The 2023–24 academic year has inarguably been one of the toughest years in recent history to be a college president. 

Following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and amid Israel’s retaliatory bombardment of Gaza, campuses erupted in activism, with thousands of students, faculty, and community members mobilizing to protest an Israeli offensive that to date has killed more than 36,000. 

College presidents — and their response to the war and protests — have consequently come under withering scrutiny as they have struggled to respond to events. 

As the faces of higher education institutions, they have been criticized for saying too much or too little in their statements about the war. Amid campus protests, students, families, and advocacy groups have complained that they weren’t doing enough to keep students safe from Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Palestinian racism. 

By December, it was clear that many college presidents just couldn’t win. Powerful donors seized on the moment, putting pressure on presidents to resign, while House lawmakers summoned them to Washington for televised hearings to grade them on their performance amid the intractable conflict. The result? Since the fall, several presidents have announced their resignations, sending schools on the hunt for new leaders. 

Though some may simply focus on the loftiness of the role — some college presidents earn seven figures — the nonstop challenges this year reveal how increasingly public and scrutinized the role of the college president has become in a polarized time. The drama surrounding the leaders has raised questions about the state of the college presidency and what it ought to be. 

“There is a lot more attention being paid to what the college presidency is,” said Hiro Okahana, the assistant vice president and executive director of the Education Futures Lab at the American Council on Education, which publishes a major survey on US college presidents. 

The college president’s job, explained 

The role of the college president has always been complex and difficult. The sheer breadth of stakeholders they manage, from students and faculty to alumni, trustees, donors, and state and federal regulators, illustrates the magnitude of their responsibilities. 

The job can involve overseeing a large medical center, running a sporting organization, or being at the helm of  the largest employer in their town. In this way, college and university presidents are sometimes viewed as chief executive officers or even mayors. 

“One of the biggest challenges of the president’s role is balancing all of the various constituencies,” said Frederick Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis University and a lecturer at Georgetown Law, who recently testified before Congress in a hearing about antisemitism on campuses. “And that is always true about any issue, but it’s particularly true when it’s one that’s quite so polarized and so fraught as issues of our present moment.”

Even before this year, college presidents have said many of the roadblocks they encounter in the role are unexpected. Women in the position are more likely than men to feel they weren’t adequately informed of the challenges of the role during the search process, while presidents of color were more likely to express this than white presidents, according to the American Council on Education’s 2023 “The American College President” survey. 

And before this year’s challenges, turnover rates among presidents had been increasing and tenure lengths decreasing. The survey found that presidents in 2022 had been in their current roles for an average of 5.9 years, down from 6.5 years in 2016 and 8.5 years in 2006.

While most presidents said they have a support system, some of them indicated that they have “struggled to find people who understand the experience of being a president,” a signal that all presidents, but particularly women and presidents of color, need help, the report concluded. 

“The president routinely has people who he or she consults, and the last couple of people he or she wants in the room. That could be the board chair,  the provost, or the chief of operations, for example,” Lawrence said. “You are always trying to get input from people who can help you make the decision, since it’s never a good idea to make a decision in isolation.”

But when it comes down to a binary moment, like whether a school will negotiate with student protesters or call the police, presidents make the call. 

“At the end of the day,” Lawrence said, “it’s the president who has to say, ‘We’re gonna go this way.’”

How the Israel-Hamas conflict changed everything for many presidents

The protests that began on campuses last fall exposed larger questions about free speech and the role academia ought to play in protecting it — questions that some looked to college presidents to answer.  

On campus after campus, many presidents failed, outright shutting down lines of communication to students and offering little transparency. Though many started off the year trying to have open dialogue with students, by the end of the year, they succumbed to pressure to lock down campuses.

University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill became the first to resign under the pressure. When lawmakers asked her whether calling for the genocide of Jews would constitute bullying or harassment under school policy, Magill responded that it was a “context-dependent decision.” Her response, during a highly politicized hearing led by Republican lawmakers, exemplified the complicated situation many college presidents find themselves in. 

Under continued pressure, others, including Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, resigned, while others made difficult, often incendiary decisions, like abandoning college commitments to free speech or cracking down on student protests by calling in the police. 

Cornell President Martha E. Pollock announced that she would step down after seven years, and though she said the decision was her own, she has faced criticism for revising the terms of faculty political speech and temporarily suspending pro-Palestinian student protesters this spring. After being celebrated last fall for fostering “authentic discussions about differing points of view,” Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock was censured by faculty after she called in the police just hours after students erected a pro-Palestinian encampment. The University of Southern California’s faculty senate censured president Carol Folt after she banned the school’s pro-Palestinian Muslim valedictorian from speaking at commencement. 

The California State University System suspended Sonoma State University President Mike Lee for “insubordination” after he reached an agreement with pro-Palestinian students that the school would become the first US university to refuse to work with Israeli academic institutions. 

Many eyes remain on Columbia University, where President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik has faced intense pressure from all sides to resign from her post. To signal their disapproval last month, hundreds of student protesters took the annual “primal scream” tradition to the president’s home and screamed for a minute and a half, then chanted “resign” and “shame on you.” 

Some free-speech experts think the presidents made it harder for themselves this year. By shutting down student protests over controversial phrases such as “from the river to the sea,” presidents suppressed debate and stood accused of violating free-speech commitments.

