College environments are often associated with excess food, boasting all-you-can-eat dining halls, fast food joints and sometimes a slew of on-campus restaurants. In fact, campuses throw out more than 22 million pounds of food each year — despite knowing that some of their very own students are struggling with access to nutritious meals. Dining halls typically make a surplus of food to avoid a shortage and often throw it out at the end of the day. More often than not, food is presented buffet-style; dining plans are often paid by swipe-in rather than by weight and sometimes allow unlimited entry. With the abundance of options, students, who may not be thinking about portion size, often take more than they consume. The average college student generates 142 pounds of food waste per year, much of which will go on to rot in landfills and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

The majority of food wasted in the U.S. is perfectly healthy and safe to consume, a fact that has led some organizations to adopt programs for food rescue: redirecting edible food that would otherwise go to waste (from places such as restaurants, grocery stores and dining facilities) to local programs that serve people in need. One such initiative, New York-based City Harvest, has rescued more than 1 billion pounds of food since it helped pioneer food rescue 40 years ago, donating it all to partner food pantries and soup kitchens.

A similar model can help address the food-access disparity on campus. At colleges and universities around the country — including Rutgers, South Dakota State, Utah State, University of West Georgia and Purchase College, among many others — surplus food and produce from the dining hall is donated to on-campus food pantries, often through the school chapter of the Food Recovery Network. These pantries provide a safe haven for students and help foster food dignity: According to a recent study, access to a food pantry “directly improved students’ perceived health, reduced the number of depressive symptoms they experienced, increased their sleep sufficiency and boosted food security.” In the past decade, the number of on-campus pantries has leaped from 80 to 800.

Students have built other creative mutual-aid models to distribute excess food within their own campus communities. Along with dining hall donations and Zot Bites-style leftover-food alerts, the Rams Against Hunger initiative at Colorado State University hosts events where students can donate meal-swipes they won’t be using. Twice a week, student diners at the University of California, Los Angeles, are able to take uneaten food after the dining halls close through the Bruin Dine program.

“Bruin Dine was created by UCLA alum Joshua DeAnda after he witnessed the dining halls throw away pans of untouched food daily,” explained Megan Cai, Bruin Dine’s vice president. “Since then, our organization and events continue to be entirely student-led and student-run. If a student is unable to afford groceries or cannot feed themselves for any reason, they can rely on our events.” During the 2022-23 school year, the initiative recovered approximately 9,300 pounds of food and served nearly 5,000 diners.

Sometimes, food rescued on one campus can feed students on another where food insecurity is a larger concern. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the food-rescue organization Food For Free collects leftover food from dining halls at Harvard and Tufts Universities — packaged into single-serving meals by student volunteers — and delivers to local community colleges through a program called Heats-N-Eats. Institutions like MassBay Community College in Wellesley gladly accept these deliveries, as food insecurity plagues over half of the school’s population. The system has been going strong since 2016. “We know that rates of food insecurity among college students are extremely high,” said Molly Hansen, senior program manager for Heats–N–Eats. “It can be a beautiful full-circle impact of food waste reduction at a college and creating a new food distribution channel to meet those in need at another local school.”

In addition to starting conversations with their college’s Basic Needs Office or Food Resource Center, students who want to take action can get in touch with national organizations working on the issue of college hunger. Joining (or founding) a campus Food Recovery Network chapter can be a way to direct food recovered from dining halls back to peers in need. Swipe Out Hunger supports anti-hunger work at more than 600 colleges; schools in the Swipe Out network have access to swipe-drive toolkits and other resources and are eligible for grants to fund initiatives like food rescue.

“Even one just one donated and consumed meal can mean the difference between passing a test or leaving higher education,” said Jaime Hansen, Swipe Out Hunger’s executive director. “The next wave of students shouldn’t have to choose between higher education goals and their basic needs.”

The post Colleges have high rates of food insecurity and food waste. Students are helping address both appeared first on Salon.com.

Then, a nurse at her high school’s health clinic in Oakland, California, explained the legal landscape of her new four-year home in Texas — where abortion is now fully banned.

Vital watched TikTok videos of protesters harassing women outside clinics in other states. She realized her newfound freedoms would come at the expense of another. That’s when she added one more task to her off-to-college checklist: get a long-acting, reliable form of birth control before leaving California.

“I don’t want to go out there and not know anything, not know where to go, because I’m in a new state. So I’m trying to be as prepared as I can before I leave,” she said.

The change is a huge culture shock for Vital and some of her classmates, who for the past four years at Oakland Technical High School have had access to their own health clinic on campus.

The “TechniClinic” is a bright-purple building across from the football field and bleachers. The school’s bulldog mascot is painted near the door. On-site, students can get free, confidential birth control consults and screenings for sexually transmitted infections and be back at their desks for fourth-period math.

This summer, nurses at the Oakland clinic have formalized the “senior send-off” appointment, during which they counsel students about their legal rights and medical options before they leave for college.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, clinic staffers realized students of color could be disproportionately affected by changes in state abortion laws. Many of them, like Vital, were choosing to go to historically Black colleges and universities in Southern states, where bans and limits on the procedure are more common.

“Many students here are just totally floored when I tell them that these laws are different in the states that they’re going to,” said Arin Kramer, a family nurse practitioner at the TechniClinic. Like many adults, “they can’t believe that they can’t get an abortion in this country.”

Kramer has been writing prescriptions for a year’s supply of contraceptive pills or patches, which students can pick up all at once.

Under California law, students can get contraception for free, without having to tell their parents or use a parent’s insurance plan. Students can pick up the prescription at the school clinic, or Kramer can call it in to a pharmacy near the student’s home.

During her own “senior send-off” appointment, Vital told nurse Kramer she was in the market for something even more reliable than pills.

“Because I’m very forgetful. Even if I set an alarm or write it down, it will still slip my mind,” Vital said.

She wanted a long-term contraceptive, like an IUD or a hormonal implant that would last for years and require no upkeep.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics have made these options their top recommendation for adolescents after research from both groups showed they were safe and highly effective at preventing teen pregnancy.

So at Oakland Tech and other school-based health clinics run by nonprofit La Clínica de La Raza, Kramer has trained other nurse practitioners how to insert these devices — so students can get them the same day they ask for them.

After reviewing the options, Vital decided she wanted a contraceptive implant. During their discussion, Kramer used clear, direct terms, even dropping in phrases students use themselves.

“Who are you talking to these days?” Kramer asked Vital, which is teen-speak for: Who are you having sex with?

“Same person,” Vital replied.

“You guys have been off and on, off and on,” Kramer said. “How do you feel going forward?”

“Well, now they’re on because he’s going to Texas, too,” Vital revealed with a smile. “He’s going with me.”

The clinic staff started preparing the exam room, so Vital could get the implant right away. Kramer turned on some calming music on her phone, washed her hands and had Vital lie down and raise her left arm over her head. Physician assistant Andrea Marquez came in to hold Vital’s other hand and offer words of encouragement.

“I’m going to count to three and then you’ll feel a little pinch,” Kramer said, before giving Vital a shot of numbing medication in her tricep area. Then she coached her through a series of deep breaths before inserting the tiny rod under the skin of her upper arm.

The whole procedure took less than 10 minutes, and Vital walked out with a birth control method that will last her up to five years. Now, she said, she can focus on her education and fully experience the new freedoms of college.

“I’m really excited for the growing up part of it,” she said.

Meanwhile, Kramer headed back to her office. She had a list of other patients to check up on, many headed to states that ban abortion. As they pack their books and bed linens for their new dorm rooms, she’s reminding them to also pack a year’s supply of contraception, too.

University-based health centers also are reconsidering their clinical protocols in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe.

In 2020, only 35% of colleges offered on-site IUD insertion and 43% offered contraceptive implant insertion, according to a survey by the American College Health Association.

That group now recommends college clinics do routine pregnancy screenings to identify pregnancies as early as possible, to give students more time to consider their options, and to have legal counsel on call to advise clinicians on allowable practices.

Attorneys might even help advise university health centers about how to have conversations with patients, especially in states like Texas, where local law forbids clinicians from “aiding and abetting” patients who seek abortion care. These new threats — of prosecution or pulled funding — have complicated clinicians’ communication with their collegiate patients.

“So I’m going to be vague with my wording, purposefully,” said Yolanda Nicholson, director of clinical education at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University health center, and chair for the coalition of Historically Black Colleges and Universities of the American College Health Association.

Nicholson thinks the concept of the senior send-off appointment in the student’s home state is a great one, given that college health centers in Texas and throughout the South have had to adjust their educational approach with students to be more general and “maybe not as specific or targeted as we would have previously done,” to stay aligned with local laws.

Out-of-state students are often shocked to discover they don’t have access to the same services as they do at home, she said.

This article is from a partnership that includes KQED, NPR, and KFF Health News.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

The post Californians headed to HBCUs in the South prepare for college under abortion bans appeared first on Salon.com.

But then I stopped myself. We were in Ohio. I’d forgotten that my youngest daughter’s hunt for the perfect college would be very different. I added, “Well, I mean, when we’re visiting states where you’re allowed to exist.”

My youngest daughter is a straight-A student, a cheerleader. Math is a challenge, but she’s in honors English and History. She’s smart, funny and grounded. She also happens to be transgender.

And so the United States of America, for her, is the Eighteen States of America, along with Washington, D.C.— the places where she is sufficiently protected by law and we feel she is likely to remain so throughout her education. (This list could expand or contract, depending on many factors.)

If she attended college in Florida, for example, she’d face laws recently signed by Governor DeSantis. As of July 1, anyone over the age of 18 on a public college campus who uses a bathroom that doesn’t match the gender marker on their original birth certificate risks arrest. I can’t imagine how humiliating and potentially dangerous this would be.

In 20 states, trans minors have lost access to medical experts in trans health; state court injunctions are in place for continuation of care in only four of those states, for the moment. And these laws are now expanding to adults.

As of late February, the Washington Post reported that five states have introduced legislation that takes away access to trans healthcare for adults. In Oklahoma, one bill prohibits trans care in facilities accepting public funding and another targets doctors who care for trans patients up to age 21; Kansas and Mississippi bills ban gender-affirming healthcare up to age 21. South Carolina and Florida bills take trans care away from those on Medicaid. In Florida, colleges and universities can’t spend state funds on gender-affirming care for students. The state attorney general of Missouri announced in March that their restrictions on trans healthcare for minors would extend to people of all ages.  

In states like Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Alabama, Oklahoma and Tennessee, new laws prohibit trans people from using bathrooms that match their gender in public schools, although some are being challenged in court. If my daughter were an education major, she wouldn’t be able to do her student teaching hours in public schools without facing restrictive bathroom laws. And in Florida, she would have no right to be called Miss instead of Mr. in the classroom. The law states that schools must adopt the policy that “a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait” and “it is false” to use a pronoun other than the sex on one’s original birth certificate.

With over 500 anti-trans bills introduced this year alone, we are watching a wildfire take over this country. My daughter’s America has become apocalyptic — safe states scattered wide and broken up by vast stretches of lands that are openly hostile to her existence.

We want our daughter to attend a university in a state where she is fully protected in housing, employment, health care and health insurance; where she feels safe to use the bathroom and where she’s respected by people who have the common decency to use the right pronouns. 

But we’re also holding our breath.

In the fall of 2024, she’ll be applying to colleges at the exact same time that America is electing our next president. If that president is a far-right Republican, the trans community would likely be targeted at the federal level as well. Donald Trump, for example, has pledged to push multiple policies aimed at dismantling trans rights, including, as The Hill reports, “enacting a federal law that recognizes only two genders.” Legal precedent has built up in favor of trans rights for decades, but with Roe v. Wade, we saw a Supreme Court that was willing to take away the right to bodily autonomy and justices who are willing to upend decades of legal precedent. Under a Republican president, trans people would be poised to have even more of their basic fundamental civil rights taken away. And so my daughter will not only be applying to colleges within the Eighteen States of America, but also to colleges in Canada, where she could possibly start the process of citizenship if she needs to. 

For undergraduate and graduate degrees, my older three children had the entire country to choose from. It belonged to them. This land is my land, this land is your land. Their sister’s country would go from those scattered safe havens to a land she had to give up, a country that was her birthright. What a blow to the American Dream, and all because of unbridled bigotry.

For now, she studies for her final exams, pays special attention to her French test, while trying to imagine her future — in our broken America.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this essay stated Maine has a Republican governor. Gov. Janet Mills is a Democrat.

The post For my transgender daughter, there are only 18 States of America appeared first on Salon.com.

This was almost 20 years ago, when going to college felt like the answer to everything. Today, I have been a college professor myself for more than 10 years. And with the mountain of uncertainty and chaos we log onto every day, including the student debt crisis, I am questioning whether I want my own child to go to college. The LA Times recently reported on food influencers‘ ability to make and break restaurants, with some charging up to $10,000 for an Instagram post about a single meal. That’s the entirety of many people’s student loan forgiveness in one reel. Should I have my daughter start an influencing career now instead? 

The streets sucked the life out of me by my mid-20s. By 2005, most of my remaining friends were in one of two places —the penitentiary or deep in one of the city’s many cemeteries. I was lost. I didn’t have any real direction outside of guys like Bo pushing me toward school. 

“Listen to me, D,” Bo said. “You still young. F**k the streets, man. Don’t settle for no job. I gotta job. Man, job’s not the way — you have no power. But college — college people run everything!” 

“I’ll never touch another drug again,” I responded. “That’s on everything I love. I need to do something.” 

That wasn’t my first time thinking about or attempting to go to college. I had been accepted to a number of universities coming out of high school and even attended briefly, but dropped out due to depression, culture shock and a lack of guidance. 

“My man from up top went to a community college. Two years of school and he makes like $190k a year, boy!” Bo continued. “That’s better than dope money, because you can keep it!”

My eyes lit up at the thought of making a small fortune, having an office and a daily agenda. But clearly there were questions I should have asked at that moment that I did not: 

• Why didn’t Bo go to college, if it’s so simple and so lucrative?
• Why didn’t “his man” have a name?
• What community college did he attend?
• What did he major in?
• Who paid him that kind of money and what did he do? 

I was young and green in all matters dealing with being a productive citizen in a legal, structured society. Street smarts and living like an outlaw had been the foundation of my existence. I had never really known a person from my neighborhood who had graduated from college. Maybe they existed and were making so much money they didn’t have time to come back and mentor a guy like me. Maybe the people who used education as a way to escape poverty figured out the secrets of financial stability and weren’t hungry to share them. But if these imaginary people did it, then maybe I could do it too. And if I’m being 100 percent honest, once Bo mentioned that earning potential, I could not see myself doing anything else with my life. I left that corner, hopped on the nearest computer and scoured the Internet, looking for schools to attend.

I enrolled in the University of Baltimore, a small liberal arts college in the middle of the city, as a criminal justice major. I figured that I would have an edge because I’d spent some years as a criminal, and I believed in justice for us. 

My advisor, a sharp woman with an aggressive smile, welcomed me with open arms. 

“You are young and in search of education,” she told me, patting my shoulder a bit too hard. “They could use you on the force!”

“Force?” I answered, clearly confused.

“Yes, young man. The city needs more educated Black police officers.”

This woman clearly had no idea who she was talking to, so I didn’t hold anything against her. But in my first criminal justice class, I found myself in a room full of cops — or at least, men and women who looked like cops, dressed like cops and smelled like cops. I dropped that class and my other criminal justice course and scheduled another meeting with the advisor.

“I’m not the cop type,” I told her. “I need out of this major.”

I replaced the cop classes with philosophy courses. Lucky for me I had also enrolled in a political history class, taught by a brilliant professor named Dr. Eric Singer. 

Dr. Singer, who was finishing his Ph.D. at the time, was young and energetic, and he had a way of explaining history as if it was a colorful soap opera full of heroes and villains and people who acted as both throughout different parts of their lives. After his first lecture, I knew I would go on to take every class this guy ever taught. Two weeks after starting his political history class, I switched my major to history, even though the research skills I was learning had quickly taught me that history majors weren’t being handed entry level positions that paid $190,000, or even $90,000, and maybe not even $60,000. But suddenly the money didn’t seem as important. In that first semester, the information I consumed started feeling way better than the mountains of cash Bo had initially sold me on. I learned about Black Americans during Reconstruction, poor drug policy, and how toxic Ronald Reagan really had been. And it was fun. There were important parts of me missing before I attended university — gaping holes in my personality, spirit, understanding of the world and ability to dream that were being filled with my college education. And I would love for my daughter to have the same feeling one day.  

I dropped out of my first try at college when I was 18 because I attended a predominantly white school, where my fellow students came from money and generations of advanced education. Culturally, I stuck out like a sixth toe. I was 25 when I got to UB. And my peers, especially the students I connected with the most, were first-generation college students and a little older, just like me. We didn’t bond at frat parties or during drinking games. Our connections were rooted in our takes on society as we worked full-time while trying to graduate. We weren’t first-generation college students because our parents were ignorant or didn’t understand the power of education. We were all from poor families, and college for the poor is still a relatively new phenomenon in America. 

The Higher Education Act of 1965 was birthed out of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. One of its primary initiatives was to provide low-income students with the resources needed to attend college. Prior to the Higher Education Act, college was either a rich person’s game or designed for people who could work to pay their way through. Johnson’s policy opened up higher education for the rest of us. Before the cost of living and tuition skyrocketed, higher education for all was a beautiful idea; however, I’m sure Johnson didn’t know he was planting the seeds that would eventually grow into the $1.75 trillion-dollar forest of student debt we currently reside in. 

“You look good, boy, you taking care of yourself?” Bo said to me at our alma mater Dunbar High’s homecoming game the year after I finished undergrad. The two of us, draped in the school’s maroon colors, watched the game from the top of the bleachers. “You good?”

“I’m good man, just looking for a job. I want to use this degree,” I said. “Where your homeboy work, the one that gets $190k a year?” 

“Ah, man, I didn’t tell you?” Bo chuckled. “Dude is in federal prison. He was a scammer. He never went to school!” 

My first job out of college ended up being as a long-term substitute teacher at a Baltimore City public high school. On the first day, I made my way past blunt guts and crumpled up pieces of paper lining the floor around cracked-in-half desks and shells of machines that used to be computers piled in the hall right in front of my classroom. It was the most chaotic place I had ever stepped foot in — even more out of control than my own days as a Baltimore City public school student. 

The school eventually hired me as a staff member because of the teacher shortage, along with my ability to connect with students and mentor them in the way I needed guidance back when I was their age. The school also promised to promote me to a leadership position after I got the necessary certifications. I enrolled in Johns Hopkins University to study education at the graduate level with the hopes of earning a Master’s and then a Ph.D. I dreamed of opening my own school one day to provide a different experience than the ones my students and I had. And while studying at Hopkins, I became addicted to creative writing in a memoir class and switched plans again.

I do want my child to have the same kinds of educational experiences and revelations. I want her to have the opportunity to try things and abandon them, then revisit them and excel beyond her wildest dreams. I never would have found my passion for storytelling and my writing career if I hadn’t stumbled into that criminal justice class I hated or gotten lost in the history class I loved. That history class sparked my interest in teaching, which led me into the school system and then to Hopkins to study education, where my love for memoir sent me back to the University of Baltimore to get my MFA. That’s where I met my first real mentor in the writing world, Marion Winik, who made me feel like I could have a career with words. Without Singer and Winik, I would not be a professor at the University of Baltimore today.

I needed college for exposure and camaraderie. But more importantly, I needed it for connections. Poor people normally aren’t able to excel inside mainstream systems because they don’t have the right connections. They can’t call an uncle or a friend of their dad’s who owns a company and is willing to look past their inexperience and offer a competitive starting salary. College has been the gateway to connections for many people like me. But do my wife and I need to spend a quarter of a million dollars to buy our daughter those kinds of connections? After all, we already made them.  

My child is my child, so my network will be her network. She won’t need a crafty teacher to trick her into loving books, because at two years old she already demands to be read to every day. She attends an elite early learning center and will probably spend her formative years in a sheltered private school — nothing like the schools I attended. She already has a schedule, a tight curriculum and parents who challenge her consistently. So if she doesn’t want to be a lawyer, a doctor, a nurse, or any profession that actually requires a degree, should we assume she will automatically go?

Should we push her to visit campuses and design her adolescence around being a competitive applicant, then spend what will likely be hundreds of thousands of dollars for her to sit in on lectures she can also watch on YouTube, read books she can check out for free from the public library, and gain access to professional networks and connections my wife and I have already established?

Maybe she will have her own reasons to want to go to college besides feeling like she has to in order to succeed. Or maybe the thing that will make her feel the way I did in history class will be sharing with her followers how good it feels to dip a gourmet grilled cheese in locally-grown tomato soup. She’s good at that already, and I hear it pays well. 

The post College was necessary for me. Will my own child need it like I did? appeared first on Salon.com.

You’ve compared tuition. Reviewed on-campus housing costs. Even digested student meal plan prices.

But have you thought about how much your son’s or daughter’s dream school will charge for health coverage?

You might be in for a shock.

Hawley Montgomery-Downs was thrilled when daughter Bryn Tronco earned a scholarship that pays half the $63,000 annual tuition at the University of Southern California. But just as school was starting in August, she was stunned to receive a bill from USC for $3,000 to cover both a student health insurance premium and a fee that allows students to access on-campus clinics and other services. At home in West Virginia, she had paid nothing for her daughter’s health insurance, through the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, which serves lower- and middle-class families.

Montgomery-Downs, who lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, was especially upset that USC not only billed her for health insurance but a $1,050 annual health fee. “It would be nice for her to go to the student health center, but with buying insurance to go to a primary care provider, it feels like I am paying twice,” she said.

Mandatory medical insurance and health service fees are common at colleges as a condition of enrollment, said Stephen Beckley, a Fort Collins, Colorado, health and benefits consultant to colleges. While the health fee can help reduce students’ insurance premiums, parents may feel as though they are paying double. “That’s a big conundrum for our field,” he said.

For parents, these big payments might come as a surprise, making a barely affordable education feel even less so. After all, students can economize by choosing a skimpy meal plan and cooking their own dinners or buying used textbooks, but there is no way around the mandatory health fees.

The costs vary by school but often can amount to several thousand dollars a year — costs that health care advocates say should be carefully reviewed by parents and students to ensure they understand their options while also meeting university requirements.

Students can seek a waiver to university health insurance by showing they have their own insurance or are covered by their parent’s insurance that meets specific university criteria. Schools typically want to see that a student’s own insurance covers local doctors and hospitals for little out-of-pocket cost. Student health fees, however, generally can’t be waived.

USC, a private college, charges $2,273 a year for its Aetna student health insurance plan. The average for public colleges is $2,712 and $3,540 at private universities, according to a 2022 survey by Beckley’s firm, Hodgkins Beckley & Lyon.

Other prominent colleges charge much more, such as $6,768 at Stanford and $4,163 at Dartmouth College.

The University of Montana charges $4,700, and most services at its school health clinic are fully covered by its health plan. The University of Colorado charges $3,976.

At Harvard, students buying the school’s insurance pay $4,080 annually and $1,304 for the student health fee.

The easiest solution to avoid these charges would be for students to stay on a parent’s health policy — which the Affordable Care Act allows until they turn 26. But that works only if the student’s parent has a policy that meets the school’s comprehensive requirements and offers in-network coverage where the college is located.

Otherwise, parents may want to shop among ACA marketplace plans to see if they can find a bargain. If their incomes are low enough, students can sometimes enroll in Medicaid or a CHIP plan in states where they go to school. But this strategy has limitations as well. Students must meet state residency requirements where they go to school, and parents cannot claim them as a dependent on tax returns. CHIP coverage also expires once a student turns 19.

Schools that charge a student health fee and require insurance coverage say the funding helps cover services at campus health clinics, which otherwise would cost students hundreds of dollars a year or more.

The USC student health fee — which covers primary and preventive health services — also helps the school pay for services not typically covered by insurance, such as monitoring disease outbreaks on campus.

Dr. Sarah Van Orman, chief health officer of USC Student Health, noted that the student health fee provides funding for additional mental health providers on campus and a team focused on sexual assault prevention and education — services available to students without any copayments. She said these additions are vital because, even with insurance, students could face challenges finding private counselors to provide timely help and, if they do, students would have cost-sharing expenses.

“The student health fee supports our public health infrastructure on campus,” Van Orman said.

Because students can get primary health services on campus at the student health center, fewer of them seek care paid for by the insurance, she said, and that helps keep the monthly premium on the Aetna student health insurance plan lower. “These things are working together and are not at all duplicative,” Van Orman said.

USC’s student health insurance has an in-network annual deductible of $450 and a $20 copay for physician office visits. It also provides comprehensive services nationwide, so students are covered when at school and back at home — even if that’s across the country. About half the USC students buy the Aetna student insurance, according to Van Orman.

Other colleges have a different strategy. For instance, George Washington University‘s mandatory health insurance covers health center services on campus. Unless they get a waiver, undergraduates must enroll in the student health insurance plan — costing $2,700 a year — unless they prove they have another insurance plan that meets the school’s criteria. The health plan premium allows students to get many free services at the student health center, including medical office visits, some prescriptions, and routine screenings for sexually transmitted infections.

Beckley said college rules vary on whether they allow students to choose insurance plans other than what the school offers.

USC allows students to buy an alternative insurance policy through their parents’ plan or on the ACA marketplace as long as it meets the school’s requirements that include comprehensive health coverage in the Los Angeles area and covering preventive care with zero cost sharing. Out-of-state Medicaid or CHIP plans don’t meet the university’s criteria because they don’t have provider networks for routine care in California.

That was unwelcome news to Montgomery-Downs.

“This is not something we budgeted for,” she said of USC’s health costs.

Montgomery-Downs, a former associate professor at West Virginia University who now works as a freelance editor, said she wasn’t sure what to do when she got the USC health bill. She had thought Bryn, who turned 19 last week, would be covered initially because her CHIP plan provided coverage for treatment at emergency rooms and urgent care centers out of state. And Montgomery-Downs wanted to make sure her daughter had health coverage on summer and holiday breaks when home.

Unsure of which marketplace coverage options would meet the school’s rules and deadlines, she decided to go with the Aetna student plan USC offered.