“They’ve been exposed as being hypocritical on free speech, since many have preached how we need to punish offensive speech that makes people feel uncomfortable to ensure that campuses remain civil and peaceful,” said Zach Greenberg, a senior program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that defends free-speech rights on colleges campuses. The group also urges higher education leaders to adopt “institutional neutrality” — that is, taking positions on social and political issues only when they “threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.” 

This stance would provide reasoning for college presidents to avoid pressure to offer comment on social and political issues that inevitably alienates various groups. Nearly 70 institutions have adopted the position in the past few years.

“Fighting for free speech is difficult when the speech is offensive or controversial. It’s easy when the speech is benign and mild,” said Greenberg. “Being principled means defending free speech even though it may be difficult or unpopular to do so.”

But crises like the ones this year “are usually best handled through dialogue and with processes that go back long before the immediate moment,” said Lawrence. “So that at the time the immediate crisis is upon us, there already are longstanding relationships and understandings that exist between and among the constituencies.”

The coming school year likely won’t be easier

This summer, presidents will try to tie up loose ends when it comes to student disciplinary cases and congressional and federal inquiries and investigations. By August, millions of students will be back on campus, and the coming academic year, with a presidential election between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, is likely to present more challenges.

“We’re living in a polarized time, so people are looking for ways of taking complex issues and making them black-white issues, or probably more accurately in our time, blue-red issues. People are looking to capitalize on it,” Lawrence said. 

Traditionally, the fall has had the highest intensity of protests, Greenberg said. “It’s the biggest season for free speech and for getting out there. [Students] are back on campus, energized, motivated, and they want to make their voices heard. We expect them to be amplified this [fall] because of the election. We’re strapped in and gearing up for it,” he said.

Schools are already making changes. Harvard recently announced that it would adopt a new “institutional voice” protocol to avoid making statements on political or social issues that would “side with one perspective or another” according to a report about the new strategy. Under the policy, the school won’t make statements on “public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” But Harvard says the position is different from “institutional neutrality” since “the university as an institution can never be neutral,” the report’s authors wrote. 

Amid a continued erosion of trust in higher education as enrollment declines, the moment demands that stakeholders step in to support what they see as a pillar of American democracy, leaders told Vox. 

“It’s not just about putting persons of color or women into the college presidency but setting them up so that they can succeed as leaders,” said Okahana. “How can the field and how can individual institutions create work environments where leaders can thrive too?”

Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis, echoed the sentiment. “It is critically important that there be a broad recognition that, flaws and all, these are institutions and leaders that require public support in every way. The mission of the university includes the creation and discovery of knowledge and the transmission of that knowledge, an important service.

“I hope that we will be able to restore a sense that when one has concerns about one’s college, as an alumnus, as a student, as a faculty member, that it should be viewed constructively, in terms of, ‘How can I help?’”

Friday marks the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the “separate but equal” schools for racial minorities were inherently unequal and unconstitutional.

But so many years after the watershed ruling, new research confirms a startling trend: School segregation has been getting steadily worse over the last three decades.

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Southern California found that racial segregation in the country’s 100 biggest school districts, which serve the most students of color, has increased by 64 percent since 1988. Economic segregation, or the division between students who receive free or reduced lunch and those who do not, increased by 50 percent since 1991. 

The study primarily focused on white-Black segregation, the groups that the Brown decision addressed, but found that white-Hispanic and white-Asian segregation both also more than doubled since the late 1980s in the large school districts. 

Why is history reversing itself? 

Residential segregation, which researchers have historically identified as the root cause, isn’t the chief driver, according to the new study. The increased segregation also isn’t due to shifting demographics nationwide, as the country becomes less white. In most of the large districts that the researchers examined, housing segregation and racial economic inequality declined. 

Instead, they cited two policy choices America has made: increasing school choice options and ending court oversight of integration efforts. 

“When we switched from a commitment to integration and equity to school choice, it’s not terribly surprising that we see rising school segregation,” said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology and public policy at USC and one of the report’s authors. “We’ve abdicated our responsibility to integration, and unfettered choice does not magically lead to integration.” 

And now, the steady increase means that Black and Hispanic students are more likely to be concentrated in higher-poverty schools with fewer resources, a trend that worsens academic and life outcomes.

School choice, namely charter schools, has expanded 

School choice, the programs and policies that let families use public funding to access alternatives to traditional public schools, has grown in the past few decades. That’s particularly true of the charter school sector, which creates publicly funded schools that have greater flexibility than traditional public schools due to “charter” agreements with states. Some of the first charter schools were introduced in the 1990s to create alternative learning environments, with their own curricula and discipline policies, for example. 

Charters now serve 3.7 million students in 8,000 schools, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. During the 2021-22 school year, they enrolled 7.4 percent of all public school students.

That might not seem like that many students — but it’s less how many are enrolling, and more who is. 

The study supports the idea that parents, particularly white parents, have enrolled their children in charter schools that are majority white. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, white parents have opted out of big urban district schools. There’s generally more segregation both within the charter sector and between charter and traditional public schools.

“We do see that as the charter sector expands, the places where it expanded fastest from the late ’90s to today tend to be places where segregation grew the most even after we take into account lots of other things that were going on,” said Sean Reardon, the faculty director of Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project that produced the report and a new “Segregation Explorer” tool. 

It’s not just white families driving the change: Some charters explicitly market themselves to families of certain racial or ethnic communities or neighborhoods, which has helped increase segregation too. 

As school choice programs were expanding, another policy that helped integrate schools was ending.

Court oversight has vanished

When Brown was decided in 1954, the Court didn’t immediately require school districts to desegregate. 

It wasn’t until the Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County that schools were mandated to develop plans to dismantle their segregated enrollment systems. The decision introduced new criteria courts could use to evaluate schools’ compliance — such as the quality of a school’s physical resources and amenities (think: the type of extracurricular activities offered or the kind of transportation they provide all students, the number of teachers, etc.) or the ratio of Black and white students and teachers. 

The orders had a huge impact, but by the early ’90s, districts were released from the mandates after a series of cases that gave districts local control. 

The new research shows that within five to eight years of districts being released from mandates, segregation increased. Since 1991, about two-thirds of school districts that were required to meet court desegregation mandates were removed from court oversight. 

Why this matters — and how to reverse school segregation

Brown was supposed to lead to long-lasting desegregation. Though school segregation in most school districts is much lower than it was 60 years ago, it’s higher than it was 30 years ago. And today’s divisions are enough to concentrate Black and Hispanic students in higher-poverty schools. 

And that in turn “drives a lot of inequality and disparate outcomes that we see,” said Owens. “It’s not that sitting next to a kid of a particular racial group is on its face beneficial. It’s that resources from home, social resources, and political resources in our society are linked to race.” 

Achievement gaps are larger and grow faster as kids progress through school in more segregated districts than more integrated districts, Reardon said, adding that integration efforts tailored to a specific town’s issues have led to very large improvements in educational and life outcomes for students of color. Research has also shown that desegregation doesn’t worsen outcomes for white students. 

Given that housing segregation helped create school segregation in the first place, tackling this issue will mean taking a “a multi-sector approach because the education system alone can’t address it,” Reardon said. 

Barring that, there are a few solutions to at least help us counteract the slides of the last three decades. Everything from voluntary integration programs to socioeconomic-based student assignment policies — and if we’re committed to school choice policies, choosing ones that affirmatively promote integration.

This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Campus tensions over Israel’s war on Gaza have flared up again, this time at the University of Southern California, which this week barred its valedictorian from speaking at next month’s commencement ceremony. The school cited potential campus safety risks if Asna Tabassum delivered a speech. 

Provost Andrew T. Guzman said in an email to students and staff on Monday that public discussion had “taken on an alarming tenor” after the school announced its choice for valedictorian. “The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement,” he wrote. 

Tabassum, a South Asian American biomedical engineering major who is Muslim and wears a hijab, says that she, along with other critics of the decision, believes the school canceled her speech because of her public support for the human rights of Palestinians. 

Pro-Israel USC student groups, including Trojans for Israel and the Chabad Jewish Student Center, had complained online about Tabassum’s views, calling them antisemitic. The provost explained in the email that the decision “has nothing to do with freedom of speech” and made no mention of Tabassum’s political views. His email did not state whether USC had already received specific threats of violence or disruption. 

Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, campuses have been embroiled in controversy as student protests test the boundaries of freedom of expression. Many college and university leaders have struggled to make satisfactory public statements about the conflict and balance safety with speech protections. In the attack, Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage. Since then, Israel has killed 33,899 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. 

Though schools have vowed to keep their students safe, some have reported facing violence and harassment. After failing to adequately condemn antisemitism in congressional testimony late last year, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard resigned. A congressional hearing on Wednesday also brought Columbia University’s president before lawmakers to answer questions about the school’s response to antisemitism, showing that the quandary is far from over. 

The USC provost referenced the broader turmoil on US campuses in his email: “We cannot ignore the fact that similar risks have led to harassment and even violence at other campuses.” 

Pro-Israel groups are celebrating USC’s decision, claiming that Tabassum’s speech, which she said she had not yet written, could have made Jewish students feel uncomfortable. Tabassum told Inside Edition that she hoped to share a message of hope in her speech.

Meanwhile, critics say that it undermines free speech and is a signal that universities are caving to pro-Israel pressures. “USC cannot hide its cowardly decision behind a disingenuous concern for ‘security,” said Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Los Angeles. “The university can, should and must ensure a safe environment for graduation rather than taking the unprecedented step of canceling a valedictorian’s speech.” Student groups and outlets including the LA Times and the Guardian have defended Tabassum and condemned USC. 

As the academic year comes to a close, the country is watching how similar situations might unfold on other campuses. It’s customary for students to make political statements during commencement speeches, but this year’s campus controversies could lead schools to keep buckling under pressure, raising concerns about students’ freedom of expression in the process. 

USC chose its valedictorian — then silenced her 

USC announced that Tabassum would be the university’s valedictorian on April 2, based on her grade point average, which topped 3.98, contributions to the campus community, essay submission, and performance in interviews. Tabassum, who also minors in resistance to genocide — studies about conflicts including the war in Ukraine, genocide in Darfur, and the Holocaust — was selected from more than 200 students who qualified for the award, and was slated to deliver the customary valedictory speech at the May 10 commencement. Then, Tabassum was notified that she wouldn’t deliver the address at commencement after all because of safety concerns. Critics began to speculate that USC was kowtowing to pro-Israel groups and people who complained about Tabassum being selected as valedictorian. 

The right-wing pro-Israel organization organization End Jew Hatred welcomed USC’s decision, stating, “Ms. Tabassum’s speech as valedictorian was anticipated to be harmful to Jewish students and even potentially agitate anti-Jewish activists.” The USC campus group Trojans for Israel wrote that Tabassum “openly traffics in antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric.” 