A look at marketplace options on Covered California shows the $2,200 for the USC Aetna student plan is a competitive rate. The lowest-priced comparable PPO plan offered by California Blue Cross that would provide Bryn a national network of providers costs about $2,400 a year factoring in a government subsidy based on their family income. PPOs provide some coverage for out-of-network doctors and hospitals.

Montgomery-Downs gets her coverage on the marketplace and said she will shop for a marketplace plan for Bryn for the next school year. She said she wishes they had been aware of all the health costs at the time of admission rather than just before classes began.

“It’s all nightmarish, even for someone with the privilege of time and some understanding of these bureaucracies — higher education and medical insurance,” Montgomery-Downs said.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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“On the one hand, it was nice that the school wanted to have us share our culture,” Gensaw told me during an interview. “On the other, it wasn’t always respectful. Some kids would make fun of the Native American dancers, mimicking war cries and calling out ‘chief.'”

“The media would be invited to come cover the dancing as part of their Thanksgiving coverage, and it felt like we were a spectacle,” he continued. “Other cultural groups and issues would sometimes be presented in school assemblies, in the gym, where teachers monitored student behavior. I thought, why didn’t we get to have that? We needed more respect for sharing our culture.” James Gensaw’s work in California’s public high schools as a Yurok language teacher and mentor to Native American students is part of a reckoning with equity and justice in schools.

Yurok language in schools

Tribal officials say Gensaw is one of 16 advanced-level Yurok language-keepers alive today. An enrolled Yurok tribal member, Gensaw is also part of the tribe’s Yurok Language Program, which is at the forefront of efforts to keep the Yurok language alive.

Today, the Yurok language is offered as an elective at four high schools in far northern California. The classes meet language instruction requirements for admission to University of California and California State University systems.

Yurok language classes are also offered in local Head Start preschool programs as well as in some K-8 schools when there is teacher availability, and at the College of the Redwoods, the regional community college. To date, eight high school seniors have been awarded California’s State Seal of Biliteracy in Yurok, a prestigious accomplishment that signifies commitment to and competency in the language.

When I started researching the effects of Yurok language access on young people in 2016, there were approximately 12 advanced-level speakers, according to the Yurok Language Program. The 16 advanced-level speakers in 2022 represent a growing speaker base and they are something to celebrate. Despite colonization and attempts to eradicate the Yurok language by interrupting the transfer of language from parents to their children, Yurok speakers are still here.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, boarding schools in the United States operated as spaces for what I refer to as “culturecide” — the killing of culture — in my latest book, “Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States.” Students in both the United States and Mexico were often made to attend schools where they were beaten for speaking Indigenous languages. Now, new generations are being encouraged to sign up to study the same language many of their grandparents and great-grandparents were forced to forget.

Language as resistance

The Yurok Tribe made the decision years ago to prioritize growing the number of Yurok speakers and as part of that, to teach Yurok to anyone who wanted to learn. They have many online resources that are open for all. Victoria Carlson is the Yurok Language Program Manager and a language-keeper herself. She is teaching Yurok to her children as a first language, and she drives long distances to teach the language at schools throughout Humboldt and Del Norte counties.

“When we speak Yurok, we are saying that we are still here,” Carson said in an interview with me, echoing a sentiment that many Yurok students relayed to me as well. “Speaking our language is a form of resisting all things that have been done to our people.”

The students in Mr. Gensaw’s classes are majority, but not exclusively, Native American. Through my research I learned that there are white students who sign up out of interest or because nothing else fit in their schedule. There are Asian American students who wish that Hmong or Mandarin was a language option, but they take Yurok since it is the most unique language choice available. And there are Latinx students who already are bilingual in English and Spanish and who want to challenge themselves linguistically.

In my book and related publications, I document how access to Indigenous languages in school benefits different groups of students in a range of ways. Heritage-speakers — those who have family members who speak the language — get to shine in the classroom as people with authority over the content, something that many Native American students struggle with in other classes. White students have their eyes opened to Native presence that is sorely missing when they study the Gold Rush, Spanish missionaries in California, or other standard topics of K-12 education that are taught from a colonizing perspective. And students from non-heritage minority backgrounds report an increased interest in their own identities. They often go to elders to learn some of their own family languages after being inspired that such knowledge is worth being proud of.

Bringing languages like Yurok into schools that are still, as historian Donald Yacovone points out, dominated by white supremacist content, does not in and of itself undo the effects of colonization. Getting rid of curricula that teach the Doctrine of Discovery — the notion that colonizers “discovered” the Americas and had a legal right to it — is a long-term process. But placing Native American languages into public schools both affirms the validity of Indigenous cultural knowledge and also asserts the contemporary existence of Native people at the same time. It is a place to start.

One step at a time

In my experience, as a researcher on education policy and democracy, I have found that putting more culturally diverse courses in school is something that better prepares young people to learn how to interact in healthy ways with people who are different from themselves.

Gensaw, the Yurok language teacher, is at the forefront of this. One year when he was again asked if he could bring the students to dance around Thanksgiving time, he said yes, but not on the quad. He requested a school assembly space where student behavior could be monitored. The school said yes, and the students danced without being demeaned by their peers. These steps are just the beginning of what it takes to undo the effects of colonization.

Mneesha Gellman, Associate Professor of Political Science, Emerson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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We can always count on the iconic “I Will Love You” singer to come to offer aid without being asked. Parton, who notably helped fund the Moderna vaccine during COVID’s peak, has a new initiative to make people’s lives easier.

Parton’s theme park, Dollywood, announced Wednesday that it will cover full tuition, fees and book costs for all employees pursuing higher education. The tuition coverage plan, called “Herschend’s GROW U.,” is available to seasonal, part-time and full-time employees on their very first day of work. It will officially launch on Feb. 24.

The reasons for joining our team keep growing!https://t.co/z1r3oftlme https://t.co/zWHVAtSIQQ

— Dollywood Parks & Resorts (@Dollywood) February 9, 2022

“Herschend’s GROW U. is not only a significant and transformational investment in our employee’s growth but also our love culture in action,” said Andrew Wexler, CEO of Herschend Enterprises, in a recent press release. 

RELATED: With “Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings,” you know ’tis the season for feel-good culture

The plan will offer more than 100 fully funded diploma, degree and certificate programs through Guild’s Learning Marketplace, including business administration and leadership, culinary, finance, technology and marketing. Partial funding of up to $5,250 per year will be provided for additional programs in hospitality, engineering, human resources and art design.

While Parton’s generosity has been proven time and again, this move demonstrates how in tune she is to the difficulties facing would-be students. Most can’t afford the astronomical cost of college, where accruing massive debt on student loans for decades is expected these days, and for new students or those wanting to pivot from their current careers, the cost are often prohibitive. 

This isn’t the first time the theme park is giving back to its employees. Dollywood’s detailed “benefits & perks” plan touts complimentary ticket passes, discounted meals, low-cost healthcare and plenty more.  

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“Whether it’s to pursue a new dream or advance their career with us, we care about our employees’ personal and professional growth, because we believe that their futures should be grown with love, not loans,” Wexler added. “Our team members’ success is our success – and that’s why we’re thrilled to make this benefit available to all, regardless of their role in the company and without the burden of debt.”

More stories you might like:

• Dolly Parton invested “I Will Always Love You” royalties to honor Whitney Houston’s legacy
• What every woman in music owes Dolly Parton
• Dolly Parton on Elvis and Willie Nelson: “I still play like a child”

The post Can’t afford college? Go work for Dollywood, which is offering the greatest gift of all: tuition appeared first on Salon.com.

“I felt the impact right away,” said Manriquez, 21.

After learning of UC-Davis’ free counseling services, Manriquez showed up at the student health center and lined up an emergency Zoom session the same day. He was referred to other resources within days and eventually settled into weekly group therapy.

That was September 2020. Manriquez, now president of the student union, considers himself lucky. It can take up to a month to get a counseling appointment, he said, and that’s “at a school that’s trying really hard to make services available.”

Across the country, college students are seeking mental health therapy on campus in droves, part of a 15-year upswing that has spiked during the pandemic. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in December issued a rare public health advisory noting the increasing number of suicide attempts by young people.

Colleges and universities are struggling to keep up with the demand for mental health services. Amid a nationwide shortage of mental health professionals, they are competing with hospital systems, private practices, and the burgeoning telehealth industry to recruit and retain counselors. Too often, campus officials say, they lose.

At UC-Davis, Dr. Cory Vu, an associate vice chancellor, said the campus is competing with eight other UC system universities, 23 California State universities, and multiple other health systems and practices as it tries to add 10 counselors to its roster of 34.

“Every college campus is looking for counselors, but so is every other health entity, public and private,” he said.

According to data compiled by KFF, more than 129 million Americans live in areas with a documented shortage of mental health care professionals. Roughly 25,000 psychiatrists were working in the U.S. in 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The KFF data indicates that more than 6,500 additional psychiatrists are needed to eliminate the shortfall.

On campuses, years of public awareness campaigns have led to more students examining their mental health and trying to access school services. “That’s a very good thing,” said Jamie Davidson, associate vice president for student wellness at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. The problem is “we don’t have enough staff to deal with everyone who needs help.”

About three years ago, administrators at the University of Southern California decided to respond aggressively to the skyrocketing demand for student mental health services. Since then, “we’ve gone from 30 mental health counselors to 65,” said Dr. Sarah Van Orman, the university’s chief medical officer for student health.

The result? “We’re still overwhelmed,” Van Orman said.

Van Orman, past president of the American College Health Association, said the severity of college students’ distress is rising. More and more students come in with “active suicidal ideation, who are in crisis, with such severe distress that they are not functioning,” Van Orman said. For counselors, “this is like working in a psychiatric ER.”

As a result, wait times routinely stretch into weeks for students with nonemergency needs like help dealing with class-related stress or the transition to college. Professionals at campus counseling centers, meanwhile, have seen both their workloads and the serious nature of individual cases rise dramatically, prompting some to seek employment elsewhere.

“This is an epidemic in its own right,” Van Orman said, “and it has exploded over the last two years to the point that it is not manageable for many of our campuses — and, ultimately, our students.”

The pandemic has exacerbated the challenges students face, said UNLV’s Davidson. Lockdown measures leave them feeling isolated and disconnected, unable to establish crucial relationships and develop the sense of self that normally comes with campus life. They also lose out on professional opportunities like internships and fall behind on self-care like going to the gym.

A study by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Pennsylvania State University found that among 43,000 students who sought help last fall at 137 campus counseling centers, 72% said the pandemic had negatively affected their mental health. An online survey of 33,000 students last fall found that half of them “screened positive for depression and/or anxiety,” according to Boston University researcher Sarah Ketchen Lipson.

Even before the pandemic, university counseling center staff members were overwhelmed, Northwestern University staff psychiatrist Bettina Bohle-Frankel wrote in a recent letter to The New York Times. “Now, overburdened, underpaid and burned out, many therapists are leaving college counseling centers for less stressful work and better pay. Many are doing so to protect their own mental health.”

On average, a counselor position at UC-Davis requiring a master’s or doctorate degree pays $150,000 a year in salary and benefits, but compensation can vary widely based on experience, Vu said. Even at that rate, Vu said, “we sometimes cannot compete with Kaiser [Permanente], other hospital settings, or private practice.”

Tatyana Foltz, a licensed clinical social worker in San Jose, California, spent three years as a mental health services case manager at Santa Clara University. “I absolutely enjoyed working with the college students — they’re intelligent, dynamic, and complex, and they are working things out,” Foltz said. But she left the university a few years ago, lured by the flexibility of private practice and frustrated by a campus system that Foltz felt did not reflect the diverse needs of its students.

Foltz returned to campus in December to support Santa Clara students as they protested what they said were inadequate services on campus, including insufficient numbers of diverse counselors representing Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ communities and other people of color. The protests followed the deaths of three students during the fall quarter, two by suicide.

“It should not be taking student deaths to get us better mental health resources,” said junior Megan Wu, one of the rally’s organizers. After the rally, the chair of Santa Clara’s board of trustees pledged several million dollars in new funding for campus counseling.

Replacing therapists who leave universities is difficult, Davidson said. UNLV currently has funding for eight new counselors, but the salaries it can offer are limiting in a competitive hiring market.

Universities are getting creative in their attempts to spread mental health resources around on their campuses, however. UC-Davis embeds counselors in student-utilized groups like the Cross-Cultural Center and the LGBTQIA Resource Center. Stanford University’s Bridge Peer Counseling Center offers anonymous counseling 24/7 to students who are more comfortable speaking with a trained fellow student.

Mental health services that can be accessed online or by phone, which many schools did not offer before the pandemic, may become a lifeline for colleges and universities. Students often prefer remote to on-site counseling, Davidson said, and campuses likely will begin offering their counselors the option to work remotely as well — something that private practices and some medical systems have done for years.

“You have to work hard and also smart,” Foltz said. “You need numbers, but you also need the right mix of counselors. There is a constant need to have culturally competent staff members on a university campus.”

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

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Loughlin’s demeanor and actions have diverged substantially from fellow indicted actress Felicity Huffman. Federal prosecutors said that Huffman, as well as 12 of the other parents indicted in the scandal, would plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest service mail fraud. Prosecutors said one coach would also plead guilty, and that dates for their formal pleas in court have not yet been set.

In a lengthy statement announcing her guilty plea, Huffman attempted to take full responsibility for paying $15,000 to facilitate cheating on her daughter’s SAT test.

“I am in full acceptance of my guilt, and with deep regret and shame over what I have done, I accept full responsibility for my actions and will accept the consequences that stem from those actions,” Huffman wrote in a statement. “I am ashamed of the pain I have caused my daughter, my family, my friends, my colleagues and the educational community. I want to apologize to them and, especially, I want to apologize to the students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices to support their children and do so honestly.”

She added that her daughter did not know about the bribe or the cheating on her test, in which prosecutors say a test proctor corrected her answers after she took it. Ultimately, Huffman said, she “betrayed” her daughter with her actions. “This transgression toward her and the public I will carry for the rest of my life. My desire to help my daughter is no excuse to break the law or engage in dishonesty,” Huffman’s statement concluded.

For Loughlin, Giannulli and 14 other parents who had been holding out on whether or not they will plead guilty, prosecutors brought new charges of money laundering against them on Tuesday. In total, 50 people have been charged in the sweeping investigation, in which wealthy parents are accused of paying orchestrator William Singer to doctor test scores or to bribe athletic coaches to recruit their children as student athletes under false pretenses.

It appears that prosecutors have drummed up more charges as they are hoping to raise pressure for plea deals, though some parents have vowed to fight. Lawyers for Silicon Valley investor William McGlashan, who was indicted alongside other parents Tuesday, say they “look forward to presenting his side of the story.” McGlashan is accused of paying Singer $50,000 for test cheating and for agreeing to pay another $250,000 to get his son into the University of Southern California as a football recruit. Prosecutors say, according to the New York Times, that McGlashan did not end up following through with the latter bribe. “The prosecutor’s case against Mr. McGlashan is deeply flawed and ignores important exculpatory facts,” one of his lawyers said.

In another development, according to a report from People, Loughlin’s daughter, Instagram influencer and YouTuber Olivia Jade, was at least somewhat aware of the alleged illegal machinations to gain her admission into USC. Olivia, who admitted her indifference to college in one of her YouTube videos, reportedly “blames her parents for everything,” an unnamed source told People. “She would have never gone along with it if she thought this would happen. Her thing is that she trusted her parents.”

“Olivia is still distraught and embarrassed. She hasn’t been home much,” the source added. “She is very angry with her parents. She just wants to figure out how she can rebuild her brand.”

While Olivia Jade and her sister Isabella have reportedly not been attending classes since the scandal broke, USC is not letting them withdraw. “USC has placed holds on the accounts of students who may be associated with the alleged admissions scheme,” the college said in a statement to US Weekly. “This prevents the students from registering for classes (until they have agreed to participate in the review of their case), withdrawing from the university, or acquiring transcripts while their cases are under review. Among many factors investigators could consider in reviewing each case are any developments in the criminal cases, including plea deals by parents. Following these case-by-case reviews, we will take the proper action related to each student’s status, up to revoking admission or expulsion.”

In the meantime, Olivia Jade has been able to move forward with her beauty trademark application, following issues with a lack of punctuation. As the source told People, “She was honest about that she didn’t really care about school. But her business, she was always very serious about. She most certainly will find a way to start over again. She isn’t someone that gives up easily.”

The post Lori Loughlin faces new charge, Felicity Huffman apologizes in college admissions scam case appeared first on Salon.com.

However, racism remains an issue within the United States services’ officer corps — the academies of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Coast Guard, and U.S. Merchant Marine, according to The Associated Press.

In short, all military academy cadets wearing the same uniforms still do not receive equal treatment. Speaking to the AP, multiple service members have recounted their experiences at military academies across the United States. Carlton Shelley II, a football recruit who entered West Point Academy in 2009, detailed the stark difference in his treatment on and off the field.

“On the field, he described the team as ‘a brotherhood,’ where his skin color never impacted how he was treated,” AP News reports. “But off the field, he said, he and other Black classmates too often were treated like the stereotype of the angry Black man – an experience that brought him to tears at the time.”

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“I was repeatedly in trouble or being corrected for infractions that were not actually infractions,” Shelley said. “It was a very deliberate choice to dig and to push on certain individuals compared with other cadets — white cadets.”

Shelley also expressed concern about the graduation rate among Black cadets. While he noted that academies have improved where racial diversity is concerned, he also suggested that there is still room for improvement when it comes to retaining and supporting students of color. Ranking inequalities also remain issues for service members of color.

Per the Associated Press:

Only 6% of nominations to the Army, Air Force and Naval academies made by the current members of Congress went to Black candidates, even though 15% of the population aged 18 to 24 is Black, according to a report on the service academies released in March by the Connecticut Veterans’ Legal Center. Eight percent of congressional nominations went to Hispanic students, though they make up 22% of young adults, the report said. …

According to the data provided to the AP, graduation rates between racial groups at the Naval and Coast Guard academies continued to show gaps. At the Naval Academy, for example, Black midshipmen still had the lowest graduation rate of any racial group at 74%, compared to the 2020 school-wide rate of 87%. And the Black graduation rate of 65% at the Coast Guard Academy between 2011 and 2020 lagged about 20 percentage points behind other racial groups.

Xavier Bruce, a 1999 graduate of Air Force Academy, also shed light on the challenges he faced amid his rise to lieutenant colonel in his 24 years of service. “We just feel it, we feel the energy behind it, and it just eats us away,” he said.

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• Famous ex-neo-Nazi shifts focus: America is becoming “the skinhead’s dream of the 1990s”
• What exactly has gone wrong in America? Frat boys, light beer or Skynyrd? IDK

The post New report reveals the deep-rooted racism plaguing U.S. military academies appeared first on Salon.com.

“The state government wants to know what political ideologies and beliefs university professors hold, and it’s giving the green light for students to secretly record lessons to later use what instructors say against them,” the Herald’s editorial board explains. “All of that is being done in the name of free speech. Such twisted logic and targeting academia have been hallmarks of anti-democratic regimes. Now, they have also become the MO of Florida Republicans who passed a bill that requires public universities and colleges to survey students, faculty and staff, to ensure ‘intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity’ on campuses.”

The Herald’s editorial board notes the type of arguments that Florida Republicans have used in favor of the new law. According to the law’s supporters, college campuses in Florida have become “socialism factories” designed for “indoctrination” of students.

The Herald’s editorial board writes, “Don’t worry, bill sponsors say, these surveys won’t be used against college professors or to threaten their employment, even though there’s nothing in House Bill 233 that guarantees that, or that survey responses will remain anonymous. University budget cuts might be looming if our supreme leaders — er — lawmakers don’t like what the survey results show, bill sponsor Sen. Ray Rodrigues and DeSantis suggested Tuesday.”

According to the Herald’s editorial board, the HB 233 is designed to do the exact opposite of promoting “intellectual diversity” on college campuses.

“College professors have got to be seeing the writing on the wall,” the Herald’s editorial board writes. “We wouldn’t be surprised if they fudged their survey responses out of fear of retaliation or that their institution will lose funding for being deemed too liberal. That’s especially true for professors teaching liberal-arts degrees that conservatives consider a waste of time and were trying to make ineligible for full Bright Futures scholarship funding. Luckily, that proposal failed during this year’s legislative session after student backlash.”

History repeats itself, and the Herald’s editorial board recalls that during the 1950s, college professors were a favorite target of far-right Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his Cold War witch hunt.

“University professors were a target of the post-war Red Scare,” the Herald’s editorial board notes. “In 1949, the National Council for American Education published a booklet called ‘Red-Ucators at Harvard,’ listing professors deemed subversive. In 1954, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee sought to flush out communists among educators and questioned professors accused of having ties to the Communist Party. Intellectual diversity should be something every university strives for, but we know the results of government officials policing educators: paranoia, persecution and the opposite of the free speech Republicans say they want to protect.”

The post Miami Herald blasts Florida GOP over McCarthy-esque college politics survey appeared first on Salon.com.

Throughout the years, each rising generation of young people in the U.S. have faced challenges unique to the times. There have been wars, health epidemics, political, civil, and economic unrest – all a natural byproduct of a rapidly developing society that almost always prioritized innovation over stability.

The wounds from the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Occupy Wall Street movement  are still quite fresh. The misfortune of college graduates and young people at that time swirled perfectly to combine some of the most dire job markets since the Great Depression, with outrageous student loan debt and interest rates that had gone unchecked for far too long.

The impact of those years, and the egregious lack of accountability for the figures that caused such a crisis reverberate today in many sectors: home ownership, access to healthcare, retirement, and the long held american notion of upward mobility. It was a given in the U.S. that children would go on to live better, or at least more financially fruitful lives than their parents. If there’s anything recent statistics have shown, it’s that this is no longer the norm, and has not been for quite some time.

How am I, a fresh college graduate, supposed to look to the future with the expectation that anything will improve? I, like the class of 2008, am inheriting a job market that is lean at best and more specifically into media – an industry that has continually cannibalized itself in order to remain “profitable”?

Not only that, beyond defining my worth within the capitalistic notion of productivity, how am i supposed to expect things to improve on a social level? I would argue that many of the events that led to the recession were perfectly aligned with how the pandemic was able to grip this nation with little effort. It is a concentration of power within a group of people who would rather make a profit than acknowledge the humanity of the people they exploit to get where they are.

And while there are parallels between then and now, there are also some stark differences. Maybe those are what I look forward to for hope.

You’ve likely seen the viral stories of fast-food chains and other restaurants posting angry signs on their doors and windows, touting the argument that unemployment benefits and stimulus checks have made people lazy. North Carolina’s David Rouzer recently tweeted a photo of a Hardee’s “closed” sign due to lack of employees as supposed proof of this.

This is what happens when you extend unemployment benefits for too long and add a $1400 stimulus payment to it.  Right when employers need workers to fully open back up, few can be found. pic.twitter.com/DlrQp8Vzw1

— Rep. David Rouzer (@RepDavidRouzer) April 30, 2021

However Eater details how this is a reductionist and blatantly untrue way to construe the issue.

The reality is that throughout the pandemic, food-service workers were forced to witness the disregard their employers had for their well-being. Line cooks were notoriously the group of workers with the highest mortality rates, working long tiring hours in cramped quarters for low wages . . . without healthcare. The current minimum wage can’t make up for possibly losing your life and endangering the lives of one’s dependents.

Throughout my senior year of college, the majority of which has been spent in my childhood bedroom in the house that my parents own, I feel like I have observed a shift in perspective towards labor that will not be limited to the service industry.

Speaking with friends and classmates, and even just seeing trends on social media, it has become clear to me that this new generation is not willing to repeat the cycle that millennials were forced to endure. It begins with the acknowledgment that the status quo was never satisfying for anyone. There is no reason why a fast food employee should not be able to make a living wage. I would go so far to say that there is truly no good reason why anyone should not be able to make a living wage. There is value in all labor, but the exploitation of the worker is dependent on their job.

It may sound like naive 22-year-old word salad to some of you, I’m sure. But if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we have always had the means to change our material conditions for the betterment of society. It was just an active choice not to enact them. People have been able to receive their COVID vaccinations free of charge, the federal government has provided extensive unemployment benefits and stimulus checks to those who needed them, and the concept of working from home has been accepted as a suitable alternative to requiring a commute, or even just expecting a pool of employees to live in cities with high costs of living.

This all goes to say that things simply never had to get this bad. One stream of online discourse I have found entertaining lately is the narrative of Gen-Z vs. millennials. Sure, most of it has focused on the minutiae of where the waistline on your jeans should fall, but media coverage and strange women who like to make songs up about current events have focused more on the differences between the two rather than what they could learn from each other.

As I enter the Big Bad Media industry, I look to mentors and people I admire to extend a branch that they were never afforded. I have learned what to expect from my employers in terms of work culture and compensation, the many generational barriers that exist for the sake of it, and I have seen those very people start to build the future they should have been given. It starts with the unionization efforts within newsrooms like the New York Times’ Tech Guild, media collectives like Study Hall, and the rebirth of publications like Defector, that prioritize equity and the idea of treating employees with the humanity they deserve.

So while it is obviously daunting to move forward into uncertainty, and hope we are on an upward trend of managing this pandemic, of managing the corruption that has actively encouraged exploitative workplaces, managing all of those unfair and unseemly things that all seem to be connected, I can’t lie and say I’m completely terrified. Because those who came before me have dealt with this kind of s**t too. And it is their work that assures me change is possible.

The post As a recent college graduate, I should be terrified – here’s why I’m not appeared first on Salon.com.

The new suit claims that Falwell “withheld scandalous and potentially damaging information” and failed to disclose “his personal impairment by alcohol” from Liberty’s board of trustees while negotiating a new contract to head the Virginia school in 2019. At the time, Falwell convinced the board to include a higher severance payout if he resigned for “good reason” or if the university terminated his contract without cause.

“Mr. Falwell claimed to the committee that this would serve as a ‘safety valve’ for both him and the university if his full-throated support of former President Donald J. Trump proved damaging to the school’s reputation,” the Times reported. According to the university, Falwell’s real motivation for organizing his contract in this way was because he was engaging in indiscretions that have gone on to damage the university’s reputation. This, the suit alleges, was a breach of contract and fiduciary duty. 