Tabassum told CNN that she received “hate and vitriol” for including a link to the website “Free-Palestine.Carrd.Co” on her Instagram profile. The homepage of the website contains the image of a woman holding up a Palestinian flag and a peace sign rising above flames and smoke, and links to help visitors “learn about what’s happening in Palestine.” 

USC’s Chabad argued that the linked website called for the “abolishment of the state of Israel” and called the words on the website, which Tabassum did not create, “antisemitic and hate speech.”

Tabassum said in a statement that she believes there was a “campaign” of “racist hatred” on the part of “anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian voices” to prevent her from addressing her peers at commencement due to her “uncompromising belief in human rights for all.”

“I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred. I am surprised that my own university — my home for four years — has abandoned me,” Tabassum said, adding that the school denied her request for more information about their threat assessment. 

Pro-Palestinian students and groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace have faced discipline, sanctions, and campus suspensions and bans over protest activity since October 7 — part of a long history silencing student activism for Palestine. Meanwhile, students advocating for Palestine have been labeled antisemitic for chanting phrases such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “globalize the intifada.” Student protesters say the phrases don’t advocate for harm to Israelis, while critics say the phrases are threatening and call for violence.  

School leadership has often said the groups were reprimanded for violating school policies amid a rise in antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment on campus. On Thursday, police in riot gear arrested more than 100 pro-Palestinian Columbia students at President Minouche Shafik’s direction, while administrators suspended three Barnard students, including Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), for setting up “unauthorized” protest encampments on campus. 

USC has not responded to requests for further information about any specific threats to Tabassum or anyone else in the USC community. USC has not yet responded to Vox’s request for comment. 

“If anti-Palestinian groups are threatening violence, then USC needs to say what they’ve threatened and why it is so dangerous that it has led to such a drastic action, instead of disingenuously claiming that it isn’t engaging in censorship,” said Radhika Sainath, an attorney at Palestine Legal, an organization that defends people who speak out in support of Palestine. 

“The fact that Palestinians and their allies are being punished and canceled in this way — while Israel is committing an ongoing genocide in Gaza — speaks to the McCarthyite moment we’re in.”

USC’s decision raises questions about free speech on campus 

USC is a private school that makes First Amendment-like free speech promises, Alex Morey, an attorney at Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that advocates for free speech, told Vox. The school is also required to provide students First Amendment rights in certain situations under California’s Leonard Law, a 1992 statute that extended free speech protections to students at private colleges and universities in the state. The school’s decision to cancel Tabassum’s speech, Morey said, “does implicate campus expression in an important way.”  

“For those of us watching the campus speech space on the regular, canceling controversial speeches or events due to vague, unspecified ‘safety concerns’ is one of the oldest tricks in the book,” Morey said. “USC appears to have made a calculated move that this was the way to avoid the most criticism. Yanking the student’s valedictorian status or canceling the speech for viewpoint-based reasons would have pleased the students’ critics but angered her supporters. By citing ‘safety,’ however, USC’s doing their best to look like the good guy and suggest this isn’t about viewpoint at all.”

Morey told Vox the school should have done everything in its power to ensure that the event would go on, and that if threats remained, it should have been transparent about what those threats are.

If USC did in fact cancel the speech due to pressure from pro-Israel critics, now they know “that with the right amount of pressure, they can silence certain views at USC,” Morey said. 

The USC decision has also introduced bigger questions about whether students who have publicly expressed any views on Palestine or Israel will be passed over for honors in the future. These decisions might lead students to self-censor. 

“If USC will only honor students with certain views, are they really living up to their lofty free expression promises?” Morey said. 

Ironically, Morey pointed out, Tabassum minored in “resistance to genocide” and is effectively getting dinged for saying “precisely the kind of things you’d imagine one would hear in Resistance to Genocide 101 at a school like USC.”

A report released earlier this year from the National Clearinghouse Research Center found that higher education is finally experiencing a reversal in enrollment declines for the first time since the pandemic began. 

In fall 2023, there were about 176,000 more undergraduates enrolled, a 1.2 percent increase over fall 2022’s total enrollment at colleges nationwide. The trend could continue as applications continue to increase. 

College enrollment began retreating in certain parts of the country after a peak in 2010, so the increase is a welcome change as industry watchers continue to fear “the enrollment cliff” — shrinking class sizes year after year that have led to layoffs and consolidation and, ultimately, the shuttering of schools. A variety of factors have driven up enrollment this year: More older students matriculated, certificate and vocational programs at community colleges attracted more pupils, and those who had dropped out in previous years returned to complete their degrees.

“The undergraduate enrollment increase is significant. It’s the first time that we have seen this happen in our tracking, which goes back to 2015,” said Jeremy Cohen, a research associate at the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.  

But as the annual May 1 enrollment deadline nears for many colleges, the tumultuous rollout of the new FAFSA, which has caused massive delays in the admissions schedule for families and schools, could destroy the gains.

As of late March, 40 percent fewer first-time filers had completed the FAFSA — it stands for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid — compared with the same time last year, according to the National College Attainment Network, which analyzed new data from the Department of Education. In all, an estimated half a million to 700,000 fewer high school seniors will complete the FAFSA compared to the class of 2023, the NCAN told Inside Higher Education.