As Salon reported in 2020, Falwell found himself tumbling from one scandal into another, before finally officially plummeting from grace when he was ousted from Liberty in August. There were murmurs of impropriety in 2019 when Politico reported that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen helped “clean up racy ‘personal’ photographs” of Falwell’s wife, Becki, including one of her in a French maid costume, which Falwell had allegedly sent to a number of employees at his evangelical university. 

Things came to a head in August of last year when Falwell released an exclusive statement with the Washington Examiner claiming that his wife had engaged in a “fatal attraction type” affair with Giancarlo Granda, a former pool attendant-turned-Miami businessman. He also said he was being extorted by Granda who was threatening to go public with information about the relationship. The next day, Granda released a statement of his own at Reuters claiming that Falwell both knew of and observed his wife’s extramarital relationship.

“Becki and I developed an intimate relationship, and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,” Granda said. 

Granda also followed up his statement with a post on Twitter in which he described Falwell as a “predator,” saying he’d sent Granda an image of a female Liberty University student exposing herself at their farm. In an interview with the Washington Post, Falwell confirmed, explaining that “She had on, I don’t know how to say this, granny panties.” He claimed it wasn’t sexual but admitting that he sent the photo to multiple people because he thought it was funny. 

Additionally, Liberty employees detailed other instances of “Falwell’s behavior that they [saw] as falling short of the standard of conduct they expect from conservative Christian leaders, from partying at nightclubs, to graphically discussing his sex life with employees.” 

Amid this, the suit claims that Becki Falwell privately contacted three members of the university’s executive committee to express concerns about her husband’s excessive drinking, which had intensified in the wake of the Granda situation. The university then paid for Falwell to have a short stint in rehab, but he balked at the idea of further residential treatment. 

“There were concerns that he smelled of alcohol during work interactions,” the suit alleges.

The suit from Liberty University also claims that by keeping the couple’s sexual agreement with Granda — and the ensuing “extortion” — a secret from college leadership, he concealed an “active threat” to the university’s standing. 

The backlash towards Falwell has pointed to the apparent hypocrisy inherent in his actions.

Under Falwell, Liberty students have been expelled for violating the student honor code called “The Liberty Way.” The code forbids premarital sex and same-sex relationships. Drinking alcohol and “obscene language” are infractions, and students are instructed to “dress modestly at all times.”

According to the New York Times, a spokesman for Liberty University, Scott Lamb, said the school had no comment on the suit. For his part, Falwell sued the university for defamation in October, arguing that it damaged his reputation by not working to verify the allegation about the affair, but ultimately dropped the suit in December 2020.

The post Jerry Falwell Jr.’s feud with Liberty University escalates with dueling lawsuits appeared first on Salon.com.

Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a feature on a now all-too-familiar theme. “Worried your kid is falling behind?” the headline blared. “You’re not alone.” As the Times explained, “As kids start school with more online learning, parents wonder whether they’ll ever catch up. Here’s how to set them up for success.” Granted, the article advised moms — surprise, no fathers were interviewed — on “creating fun, low-key learning opportunities,” but the phrase “falling behind” nevertheless appeared three times in the body of the article. 

It was the same day my younger daughter’s high school scheduled a virtual town hall to discuss plans for the new academic year. The school’s invitation added, “This will help us in planning the most successful learning opportunities for your kids and providing you with what you need.” 

There was that word again. Success. I’ve spent nearly two decades now shepherding my children from nursery school to university, and I have never gotten a satisfying answer to the basic question of how our educational system defines success. I sure as hell have even less of a concept of what constitutes success for our students right now. I only know that as far as I’m concerned, I believe what Bill Murray taught us in “Meatballs”: It just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. 

A generation ago, I spent my third year of college in England, interning for a music weekly and trying not become totally awestruck at the rock stars passing through. The current best-case junior year scenario for my older daughter will be mostly self-quarantining in her dorm room, attending classes and participating in her student clubs online. My younger daughter, meanwhile, is gearing up for SAT prep and band practice, both of which will be taking place within a few feet of where both my spouse and I do our own work.

And then what? My older daughter graduates college into a nonexistent workforce? My younger one starts shopping around for colleges that will pressure her — and her parents — to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans so that she too can graduate into a dystopia in a mountain of debt? Is it any wonder I’m having a hard time right now really giving a crap about maintaining academic rigor, or what activities will look good on resumes and college applications?

I am aware of the numerous privileges that come with my laissez-faire stance. My daughters are older, which means they work independently and communicate directly with their teachers. I don’t have to be the middlemom who manages their homework packets, interpreting the assignments for them. They likewise haven’t been as academically hard hit as students in other economic groups — an April Pew Research Center survey found that while “[a]mong middle-income parents, 44% say their children have received a lot of online instruction from their school… about three-in-ten lower-income parents (29%) say their children’s school has provided not much or no instruction.” 

Even with all our advantages, I can’t fully fathom — any more than my Gen Z daughters can — how our new reality will affect their future personal, professional and educational aspirations. What I do know is that the Jenga tower of higher ed was tottering well before this mess, and that my priorities right now are not what happens with SAT scores or the Dean’s List. What I don’t need is a bumper sticker that reads “Proud Parent of an A Student at Apocalypse High.” 

From our different vantage points, my daughters and I look at our millennial comrades and see what the shabby bill of goods they and their boomer parents were sold has wrought. A year ago, millennials were facing “$497.6 billion in outstanding student loan debt for about 15.1 million borrowers,” according to data from the U.S. Department of Education. That was before the country’s worst economic quarter on record. We’ve watched college tuition skyrocket well out of pace with inflation, with in-state tuition increasing 65 percent  over just ten years. We witnessed the unfolding of a very public criminal scandal that revealed how easily admissions can be bought, and the sham idea of meritocracy. We know that last year, one-third of Harvard’s incoming freshman class were legacies.

So to whom, exactly, should I be concerned my daughters are falling behind? The kids who were born on third base and whose parents let them believe they’re hitting triples? Or the ones who have played by the rules their whole lives, who’ve done all the enrichment and the test prep, and are at the epicenter of a quantifiably shocking rise in rates of suicide and depression? In the past few years, my children have faced life-threatening illnesses and serious mental health challenges. And they didn’t go through all they’ve been through without developing priorities that I can throw my full weight behind. Those priorities are simple — stay sane and stay alive. The rest will get figured out. If that means that more of their time is spent noodling around on the keyboard or watching old movies or just talking with their friends than mastering trigonometry, then I say, whatever.

It seems like only yesterday I was touring a preschool for my then two-year-old daughter when a parent asked what the science curriculum was. It really hasn’t been that long since we were getting letters from prestigious, $70K a year colleges asking, “What will your degree from us tell the world?” I think often of Lily Tomlin’s decades-old observation: “Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.” And I just don’t believe my kids are supposed to be freaking out now about what happens next to their chances to make a handful of billionaires richer.

I was one of the first in my working class family to go to college. I’m — perhaps foolheartedly — starting a master’s degree program in the fall. I’m not anti-intellectual. I am, however, increasingly anti-pointless busywork. I am anti-test taking while the world burns. And I am definitely anti-anybody else’s vague concept of “success,” which as far as I can tell is defined solely by monetary “return on investment.” It’s certainly not measured in personal satisfaction, mental health, service to others, or even actual learning. 

I have anxiety to spare. I worry about what happens to my older daughter, with her history of health problems, when she returns to college — even though I know that she’s learning to care for herself. I worry about my younger one, with her OCD, getting back on public transportation. I worry about all our kids and their futures. But I don’t for a second worry that they haven’t been learning.

I think of what I knew of the world at their age, with my good grades and my glee club practice, and I realize that I knew nothing. Northing of social injustice, of protest, of voting rights, of gun control, of resilience and coping skills. I certainly didn’t know how to wash my hands like I’m preparing to perform surgery, or to have a productive conversation about consent, or to make a beautiful dinner from the dregs of the produce drawer, or manage my meager finances. My daughters are experts at all of those things. I look at the kids of Gen Z, who have experienced so much and managed to stay weird and hormonal while fighting climate change and punking MAGA rallies, and they don’t look like they’re falling behind at all. They look really smart, actually. And every day, they’re they ones leading me forward.

The post Why I’m OK with my kids “falling behind” in school during the pandemic appeared first on Salon.com.

While some of those losses came from medical centers that temporarily gave up high-paying elective procedures in order to treat COVID patients, the bigger picture was as vexing as it was simple: In the age of pandemic-induced remote learning, the campuses were largely deserted. And when students aren’t living on campus, schools stop making money. Fast.

“Colleges and universities get very high premiums on their housing. It’s a big revenue space for them,” said Dr. Jorge Nieva of the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. “But for many, many schools right now, they just can’t operate in person.”

When they try, the outcomes have often been dire. A New York Times rolling survey of roughly 1,900 colleges and universities has tracked more than 321,000 viral infections on campus among students, faculty and staff, with at least 80 deaths. Most of the fatalities occurred in the spring, and hundreds of schools have since opted for either 100% remote instruction or severe limits on how many students may be on campus.

Those decisions, driven by administrators’ understanding that it’s nearly impossible to contain the spread of COVID-19 in classrooms, dormitories and cafeterias, are prudent and comply with local and state health protocols. But as schools attempt to finalize plans for the winter quarter or spring semester beginning next month, a sense of dread has crept in. Absent student housing and dining money, budgets again will be blown.

The expected arrival of a coronavirus vaccine is welcome, but at many campuses, students are unlikely to pay for room and board again until the fall — and, even then, perhaps in reduced numbers. Larger schools and private universities with significant endowments will almost certainly get through it, but after that, the picture gets cloudier.

“We’re fully anticipating that some of the smaller schools will not make it,” said Patricia Gandara, a research professor of education at UCLA. “Some of the liberal arts schools, especially, are struggling to stay afloat. It’s a really terrible problem.”

Indeed, a recent model created by a Boston education company, Edmit, estimated that more than a third of the private four-year colleges it studied may need to merge or close in the next few years. New York University professor Scott Galloway, meanwhile, has identified more than 90 colleges that fall into the “low value, high vulnerability” quadrant of his analysis, meaning they’re already in trouble financially and may be pushed to the edge by the budgetary effects of the virus.

The national figures are mind-boggling. In a letter to Congress in October, the American Council on Education said it had estimated that the pandemic would cost colleges and universities at least $120 billion. In every category of university operation, the council wrote, “revenues are down and expenses are significantly increased.”

At many large school systems, those losses are compounded by state budget crises that also loop back to COVID-related economic downturns — and they follow a decade in which state funding was already significantly shaved. California reduced its general-fund contribution to the UC system for 2020-21 by $472 million, and federal relief is uncertain with a likely divided government, said education consultant Ben Kennedy.

Smaller schools are more vulnerable to an immediate threat. This summer, tiny Wells College, in New York’s Finger Lakes region, pondered closing its doors permanently. “If we don’t have room and board revenue, we won’t have enough revenue to operate the campus next year,” said President Jonathan Gibralter. The college ultimately decided to open this fall, with students living in the residence halls; it went into a “pause” in November, suspending in-person instruction and advising students to essentially stay in their dorm rooms, after positive cases of COVID began to rise at Wells. Students ultimately left the campus at Thanksgiving break and, as Wells had planned months earlier, will finish the semester remotely.

For Wells and other small schools, collecting even part of a semester’s worth of housing and dining fees is critical. According to research by the College Board, room and board costs rose faster than tuition and fees at public two- and four-year institutions over the past five years. In 2017, the Urban Institute found that room and board costs had more than doubled since 1980 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Some of this has to do with the way the college pricing game is played. Schools often post sky-high tuition rates, then offer to knock them down — often by 50% or more — via grant or scholarship. The profit margins on housing and dining services make up the difference in the budget.

At UCLA, an in-state student in campus housing would pay $13,239 for tuition and $17,599 for room and board this school year, according to the school’s estimate. Out-of-state and foreign students pay an additional $29,754 in “supplemental tuition,” a premium that many schools raised aggressively over the past decade to recover funding deficits after the recession of 2007-09.

The University of Florida charges state residents $6,380 in tuition, but $10,590 in room and board. At Dartmouth College, students of families with incomes under $100,000 can expect a scholarship covering the $57,796 retail tuition, but room and board add $17,022.

Campus lockdowns have been devastating. From March to August, UCLA lost nearly $185 million in canceled housing and dining programs and “lost enrollments,” part of a system-worst $653 million overall revenue decline. Despite UCLA’s losses, overall the UC system’s enrollment levels remained flat.

Remote instruction will continue at least through March in the UC system, with on-campus housing again serving only those students with no other options. The residence halls at UCLA were about 10% occupied this fall.

Schools around the country generally operate within the health and safety guidelines of their cities or counties. As the nation plunges into its worst phase of the pandemic, that means few opportunities for a return to campus until a vaccine becomes available for college students, which may be well into the summer.

Still, there are some differences. While USC has followed Los Angeles County’s very cautious approach to reopening, New Jersey’s Princeton University went the other way, announcing that all enrolled undergraduates would be offered campus housing in the spring, even as classes remained mostly remote. (Room and board at Princeton for the spring semester comes to $8,910, according to the university’s statement of fees.)