“It’s bad. There are a lot of words not fit to print to describe how bad the FAFSA rollout has been and the impact that’s going to have on student enrollment,” said Katharine Meyer, a Brookings Institution fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy. “I remain cautious to see what the fall 2024 [enrollment] numbers look like, to see if [the enrollment gains] are a shift in the trend, or if [2023] just ended up being a nice year.”

The debate over whether college is worth the cost is ongoing, and the FAFSA processing delays further complicate it. If students can’t access grants and loans for the coming academic year, college will be out of reach, particularly for low-income students. Ultimately, the promise of financial security — one of the most touted benefits of earning a post-secondary degree — could be elusive for many, especially students who stand to benefit the most from a college degree. 

Enrollment-dependent institutions will suffer, too. It’s why higher education experts are putting pressure on the Department of Education to fix these errors quickly.  

“We are urging the department to take immediate steps to address these issues. In the meantime, we are encouraging colleges and universities to be flexible with their enrollment deadlines, so we don’t inadvertently lose students in this process,” said Hironao Okahana, the assistant vice president and executive director of the Education Futures Lab at the American Council on Education, which tracks higher education trends. “We still believe that there is learning that happens at the post-secondary level that develops critical thinking and other aspects that are really important in democratic society, writ large.”

“That value proposition itself is still there, and we have work to do as a sector to make sure that those opportunities are provided equitably,” he added. 

Here’s what we know about enrollment trends and why the FAFSA complications might completely erase any gains this fall. 

With some colleges set to charge students $100,000 for room, board, and other expenses each year, there’s already a perception, among students and families, that higher education is unaffordable — a reality forcing some students to not attend altogether. Now, the chaotic rollout of the FAFSA has become a new major roadblock.

Congress directed the Department of Education to revamp the historically complicated FAFSA form to make it simpler for families to file and get financial aid awards. But the rollout grew disastrous beginning in January after thousands of students reported technical glitches that prevented them from completing the new form. While 40 percent fewer students completed the form this year, 27 percent fewer students submitted the form, according to data released by the Department of Education this week. The submission rate includes forms that still need to be corrected due to a variety of processing errors. 

After weeks of technical challenges that prevented families from completing the new form, the Department of Education announced that it would begin to transmit tax information to schools. Colleges are supposed to use this information to create financial aid packages for students, but even this step has presented new difficulties. 

School leaders have reported receiving inaccurate tax information for thousands of applicants. The Department of Education recently announced that 200,000 of the 1.5 million applications that it had sent to schools before March 21 had miscalculation errors. The latest hiccups could delay the admissions process further, well past the typical May 1 enrollment deadline that many schools have already extended.

“I expect to see this have a really stark impact on enrollment that will likely be concentrated among community college students, who tend to be lower income, and lower-income students in general,” Meyer said.

Community colleges saw the biggest enrollment increases last fall, adding 118,000 students — a 2.6 percent gain over the prior year, according to the National Clearinghouse report. Older students, those ages 21 and above who enrolled as first-year students, drove the enrollment increase. Community colleges that offered vocational training and dual-enrollment programs attracted more students, reversing pandemic declines. 

But the FAFSA complications could shift where students choose to go to school as they think through what they can afford, Meyer said. This means more students could opt for affordable options that might not meet their academic needs. Other students may choose to forgo college entirely. 

Students who plan to enroll as first-year students aren’t the only group who stand to be affected. “While much attention has focused on how this will impact first-time students and enrollment of new college classes, which it undoubtedly will, the effects on current students should not be overlooked,” said Cohen. “Because students who rely on financial aid need to fill out the FAFSA every year, delays or uncertainty in aid packages could lead to students who might otherwise continue their education stopping out instead.”

Enrollment-dependent institutions are also vulnerable. “There are institutions where the difference of 100 students is actually the difference between staying open and closing,” said Meyer. “There are students who are already enrolled in these precarious institutions that could only end up closing in the next year or two because of this.” 

Wisconsin’s Northland College, which enrolls around 526 students, recently declared financial exigency due to declining enrollment and rising costs and is deciding whether to close. The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, announced it would close at the end of the 2023–24 academic year due to enrollment “caused by both a shrinking pool of high school graduates and the prolonged negative impact of COVID-19,” which made it struggle to manage operating expenses.  

“In the long run, I think there’s every hope and expectation that this FAFSA simplification will deliver on its promise to get more low-income students into college,” said Meyer. “But the class of 2024 is being rocked really hard.”

The latest season of The Bachelor concluded with an emotional proposal and an exciting announcement: For the first time in the franchise’s more than 20-year history, there will be an Asian lead. 

While 26-year-old Jenn Tran’s coming tenure as the newest Bachelorette made many fans happy, the announcement has others downright furious and some feeling anxious. The anxiety about ABC’s decision has been clear online this week. When one X user wrote, “PLEASE PROTECT JENN FROM THE RACI$M of bachelor nation,” almost 5,000 users liked the post, with one replying that they could “already feel it.” 

Why are die-hard fans of the show already concerned about the treatment of the first Asian Bachelorette?

“The franchise is problematic. We know that,” said Ashley Tabron, who runs the popular AshTalksBach Bachelor fan account on Instagram. It took the show 15 years to cast its first non-white lead, and interviews with former Black contestants have long revealed that the show has a race problem. A racial reckoning ousted longtime host Chris Harrison three years ago, and just this season, producers were silent on questions about the show’s embedded racism.

However, Tabron says that ABC is at least “attempting” to improve casting, story editing, and screen time — production elements that have historically favored white contestants. But the problem doesn’t end there, as Tabron explains: “It doesn’t seem like the fan base is responding to that.”

The massive audience known as “Bachelor Nation” is many things, and it’s hard to paint with a broad brush. It’s a machine that’s eager to boost its favorite contestants or quick to tear down an unruly villain — and it’s notorious for its overt racism. New data shows that there’s still plenty of reason to believe that Bachelor Nation is overwhelmingly more supportive of and interested in white contestants.

Look no further than the contestants’ social media followings.

Before we delve into the numbers, it’s important to understand why social media followings mean so much in Bachelor-world: money. 

“Now that social media for this show has really seen a comeback, the monetization of social media is key,” said Suzana Somers, who runs Bachelor Data, Bachelor Nation’s go-to data analysis platform. 

Followers translate into career and financial opportunities for contestants, allowing them to create promotional content for major brands and develop online personas that help them launch their own products and projects. An influencer marketing agency estimated in 2020 that Bachelor influencers with more than a million followers can earn around $10,000 for a single sponsored Instagram post or story and between $500,000 and $1 million in a year. Bachelor influencers with about half a million followers can bring in an estimated $20,000 to $50,000 per month, the firm found. 

As much as viewers want to believe contestants go on the show simply to find love — the so-called “right reason” — aspirations of online influence and notoriety are major motivations for contestants. In turn, their hard work and more importantly brand partnerships keep the franchise’s fandom alive online. 

“When a contestant hits a certain milestone, follower-wise,” said Somers, “it can become a very big financial opportunity for them.”

Previous Bachelorettes and contestants have been able to unlock high follower counts and opportunities. JoJo Fletcher, a contestant on the 20th season of The Bachelor in 2016 and the lead on the 12th season of The Bachelorette that same year, has 2.6 million followers on Instagram and hosts regular product giveaways through partnerships with home furniture brand Abbyson Home and others. She’s also founded a spirits company, launched home decor and clothing lines, hosted a reality TV show for the USA Network, and partnered with brands such as recipe platform Yummly and Walmart. Season 23 contestant and former 2019 bachelorette Hannah Brown boasts 2.7 million followers on Instagram, and has erected an empire with a Dancing with the Stars season win, New York Times bestselling books, a podcast, and recent sponsorship deals with beverage company Flying Embers, cheese brand Athenos, and pharma giant AstraZeneca. 

Follower count is directly correlated to a contestant’s screen time and the nature of the screen time they receive. More screen time means a greater chance of being known to viewers, although a negative storyline usually hurts follower count (but can sometimes help). Ultimately, though, follower counts reveal who the fan base is excited about. “We fall in love with these contestants when they’re on the show. And when we follow them, we want insights into their lives. We want to live with them,” said Somers. “This is the purpose of reality TV, for us to live in somebody else’s life and experience their stories and find a way to relate.” 

“Instagram follower counts aren’t everything, but they give us a sense of whose stories we are invested in and whose stories we want to continue to follow,” said Tabron. 

Data across seasons, collected in real time by Somers, supports the idea that Bachelor Nation is not as interested in following contestants of color online. 

Somers noticed the racial trend when she first began collecting data during Colton Underwood’s 2019 season of The Bachelor. Contestant Tayshia Adams, who is Black and would go on to become the franchise’s second Black lead in 2020 after Rachel Lindsay in 2017, did not gain the kind of following that white contestants on the season did. 

“The trend was that if you got a one-on-one date, that would translate to more followers. But that didn’t hold with Tayshia,” Somers said. “Even with someone as beautiful and amazing as Tayshia, if you are white, you are going to get more followers than if you are not white.”

Though Tayshia has now built her Instagram following to 1.4 million (the only Black lead to have more than 1 million followers), it’s important to view her growth in comparison to her white counterparts in real time. During Colton’s season, the final four women were Cassie Randolph, Hannah Godwin, Caelynn Miller-Keyes, and Tayshia; all three white women had follower counts that fell between about 500,000 and 700,000, while Tayshia had less than 100,000.  

“You will not find a season where a person of color contestant is ahead of all the other white contestants, even if they’re [finalists],” said Somers.

Some viewers have tried to argue that the contestants and leads of color don’t have as many followers because they’re “boring” or simply not doing enough to grow their audiences. But this is the double-edged sword faced by many women of color on reality TV, including shows like Love Is Blind: be boring or risk being bad for everyone. “As women of color, they have to navigate more when they’re onscreen,” said Tabron. “There are all kinds of stereotypes they’re fighting because they aren’t just representing themselves but their entire communities. They have to be more conscious of how they’re being portrayed.” 

Somers crunched the numbers on Instagram follower counts for the season 28 cast of The Bachelor and found record-setting engagement, challenging the narrative that the “Bachelor-to-influencer pipeline is dead.” Leading contestants on the latest season surpassed 500,000 followers on Instagram while the show was still airing, a new feat. Still, the social media gains have mostly been shared by the season’s white contestants.

This season, Daisy Kent, a crowd favorite runner-up from Becker, Minnesota, became the first to surpass 500,000 followers, and now hovers at around 747,000 days after her hot-seat interview during the finale. Maria Georgas, who gained a cult following for standing up to bullies on the show, is now at 593,000. Winner Kelsey Anderson shot up to 550,000 Instagram followers days after the finale. These numbers are groundbreaking, according to Somers. 