With an endowment valued at more than $5.7 billion, USC can survive an extended time of reduced housing and dining revenue, as can the UC system, whose collective endowments total $15 billion.

But as the pandemic rolls on, the pressure on schools that are relatively underfunded — or were already leveraged — will only increase. When MacMurray College in Illinois announced its closure this spring after 174 years, its president noted that 2020 was MacMurray’s third consecutive year in deficit, part of a longer pattern of students gravitating toward larger schools and their amenities.

“If an institution wasn’t running a structural deficit with dwindling reserves pre-COVID, they should be OK now,” said Kennedy, the education consultant. “If they were already two to four years away from an existential crisis, then COVID has brought them, likely, to the point of no return.”

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

The post Fear and loathing as colleges face another season of red ink appeared first on Salon.com.

Touting Barrett’s credentials, which were compiled in her infamous briefing binder, McEnany claimed that Barrett “also is a Rhodes scholar.” McEnany later acknowledged the mistake after a reporter corrected her.

Her explanation? “That’s what I have written here.”

“My bad,” the top White House spokesperson added.

The Rhodes Scholarship is a prestigious international postgraduate scholarship to study at Oxford University in the U.K. Recipients include former President Bill Clinton, former Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and John Kennedy, R-La. Journalists Ronan Farrow and Rachel Maddow are also members of the elite group.

Barrett earned her B.A. at Rhodes College, which is not located in Europe but rather in Tennessee. The homonyms apparently provide for a cheeky play on words for students at the University of Memphis, a state school in the same southern city. 

Barrett graduated summa cum laude from Notre Dame School of Law, where she was the top student in her class, according to the university. She currently teaches there. (A Rhodes scholarship also was awarded to former Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg, who was the mayor of South Bend, Ind., where Notre Dame is located.)

While the source of McEnany’s confusion remains unclear, the same mistake appeared in a Sept. 25 Fox News segment about Barrett’s background.

⁦@FoxNews⁩ actually claims tonight that Judge Amy Coney Barrett was a Rhodes Scholar ! Seriously ? Was she a Rhodes Scholar or did she graduate from Rhodes College in Memphis ? Who are their editors at Fox News? pic.twitter.com/TdpW9PK3y6

— Jeff (@23JAM_23) September 25, 2020

It is unclear whether the president, known to be sniffy about Ivy League educations, was aware of the difference. Trump reportedly made a degree from Harvard or Yale a prerequisite for his 2018 Supreme Court nominee. Though Barrett made Trump’s short list that year, the president nominated Brett Kavanaugh, a Yale alum who taught law at Harvard. (Trump was also rumored to have been “saving [Barrett] for Ginsburg.”)

Trump often boasts that he graduated from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution, where he had transferred after two years at Fordham University in the Bronx. That feat was called into question earlier this year in a tell-all book by the president’s niece. Per The New York Times:

As a high school student in Queens, Ms. Trump writes, Donald Trump paid someone to take a precollegiate test, the SAT, on his behalf. The high score the proxy earned for him, Ms. Trump adds, helped the young Mr. Trump to later gain admittance when he transferred as an undergraduate to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton business school.

Trump additionally appears to prize distinguishing Wharton from Penn itself. The university’s student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, reported that Trump name-dropped “Wharton” 52 times between June 2015 and January 2018. The president has called it “the hardest school to get into” and “super genius stuff.”

A Penn official told The Washington Post that the school did not have a record of its acceptance rate for 1966, the year Trump entered. But the school’s website says the acceptance rate in 1980 was “slightly greater than 40%.” The school announced that its admissions rate for the class of 2023 was 7.4% — or five times more exclusive.

“It was not very difficult,” an admissions officer who interviewed Trump for the slot previously told The Post.

“I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius,” the officer added. “Certainly not a super genius.”

The Biden-Harris Democratic national ticket will be the first since 1984 to not include a candidate without an Ivy League degree. Presidential nominee Joe Biden attended the University of Delaware, while vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris attended Howard University, a historically Black college.

The post “My bad”: McEnany falsely claims Barrett is a “Rhodes Scholar” days after incorrect Fox News segment appeared first on Salon.com.

* * *

I finished my courses in the social work program in the fall. We have to finish all the classes before field placement. I started my field placement with Roanoke City Department of Social Services in January. It’s very practical. You practice all the things you learn and plan for in class. At the agency I worked a regular eight-hour day Monday through Thursday. Then on Fridays we had class and I caught up on assignments. In class we talked about our experiences, about assignments, and about what was going on in our field placement. We listened to our classmates’ experiences and how to deal with stressful cases.

I was in my field placement for two months and then in mid-March I found out that everything was cut off. I had to stay home because of COVID-19. All the classes at Mary Baldwin went online. There were so many activities that I was still required to do for field placement, like attending advocacy community meetings. But I was unable because those meetings were no longer happening. So I worried if I could still graduate. Luckily our program director adjusted our requirements so we could graduate and still meet our professional requirements. I continued to do my work remotely and did research to cover the hours. It’s not the same though. I worked with Adult Protective Services at the agency and we did a lot of home visits. After the shutdown I didn’t have direct contact with clients. I had two clients of my own that I was working with, and before I left, my cases were closed. So I had a chance to work with those clients from the beginning to the end of their cases.

Right now I’m very disappointed about graduation. I had planned a big celebration. Family and friends were coming from across the country. Even family in Rwanda that my mom reconnected with only recently, whom we haven’t seen in so long, were coming to celebrate. My graduation was a reason for all of us to get together. But my plan is broken now. Mary Baldwin is planning a nice online celebration, but it won’t be the same. I was going to wear the cap and gown. We won’t be able to take the photographs with all our family and friends. My mother was going to see me walk across the stage. She worked so hard to get me here. My brothers can’t travel from New Hampshire and even a small gathering might not be possible. I know they’re all proud, but now they can’t show it.

Since my field placement was going to be in Roanoke, I moved out of my dormitory and into an apartment in January, and drove to class on Fridays in Staunton — an hour’s drive. My mother moved back to Roanoke from New Hampshire. She was helping my brothers there, but now we live together in Roanoke. When my sister’s classes at Radford University moved online, she moved in with us, too. It’s been really hard. I’m the only one working. I’ve been delivering newspapers for the Roanoke Times to pay the rent on the apartment. I work from midnight to 4 a.m., driving and taking papers from house to house. I make about $1400 a month, but the rent is more than half of that. It’s really good that we’re together now though. Mom has a plot at the community garden, so she grows vegetables and that helps us. We all love being with her. She takes care of us.

Before my field placement was canceled, I wasn’t even sleeping. I’d come home from delivering papers and get ready to go to the agency. But now that I’m done with that agency work, I have a little more time to sleep and to apply for jobs. But I’m so worried about work and taking care of the family. I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to find a job in social work because most of the places where I’m looking are closed. There are no vacancies right now. I have student loans.

I also want to go to graduate school, but I want to do that while I’m working in my profession at the same time. I don’t know how I’m going to cover that. Because really, if I can’t find a good scholarship, I’m going to be forced to wait for at least two years and save money for it. Hopefully, I can find a place that will hire me while I’m taking classes as well. I’m looking for clinical social work.

I want to open my own agency once I get my graduate degree, a place for social work but with high school students wanting to pursue education—like who I was when I was getting ready to go to college. I want to work with immigrants and refugees and I want to work with students directly. After high school, there are many who rush to go into the workforce. Some are pressured by their parents and I know from personal experience that some parents have cultural beliefs and traditions that keep their kids from college, especially girls. Some girls, their fathers pressure them to get married. Also, this is a new country for them and they might not have access to information. There’s so much more that we can achieve if we go to college.

I wanted to be a social worker from a very young age. My mother was a single mom with four children and when we came to the camp, we were the first Rwandans. There were Ethiopians, some Sudanese, Congolese, and Burundis. There were some resources for them, but nothing for Rwandans at first. There were no scholarships for Rwandans to finish eleventh and twelfth grade. So many others got help to finish, but my mother couldn’t get help to send me to finish high school. So she grew her own vegetables and saved money to send me to the Paresis Secondary School in Otjiwarongo, a small town in Namibia. I finished high school there. I had to figure it out on my own.

I really miss college because I lived on campus with friends and we’d get together at the library or the coffee shop downtown and talk about our classes and our problems. I also miss my professor, Mary Clay Thomas, the director of my program. I could go to her office and talk to her. I really cherished her support. When I transitioned from the community college to Mary Baldwin, I stayed after class and asked her, “What do I need to know? What should I change?” I worried because for me, failing was not an option.

I haven’t seen my brothers in New Hampshire in a long time, but because of COVID-19 I can’t see my brother who lives here in Roanoke either. His wife is pregnant and my nephew is small so we are very careful. We had to do a Zoom chat for his birthday. I haven’t seen my boyfriend for two months. He lives in Maryland. We use Zoom chat a lot, too.

I hope things get back to normal. Sometimes when I think about it, you know the saying, “It is what it is.” You have to live with it. When you don’t have control over something, what can you do? Stressing won’t help you. I learned that living in the camps.

The post A Rwandan refugee graduates into a pandemic, and an uncertain future appeared first on Salon.com.

That absurdly short moving window, it turns out, was real. In the wake of the pandemic, most American colleges opted to move teaching online for the remainder of the semester, while hundreds of thousands of college students were ordered to leave their campus dorm rooms — forcing some back to their childhood bedrooms, others scrambling for alternative accommodation.

The jolting orders to move marked another unwanted anxiety for young people already in the throes of what is, for most, a turbulent time in one’s life. For the longest time, college was what I looked to as the turning point when I would truly start living. I had my mind set on going abroad for college, and everything before that felt like an intermission. It represented so much to me because it was symbolic — it was a chance for me to rewrite my personal narrative, and to permanently change the course of my life.

Feeling disengaged with my education in Singapore and hungry for more than what my surroundings could provide, I watched free or low-cost college lectures online at home from professors at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Michael Sandel’s popular justice course at Harvard University — the first Harvard course to be made freely available online.

But now, after almost four years abroad, I’m back in the same bedroom on the opposite side of the world, in an online class at 3:30 a.m.The sticker price of tuition (excluding financial aid and scholarships) at the elite institution that I attend, Sarah Lawrence College in New York, is $56,020 a year. Which makes me wonder: What am I paying for? In other words, what is the value of a college education?

“Zoom university is not worth 50k a year,” one New York University student wrote in a petition for partial tuition refund that has more than 11,700 signatures so far.

Many students share the same sentiment, and some are even taking legal action against their colleges and universities. A wave of class-action lawsuits from students at Columbia University, University of Miami, Drexel University, and Pace University have been filed to demand partial refunds for the spring semester.

A college degree: a “signal” to employers

These lawsuits reveal very different arguments about what the value of a college degree is. One claim is that “the value of any degree issued on the basis of online or pass/fail classes will be diminished.” This claim rests on the idea of job-market signaling in economics, in which the value of a degree comes from the positive signal that it communicates to an employer—for example, tenacity in sticking it out to obtain that education credential, or intrinsic intelligence in navigating the college maze.

Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University and the author of The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, is a proponent of this idea of signaling in higher education. “A lot of the reason why education helps you in the real world is not that you’ve learned useful skills, but that it’s given you a certification. It’s given you a stamp on your forehead saying that you’re a superior worker. I say, a lot of what people are paying for is actually that signal,” Caplan said in an interview with Salon.

In his latest column for The New York Times, Ron Lieber argued that “most people send their children off to college to accomplish one (or all) of at least three goals: They want to stuff their heads so full of knowledge that they explode and then need reassembly into new and improved adult brains. They want their kids to find their people — the friends and mentors who will carry them through life. Finally, there is the credential: A diploma that means something to those who see it on a résumé, one that may also offer a chance to jump a rung or two up the economic ladder.”

“The coronavirus shows no sign of diminishing this year’s undergraduate degrees as a credential. But for the other two goals, the status quo can fall short,” Lieber added.

Scott Carlson, a journalist who has written about higher education for more than two decades at The Chronicle of Higher Education, believes that the biggest loss in value of college degrees won’t be its diminished signal. “I don’t specifically know how Drexel or some of these other schools are going to be issuing their degrees, but they’re not going to stamp on the degree that ‘oh, you only got an online education,’ right? No employer is going to say, ‘did you learn part of your degree online?’ So in terms of the signaling, I don’t think it’s a problem,” Carlson told Salon in an interview.

The in-person aspect to learning

The disparity in the quality of instruction with the shift to online classes has students questioning what they’re paying for in a college degree. For students in the creative and performing arts, that difference is particularly jarring given how much of their learning comes from hands-on, in-person teaching, and using equipment which are now not available to them.

“I know some people taking a sophomore level class where they’re supposed to shoot five films, and now they’re allowed to shoot on their own personal equipment, which NYU said is going to level the playing field. Which is insane, because some people have 50-thousand-dollar camera and some people don’t even own a phone with a camera,” NYU Tisch senior Laine Elliot told Salon.

“If I happen to own a DSLR [camera] and I use that, and my classmate’s using their iPhone 6, it’s not the same platform at all,” said Boscov, who is majoring in Film and Television. “They’re learning about the equipment online via Zoom and not hands-on now, which is basically what you can get from a free YouTube video,” Elliot continued.