But contestants of color haven’t fared the same. Though Asian contestants broke barriers in their own right this season when it came to social media and representation on the show, Bachelor fandom isn’t recognizing them with follows — an extension of what Black contestants have experienced since being made leads. 

Following the finale, Jenn Tran has the fourth-highest number of followers — 164,000 — although she only crossed the 100,000 mark after being announced the Bachelorette. Rachel Nance, one of Joey’s final three contestants who was sent home after the coveted overnight date, is of Filipino and African American descent and has around 90,000 followers days after the finale. On “The Women Tell All” episode, which aired on March 18, Nance opened up about receiving racist messages from fans online. 

Jenn and Rachel’s stunted online growth somewhat mirrors Charity Lawson’s, the franchise’s fourth Black Bachelorette, who despite leading season 27 and making it to the finals of Dancing with the Stars, has fewer than 300,000 followers. 

These numbers show race is still the elephant in the room for Bachelor Nation. 

“The leads and contestants of color do so much on their platforms after the show,” said Tabron. “Charity, she’s done so much. Anybody else that would have done what she’s done that wasn’t Black would have a million followers. The only difference is race.”

Netflix’s Love Is Blind is reigniting conversations about whether the show’s unique dating experiment — courting sight unseen — benefits Black women. 

Since season six of the hit show began airing on Valentine’s Day this year, all eyes have been on Amber Desiree (AD) Smith and her bumbling journey through the pods. AD quickly became a fan favorite because she was candid about her destructive choices when it comes to love. “If I see a red flag, I’m like, ‘Oh, well, I’ll just paint my nails red to match,’” AD confessed to the camera early in the season. This tragic admission informed her decision to pair up with Clay, a man who reminded her of her exes and revealed that he selected women solely based on physical appearance. The internet placed Clay in the show’s villain category once he probed AD about her looks, a major faux pas for a show titled “Love Is Blind.” 

Throughout the course of their engagement, Clay earned that villain title. Commentators noted how he treated AD like a receptacle for his trauma, even going as far as laying his head on AD’s chest to be coddled like a newborn minutes into their reveal. “I’m a baby,” he told AD, as they took stock of their physical characteristics, noting that both of them were dark-skinned. Clay talked about his father’s infidelity like it was the third partner in their relationship and focused on how AD could build him up. He repeatedly expressed fear about commitment, but AD held his hand through the process. He ultimately managed to shock AD, in front of their parents and other family members and friends, when he said no to marrying her at the altar. 

Outside of her relationship with Clay, AD faced additional hurdles during filming. Her castmates drew attention to her body, pointing out how “stacked” she is, and made an inside joke (“bean dip”) about non-consensually smacking her breasts, which, no need to look it up, is in fact sexual assault. Now, a year after filming, AD says that she “had such an amazing experience” on Love Is Blind. But her storyline highlights some of the sinister aspects of dating as a Black woman, and because it’s airing on Netflix, the reality is being splashed across one of the world’s biggest platforms. AD’s experience is connected to that of Lauren, Diamond, Iyanna, Raven, Tiffany, and Aaliyah — Black women whose stories came before hers on Love Is Blind — as well as to the Black women whose journeys were never shown, and even those well beyond the show’s pods. 

To talk about how this show positions Black women, I reached out to “meeting and mating” sociologist Sarah Adeyinka-Skold, an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University. Adeyinka-Skold studies how “inequalities are produced and reproduced” in romantic relationships, and says that Love Is Blind viewers are naive to have ever thought that this experiment, sometimes billed as an equalizer, would help Black women have an easier time finding love. We talk about the unique challenges Black women face, their limited portrayals on the show, the issues with casting, and why Black women’s pain seems to be profitable for both Netflix and the show’s producers. 

We are now six seasons in on Love Is Blind and I find myself questioning whether Black women should continue to go on this show. Have you been wondering the same thing?

I can honestly see an argument for Black women to not go on the show. What we’re seeing is that external constraints like racism and sexism are always in the pods even though the show has tried to create this other reality. 

What kinds of portrayals of Black women are allowed on Love Is Blind?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the reality they choose to show and how they choose to edit. They’re choosing to give us some things and not give us others. They’re creating a reality that reinforces these gendered racial stereotypes of Black women as these Jezebels — hypersexual and promiscuous. And as these mammies who are caring. 

In season four, they had these two white nasty women [Irina and Micah] on the show. That’s not behavior we could ever see from Black women on that show! The kind of backlash they would get. And I wouldn’t want them to depict Black women that way. But again, there’s this humanity and fullness of person, or a spectrum of white womanhood that we get to see, that we don’t get to see with Black women. 

All of the Black women on the show are professionals. They’re extremely kind. They’re extremely smart. But we don’t get to see that. We see the producers and editors focus on the problems these women have. Why are we treating the representation of Black women so basic? 

Black women being ignored, disrespected, or rejected on dating shows isn’t new. We have so many examples from the Bachelor and Perfect Match to Married at First Sight and Love Island. Black women are either treated as side characters or just not given a chance to shine at all. But it felt like Love Is Blind could somehow equalize dating and create a space for Black women to be seen and celebrated. Do you think this has happened?

I think when people say that, they’re being naive about how our social structure is shaped and formed. Anytime anyone says that something is supposed to be the great equalizer, we should side-eye them and ask, “What does that actually mean?”