What about students not in the creative and performing arts? “Even if I wasn’t receiving an education that wasn’t so equipment based and hands-on learning based, I would still feel this education that I’m receiving online is not equal, because you’re still in a situation where it’s very difficult to connect with your professor in these online classes. It’s very difficult to foster discussion. And when discussion does happen, it can often be very stilted and confusing, just because of the nature of interacting with people through a webcam call,” said Kaylee Scinto, a senior at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. 

New York University is being sued by Christina Rynasko, a mother of a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Rynasko filed a $5 million class-action lawsuit on April 24, arguing that the shift to online classes is not worth the tuition she paid for the semester. This lawsuit comes on the heels of the NYU Tisch Partial Refund Effort, a petition appealing to the Board of Trustees to offer a partial tuition refund for Tisch students.

The Tisch School of the Arts is the most expensive college at NYU — tuition is approximately $3,000 more for a regular course load per semester as compared to other colleges at NYU, and Film Production students must pay laboratory equipment insurance fees of approximately $879 per semester.

“I know for some students, that pays for half your rent, or food for two weeks in New York City,” said Elliot, referring to Tisch’s production fees. “That’s major especially when so many people are getting sick and losing their jobs. You’re an arts institution. I’m graduating to no job market. Now, more than ever, a refund would help people stay on their feet until the job market recovers,” she continued.

“It may be true that remote learning has cost the university as much as Dean Green stated, but it is not what the students have paid for. We have found the online format to be untenable,” a letter to Tisch administrators by a group of students stated.

“The colleges and universities sell in-person, on-campus, experiential education — that is what these students bought and paid for. The students could have opted for a virtual campus or online degree, but they did not. Drexel, for example, advertises that the same degree programs offered online are 40% cheaper than the on-campus programs that deliver the same degree. So it’s not about how we are making the comparison but how the schools themselves do,” Roy Willey, the class action attorney with the Anastopoulo Law Firm representing students in the lawsuits filed against Drexel University and the University of Miami told Salon.

The lawsuit against Columbia also pointed out that an on-campus undergraduate degree in social work costs approximately $58,612 for an academic year, which is considerably more expensive than the university’s online program — tuition for the same degree online costs $48,780.

A College Degree: The College Experience

Lastly, what do college-bound kids envision they’re paying for when they imagine going to college? It comes down to all of the things that make up the ambiguous idea of “the college experience.” UCI is involved in a project called The Next Generation Undergraduate Success Measurement Project, which is attempting to break down what exactly the college experience is.

“We’re trying to measure student experiences, attitudes, and behaviors around ways that are able to document what value students receive from their college education. It’s not just growth in general and subject-specific areas, but also about the development of intellectual dispositions; identity formation; finding direction in life; developing civic engagement; and developing social networks,” the Dean of the School of Education at UC Irvine, Richard Arum, told Salon.

The uncertainty of the current pandemic has left universities unclear on whether they will hold in-person classes for the upcoming fall semester, with many looking at a hybrid model of in-person and online classes.

According to Inside Higher Ed, college admission officers and college counselors are reporting many more inquiries about deferrals from students and parents. “Students and families are going to be making tough choices around that. Part of that is related to the incredible economic distress that’s going to be facing our communities and many of those families,” Arum said.

Despite the fuss over Generation Z constituting the first generation of digital natives, high school seniors are not keen on the idea of having to start college online. As Carlson puts it, “For the 18 to 22-year-old, they’re kind of thinking about the signal [of a college degree], but I think they’re probably thinking more about, ‘I really wanted to go to this school, I was really in love with being on this campus. The college experience is this rite of passage for me. That rite of passage is what I was paying for, and not sitting in my living room on Skype talking to my professor.'”

A student behind the University of Miami lawsuit told Salon that college is about preparing you for the real world. “On top of all of the work we are given, many of us are involved in clubs, Greek Life, sports, jobs, and extracurriculars. This can be stressful as we have to learn time management and be responsible with everything that needs to get accomplished. At college, we are able to experience living on our own and having to learn life lessons that help us adapt and prepare for life in the ‘real world.'”

“Being home, I have lost the motivation to put our best effort into my work. I often find myself distracted at home with family members conversing or construction on the house next door. I wish for my long hours on the second floor of the library, where my work was accomplished in a timely manner and to the best of my ability. Now, I have lost the desire to work to get good grades or to impress the professors as it is hard to prioritize with a credit/no credit system. College is said to be the best four years of your life and that is due to the experiences you have on campus with others,” the University of Miami student added.

“If you’re not living at home, you have a few years of comparative independence without (mostly) having to support yourself by working full time; you’re away from your parents, and surrounded by peers and by older scholars,” Lisa Hirsch wrote on Twitter in response to Lieber’s column.

Carlson believes that “so much of college is not about the signal of the degree. It’s about the kinds of experiences that you can get from being on that campus and having daily contact with other and new kinds of people. I actually do think there is educational value in a college degree where you’re having close relationships, and contact with the people who are instructing you,” he said.

Amelia Boscov, a senior at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts agrees. “So much of what I gain from going to classes is learning from my peers and learning how to work with them. It just feels so different to be so isolated right now and not getting that part of my education,” she said to Salon.

“I think the most upsetting thing [about the move to online classes] was just that feeling of an immediate loss of community,” Scinto said. “It’s my senior year, and the thing I love most about going to Tisch is the really strong community that is fostered within the school and my program,” she added.

“Being on campus provides a sense of community that we share with peers who are like-minded; challenging and motivating us to be the best version of ourselves. With online classes, I am unable to have the face-to-face talks with professors in office hours, pushing me out of my comfort zone and encouraging me to ask for help when needed,” the University of Miami student said.

According to Gallup research data, graduates who strongly agreed that a professor cared about them as a person were 1.9 times more likely to be engaged at work, and 1.7 times more likely to be thriving in their wellbeing. These were two out of six core college experiences studied which strongly relate to important long-term outcomes of engagement in careers and wellbeing after college.

“My question would be, are those kinds of relationships [with professors] imperiled because you’re doing it online, or is it a situation where those kinds of relationships could be stronger?” Carlson posed.

Will higher education be transformed?

Arum, the Dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), said it isn’t useful to draw a binary comparison between online and in-person learning: “There’s a lot of variation in the quality of instruction both online and in person. So simply comparing across the mode of delivery, so I’m not sure that’s the most relevant question.”

“Right now, in-person teaching is not possible,” Vijay Govindarajan, Coxe Distinguished Professor at The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, told Salon. “Obviously, you’re not getting the full menu of services online that you get if you attended a residential university. The more interesting question is: How should universities transform post-COVID? How can digital technologies be used to transform, co-create, and enrich learning experiences?”

Govindarajan said there are two components to a class in a blended, hybrid model. “There’s the asynchronous component which is delivered online, and then there’s the synchronous face-to-face. The asynchronous should be done in an interesting way. So I’m thinking about how I can make a 15-minute high quality video, but even to break that down into five segments of three minutes each, and create applications after three minutes. To have a tremendous amount of immersive experience that’s created for students asynchronously. That asynchronous session has to be managed by research associates or teaching associates who then summarize what the students learned in the session to me. Therefore, when I start the class, I already know where the students are struggling. Even in class face-to-face, I will keep a chatroom open. They can continuously post in the chatroom because some students don’t feel like talking, but they feel happy writing. What I’m saying is, there are very clear ways to incorporate technology which I cannot even do face-to-face.”

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are seeing a resurgence in popularity since universities have moved classes online. MOOCs are free or low-cost courses that delivered online and are open to anyone through course providers such as Udacity or edX. Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central, a site that serves as a directory of MOOCs, said that he saw a spike in traffic to his site as some states in the U.S. went into lockdown. “Since March 15, Class Central has received over 7 million unique visitors, more than in the entirety of 2019. Due to quarantine measures, suddenly a lot of people found time and were more receptive to learning opportunities,” Shah said.

Close to a decade ago, MOOCs seemed to have the potential to disrupt the landscape of higher education with the promise of reaching students who could not afford a traditional degree. However, the reality has turned out to be quite different: “The vast majority of MOOC learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world’s most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs — low completion rates —  has not improved over 6 years,” according to data from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I asked Govindarajan if he foresees the low completion rates of online courses on MOOCs as a problem for universities, and how they would approach online learning differently. “I don’t think you can just put up Coursera or edX type of courses,” Govindarajan told me. “Maybe there are some universities which don’t offer any extra value other what you can already watch on edX, then they can’t justify the high tuition,” he continued, when I asked about how colleges will justify the high cost of tuition without selling points such as in-person or close interaction with professors possible online.

“I do believe that technology can be leveraged to offer a premium experience, and I think that’s what universities who charge a premium price like Dartmouth are thinking. Whereas if you think about University of Delaware or University of Miami or some other university — if you are not giving the same value, even in the face-to-face setting, but you are charging high tuition and now putting those courses online, then people will ask, why am I paying so high?” Govindarajan reasoned.

“If online is replacing just rote lectures, that’s not a bad thing. That is, rather than having these factory format lectures that are totally impersonal where you have 300 people in the class, but with a tutorial format, they actually get to interact with the professor in person,” Jeffrey Williams, a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, told Salon.

“MOOCs are the exact wrong way to think about the opportunities in terms of online education,” Arum continued. “Rather, what I’m talking about is sophisticated courseware where instructions and learning happens in a way that is interactive, that is a personalized instruction that allows for interaction between students and the instructor, but also students with other students. That’s the opposite of MOOCs,” he added. He continued: “You could move everything to MOOCs right now, that simply reproduces some of the worst aspects of traditional in-person education, the on-the-stage notion that students learn best by just watching and listening to an instructor. That’s not at all the vision I can imagine for the future. Tools that are around active learning and enhanced student engagement, personalization, and social interaction — it’s those types of tools that we need to develop, not the MOOCs nor classes just occurring in Zoom rooms.” 

In an op-ed for Business Insider, Scott Galloway, a professor of Marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, argued: “The rookie move is to believe that MOOCs or stand-alone education start-ups will be the big winners. . . . They won’t.”

Shah points out that “the real audience for MOOCs is not the traditional university student but a ‘lifelong career learner,’ someone who might be well beyond their college years and takes these online courses with the goal of achieving professional and career growth. And I don’t think that has changed much.” 

“Right now, the signal from Sarah Lawrence College, NYU, or Harvard is far stronger to an employer than the signal saying, ‘Oh, I completed this online course and here’s the little badge that I get from that,'” Carlson said to me. He continued: “Employers have pulled back on their training function over the last few decades. So they basically outsourced that training to colleges and universities with the signal involved in that. What if employers came back now after COVID and they said, ‘you know what, we’re not getting the kinds of skills out of students that we really want that are coming out of college?’ We’re just going to ramp up our training programs again and train our own employees to work in our companies — Amazon has talked about setting up a university.”

“If that starts to take off, that’s a problem for higher education institutions, but then there’s the question: Will students want go to a beautiful campus like Sarah Lawrence, or a city campus like NYU, or some other kind of college environment where they’ll want to take advantage of all the things that comes with living and learning among your peers, being in a social environment?” Carlson posed.

However, Arum points out that higher education in the U.S. in particular is very expensive because it’s heavily dependent on a residential model. “It’s about twice the cost of education in Europe,” he said. “There’s a larger discourse on the value of college and its high cost. There’s been growing concern about that related to larger economic challenges in our society with growing economic insecurity and a growing sense of the precariousness of the middle class in our society. This pandemic brings those existing concerns to the surface in a pronounced way, but those questions are not new.”

Govindarajan believes that we need to look at the model of higher education and why it costs so much in the first place, and how we can circumvent that with technology. “Bernie Sanders has this notion of free college for everyone. I think that his objective is spot on. College education should be a human right. But free college for all misses the point, because what free college for all essentially says is the cost structure of college education is not changed. When you make it free, you’re shifting the cost from one pocket to another. You make it free to students, somebody has got to pay that cost. What we should be asking instead is, how do you bring that down so that every American can afford this? And I think technology is a wonderful tool because technology scales at zero marginal cost,” Govindarajan said.

Galloway predicts that we could see “big (and some small) tech firms partnering with a world class university to offer 80% of a traditional four-year degree for 50% of the price.” Earlier this week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation has been chosen to “reimagine” New York’s school system, and the state’s relationship with technology. Cuomo’s announcement has been widely criticized by politicians, activists, public school principals, and the New York state teachers’ union.

Others think that we should be wary of falling into techno-utopianism or techno-optimism. “I think that most people, if they can afford it, would rather have a bespoke education,” said Williams. “I think the issue is not that technology is so wonderful, the issue is because it wouldn’t be socially paid for, we’re thinking of cheaper ways to deliver it to people. What’s clear is that online is offered as a cheaper way to do it — a lesser product given to people who are of lower social class. It’s possible higher education will be more classed, and it already is deeply classed.”

Govindarajan put forth three questions he thinks undergraduate institutions should be asking themselves. “Question one: Do students really need a four-year residential experience? The answer to that question depends on, what is it that we currently do in the four-year residential program that can be substituted, what can be supplemented, and what can be complimented by technology? Second question is, what improvements do we need to make to the IT infrastructure to facilitate online education? And the third question is, what kind of training are you going to give the faculty and the students?” he posed.

It is apparent that should online education have to continue into the fall semester, certain colleges will come out on top, while others will struggle to adapt. “The instructional cost of providing education haven’t decreased for these institutions. If anything, they’ve increased as they’ve had to purchase software upgrades and different enhancements to move instruction online. I think it’s important to recognize that many of these universities not in the elite sector per se, but in higher education more broadly, are going to be pushed by this current pandemic to the brink of financial insolvency,” Arum warned.

“You have to remember that the cost of higher education — 85% of it is personnel. So it’s somehow implied in a demand for reduced price of tuition in the current moment, higher education institutions should be laying off faculty and instructors. I think that’s not a sensible approach to this current crisis that we’re facing not just as a country, but globally,” Arum added. Ohio University recently announced layoffs for teaching-track and tenure-track junior faculty, which has been attributed to long-term financial mismanagement.

In the two decades of his reporting on higher education, Carlson has seen many storied and unique colleges close. “The higher education landscape [in the U.S.] is so diverse and broad with so many interesting creatures within it. With COVID, we will undoubtedly see some of these wiped off the face of the map. That’s a real shame. In the past year, Green Mountain College and Marlboro College went out of business completely, and Hampshire College is in trouble. All three of these schools are really interesting colleges, and it took a lot of resources and effort to get them started. Green Mountain College was a college that had a great niche. It was declared the most sustainable college in the country by Sierra magazine year after year. It’s going to be hard for us to recreate places like that going forward,” he said.

“Part of the reason why this is happening is because colleges don’t know their business very well. The finance side of the house is not as deep and supported as other parts of the enterprise. Colleges really don’t know their costs — they don’t know what it costs them to graduate a student who’s a nursing major versus an English major. They don’t know because it’s a really complicated calculation to make — it’s not like they’re a manufacturing company that’s just pumping out a widget. Their widget at some level is, you the student with a degree. But you the student, you have a mind of your own, and you can take a totally unique pathway from your other friend who’s only a major in your particular degree, but maybe has a different minor,” explained Carlson.

Consequently, he tells me, “what’s happened to the industry is the bigger getting bigger and richer, and a number of smaller colleges are struggling to stay afloat. These smaller colleges that are struggling to stay afloat, they are largely rural, mostly private colleges, are church affiliated or were church affiliated at one time. They are colleges that are sort of no-name colleges, or colleges that have less prominence in the market and largely draw from local populations of students. They’re far from cities, and students now more and more because of the internship and employment opportunities want to be located closer to the city.”

For elite institutions that are not going to be pushed to the brink of financial insolvency because they’ve built endowments that have grown tremendously over the past few decades, Arum reminds me that these endowments are not taxed since they are considered to be nonprofit institutions thought to be acting in the public interest. “When you have those same types of resources at your disposal, but you’ve resisted adding enrollments to expand access to your institutions, and over the past decades you’ve done little to nothing in terms of expanding the proportion of students that are coming from low-income family backgrounds to your institutions — then, the question I get to raise is, what obligation do you have to support the larger social and public good of society?” Arum questioned.

“What Mitchell Stevens and I were arguing [in the New York Times] is, you have an obligation to help invest in standing up high quality instructional tools that can expand educational opportunity broadly throughout society. And there, those elite institutions have the resources, both financial and also in terms of legitimacy to do that work in a way that would provide an extraordinary public good for the country moving forward,” Arum added.

“In my adult lifetime — certainly since the 80s — everybody’s talked about innovation, but we have reached the highest degree of inequality [in] that time. So everybody acts like innovation is wonderful, but that jury has already rendered its verdict, because if it’s more inequitable and unjust, we need to rethink what innovation is about,” Williams cautioned.

For students at institutions that have less resources to adapt to this potential new normal, they stand a lot to lose. “Online instruction done poorly has disastrous effects on educational equity. When you provide low quality instruction online, we know definitely from the research that it leads to incredibly disparate educational outcomes. I think anyone who looks at what’s happening in higher education more broadly today would have to be deeply concerned that all the progress we’ve made in recent decades to improve and address educational inequity is going to be set back by decades because of the pandemic and the types of education that students are going to be experiencing in the months ahead,” Arum emphasized.

The winnowing of the higher education landscape will have a ripple effect that will affect not just professors, students, and employees of those institutions, but the communities that those colleges are embedded in.

“What would happen to Ithaca, New York, if Ithaca College went away? What would happen to Utica, New York, if Utica College went away?” Carlson asked. “Now that Green Mountain College has died, Poultney, Vermont is in a lot of trouble. We would like to see a lot of these institutions continue to thrive because they are the last hope for some parts of America,” Carlson concluded.

The post As colleges go remote, students revolt against the state of higher ed appeared first on Salon.com.

Family, friends, neighbors and even TV talk-show hosts are now meeting and broadcasting from home. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Google and Zoom are struggling to meet the demand for their videoconferencing services.

People have long noticed, however, that some peculiar things happen in videoconferencing. A magazine mentioned its “bizarre intimacy.” Jaron Lanier, who is considered the “father of virtual reality,” once remarked that it “seems precisely configured to confound” nonverbal communication.

As an educational technology researcher, I have explored these and other subtle but strange elements of videoconferencing. I do this through phenomenology, the study of lived and embodied experience.

I seek to understand why certain issues arise when technology is introduced to educational settings and to suggest ways to deal with them.

Here are four odd things that happen when you’re engaged in a videoconference.

1. Eye contact is lacking

First, and probably most obviously, meeting by video interferes with eye contact. This is due to a simple technical limitation: There’s no way to put the camera and the display screen in the same spot. When you look at the camera on your device, you give the impression you’re looking someone in the eye. However, when you look at their eyes on screen, you appear to be looking away.

Phenomenology and psychology both emphasize the importance and complexity of eye contact.

“In eye contact you not only observe the eyes of the other person,” observes author and philosophy professor Beata Stawarska, but this other person is also “attending to your attention while you are attending to hers.”

This extends to multiple levels of awareness, as philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes: “I look at him. He sees that I look at him. I see that he sees it. He sees that I see that he sees it.” Merleau-Ponty adds that as a result, “there are no longer two consciousnesses” in a moment of locked eye contact, “but two mutually enfolding glances.”

For Merleau-Ponty, these kinds of experiences are a part of what he calls our embodied reversibility: I see, hear and experience others as they see, hear and experience me.

2. Looking awry

Here’s a warning a pair of researchers gave about making a video guest presentation in a classroom: “Even if… you are not ‘on,’ you are on-screen, and probably larger than life-size. If you surreptitiously pick your nose, chances are that everyone can see you doing it.”

Sitting in front of a webcam and computer, the guest-presenter sees a room full of students. But the students see a talking head on a projection screen, showing every blemish or imperfection. Instead of sitting or facing one another reciprocally, “face to face,” we find ourselves looking up, down or sideways at the sometimes much-larger-than-life image of those we see and speak with online.

3. Feeling watched

Without overt eye contact and embodied reciprocity, people who videoconference can sometimes feel silently scrutinized or surveilled. A person may worry: Exactly how does the unblinking camera eye show me to others?

“Though we may pretend to be looking at another person when we FaceTime or Zoom,” journalist Madeleine Aggeler observes, “really we’re just looking at ourselves — fussing with our hair, subtly adjusting our facial expressions, trying to find the most flattering angle at which to hold our phones.” Videoconferencing can be a bit like the distracting or enervating experience of talking while constantly glancing ourselves in a mirror.

4. Squelching voices

The long-lived tagline of the Verizon network, “Can you hear me now?” is a question associated with technology. Face to face, we are able to monitor our speaking as a result of our own vocal projection and the acoustic environment. And we do this based on the assumption of acoustic reversibility: that others hear the world as we do.

Online, this is not necessarily the case. Our voices might break up as they are compressed and transmitted, a noise in the background might overtake us or our mic might simply be set to “mute.” By its very nature, sound, unlike vision, is relatively undirected. Face to face, it is enveloping and shared. Its disruption and interruption online can be as jarring as speaking with someone who refuses to make eye contact.

A new normal

Despite the odd ways that communication takes place in a videoconference, as a society, we’re about to get more accustomed to this mode of communication. There are many websites full of tips on how to make the most of our videoconferencing experience.

Among other things, these tips advise us to place the camera at eye level to appear naturally positioned, to use a clean, well-lit space to be clearly visible and to wear a headset to maximize audio quality. But no matter what we do to have a smooth videoconference experience, video will lack the “mutual enfolding” of the senses that, as Merleau-Ponty knew, comes with meeting in the flesh.

Norm Friesen, Professor of Educational Technology, Boise State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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I’m a graduate student in the biology department at New York University (NYU), and like many other graduate students at private and public research universities, I perform critical roles for the benefit of my university. On average, graduate student research assistants in the U.S. make only about $20,000-$25,000 a year in the form of departmental support and grants, although this can vary significantly based on academic discipline and location of the university. Despite this, we work more than one job. We spend years doing research around the clock. We attend conferences and do outreach to publicize our teams’ work and build collaborations with researchers at other universities. We teach classes and labs for minimal, or sometimes no, additional pay because our schools don’t have enough full-time instructors. And we do the grunt work to apply for — and win — lucrative grants, which fund our own work and the laboratories for which we work.

Yet despite all of these roles, the NLRB claims that graduate student workers at private universities should not be considered employees. (The NLRB does not have jurisdiction to rule on graduate students at public universities, which are governed by state labor laws.) The board’s reasoning: The endeavors of graduate students are first and foremost educational, which means they don’t fall under their definition of labor.

This ruling is part of a long history of back and forth at the NLRB on the issue of graduate worker unions. In 1972, after asserting jurisdiction over private college and university faculty, the board explicitly excluded graduate students from collective bargaining. Graduate student teaching assistants were not considered employees with the right to unionize by the board until a decision in 2000. But over the next several decades, the presidentially appointed board flip-flopped its position multiple times, as political power in Washington changed hands. The most recent of these changes had come in 2016, under President Barack Obama, when the NLRB classified not only graduate teaching and research assistants, but also undergraduate teaching and research assistants, as workers.

Under President Trump, the NLRB has now proposed to strip our right to unionize away again. But the ruling’s logic — that graduate assistants’ work is primarily educational — is deeply flawed and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the duties that graduate students perform. The work that we do not only furthers our own training, it is necessary and important for our departments and universities to function.

A primarily educational relationship would describe a situation where students simply learn course material and do not produce any novel insights. Attending classes, completing homework assignments, and taking tests are primarily academic endeavors: They are attempts to understand or synthesize information that already exists.

But for many graduate students — as is clearly true for Ph.D. students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields — classes, homework, and tests are hardly the primary focus of their work. The task that defines a Ph.D. is the completion of original research that marks a significant advance in knowledge for the field, something the student must prove to a committee of experts when defending their dissertation.

In performing this novel research, graduate students do the work that allows professors to continue to win grants to fund their labs. In many STEM departments, the professors themselves do little if any of the hands-on experimental work that happens in the lab. That job falls to the graduate students. Some graduate students even fund their own research stipends through outside research grants; in those cases, the university is essentially getting free labor.

As a result, graduate students make up a large part of the United States’ $72 billion-a-year academic research industry. That total does not even account for the work that graduate students do teaching classes and labs, grading tests and assignments, and designing syllabi and course work. Clearly, the university has an economic interest in its graduate students that goes far beyond tuition checks.

In the face of those economic interests, unions can provide students with vital protections. Between September 2016 and May 2017, graduate student organizing committees at six private universities successfully negotiated contracts with their universities. These contract negotiations delivered, among other things, standardized pay rates; annual cost-of-living raises; improved health care, childcare, and dependent-care benefits; and arbitration support in contract disputes.

And then there’s the matter of overworking. Departments or graduate schools usually offer set amounts of sick days or vacation days for their students, but students often forego this much-needed time off. This may be due to their inability to get away from the lab if they have ongoing experiments or because they don’t want to appear lazy. Union contracts have helped address that problem by setting standards for paid leave.

If it passes, the NLRB’s proposal to strip graduate students of employee status will have tangible repercussions. I am fortunate to work at a university that, due to decades of strong organizing by graduate students and their allies, has voluntarily recognized our Graduate Student Organizing Committee as a valid bargaining unit. The university has said the NLRB’s decision won’t have an impact on proceeding with a new contract agreement in 2020. But other universities have not been nearly as willing to voluntarily negotiate with unions.

As a result, there is a national campaign by unions who have partnered with graduate workers to submit public comments on the NLRB’s proposed ruling. This period of public comment continues until December 16, during which time anyone can write to the Board explaining how this ruling would affect them.

The historical underpaying and overworking of graduate students will surely continue unless graduate students have a way to effectively organize and negotiate with their universities. By denying graduate workers the right to unionize and bargain, the NLRB has decided that we do not deserve to be protected against these abuses. But they are wrong: Our work is always work, not just when it is convenient for our universities. And we as graduate workers have a right to stand up for better working conditions.

* * *

Marissa Knoll is a second year Ph.D. Student in biology at New York University studying host-pathogen relationships and evolution. She is an active member of the UAW-GSOC that represents graduate students at NYU.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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