In this context, that idea shows a lack of understanding of how our society is set up on purpose to put Black women at the bottom of the gender and racial hierarchy. To think that any dating show could be an equalizer for Black women is pretending that that hierarchy doesn’t matter.

Let’s talk about casting. People have criticized the show for not casting men who are interested in dating Black women. 

We think about romance and love as these agentic, individual things that we do in silos. We’re constantly acting as though we are choosing or making decisions outside of our social structure. But the fact of the matter is, this country was built on the rape, pillaging, and conquest of Black women’s bodies. It’s also built on explicit laws that said you should not be marrying Black people, laws that were on the books until 1967 with the Loving v. Virginia case. So how do we think that that’s all just going to disappear? My question is, what do people mean when they say we need to get men that are interested in Black women, and dark-skinned Black women, in particular? Isn’t that the antithesis of the show? 

If the whole premise of the show is emotional connection, maybe what they’re trying to say is you need to bring people on the show that are really tuned into and attracted to the experiences that Black women have, [who] know for themselves that Black women’s stories and the experiences make them great partners. So maybe what we mean is we need to cast men who are intimately familiar with the Black woman experience, and it’s part of their attraction to these women.

Yes, that is the subtext. Most of the people I’ve seen making this suggestion are Black women. AD herself is advocating for a better vetting process, and a few seasons ago, former contestant Raven Ross said men in the pods “weren’t looking” for Black women. So it seems like Black women in the pods have had to do this kind of initial vetting themselves. 

That’s why AD asked Matt, “Do race and ethnicity matter to you?” She was correctly attuned to the fact that he is white. And when she asked, she was talking about skin color, but the subtext was also, “I’m coming in with a particular kind of experience that you’re not going to get with any other woman precisely because of the way our social structure is set up.”

Let’s break down some of the issues in AD’s relationship with Clay and try to make sense of what it all means for Black women who go on this show and for Black women who date on any reality TV show, online, or in real life. 

Let me first say that any man of any race can say all of the things that Clay said. But when we think about the cultural imagination about Black men, unfortunately, Clay checks off all of the boxes of what we think about Black men who are good-looking and as egotistical as Clay. 

We can think of it like a Venn diagram. There’s the circle of shitty men characteristics, and then another circle for Black men characteristics, and then in the middle you have Clay. So together, Clay is a shitty man who also happens to be Black. 

And when we think about what a shitty Black man is, he’s a guy who cheats. He’s a guy who’s not ready for commitment. He’s a guy who is stuck on the physical. He’s a guy who’s maybe fine dating non-Black women but doesn’t think that Black women should be interested in non-Black men. Like, he’s so much cooler. He’s a cool Black guy, so how could AD possibly be interested in a guy like Matt? 

In the United States, there are these characteristics that we associate with shitty men, but when you’re a shitty man in Black skin, society looks at it differently. Society says, oh my goodness, they are going to ruin your family. They are going to be violent. They are going to be cheaters. It doesn’t carry the same type of weight as a shitty man in a different skin tone. 

So unfortunately for Clay because he happens to be a shitty man who’s also Black, he’s just playing into that cultural imagination, those stereotypes, that we already have of Black men and which we think is the source of Black women and Black families’ problems. When you have a society where Black people are at the bottom of the racial hierarchy and Black men are demonized, Clay is seen as particularly bad. Again, I don’t think that Clay is doing anything original.

It feels like Black women are having this conversation among themselves. I don’t know that I’ve seen many men outraged, apart from Wale who’s been keeping his foot on Clay’s neck on X all season. 

That points back to our racialized and gendered society. Black women are often the ones that have to bear the burden of choosing Black men, of being committed to the racial uplift of Black people, of choosing Black community over themselves. 

People are always holding Black women to the highest standard. Black women understand that it’s on them to keep Blackness afloat. It’s on them to breathe the respectability of Blackness. It’s on them to show other people we can have Black love and Black families. Black men don’t care about this because first of all, they’re men. They are rewarded regardless. They don’t have to care because the pressure is not on them to keep the race going. The pressure is not on them to choose the community every time. And if they do that, people are like, “Oh, that’s fantastic.” You get extra points for choosing the community and choosing Black women. 

But Black women don’t get extra points. And in fact, they get deducted points, if they do something like date a white guy, which goes outside of the norms. And I think that AD probably didn’t even understand how much the experience within a culture that says, “This is what good Black women do” also impacts the decisions that she’s making. That’s why Black women are having this conversation. They recognize that these two things constrain the ways in which they’re allowed to be fully human. 

Some would argue that Black women have had some successful relationships on LIB. For example, fans view season one’s Lauren and Cameron as the show’s golden couple. And then we have Tiffany and Brett, who are celebrated for being the show’s first Black couple that has remained together. 

I like the contrast with Tiffany and Brett. They did a good job in season four of giving us a successful story. It was just really beautiful and I’m glad that they did that. But I also think it shouldn’t be an anomaly. It shouldn’t be that in these other seasons we’re kind of treating Black women like trash. We need to see the full experience of Black women just like we see the full experience of white women on the show.

I’ve seen white commentators call Tiffany and Brett boring, while others have complained that they don’t get enough attention from the franchise. 

When you say it’s boring, what are you looking for? Are you looking for that drama that you guys focused on in season five? Is that the only thing we’re capable of watching? These are the same groups of people who will tell us that the Black family is in shambles because all the men are like Clay. But y’all want to watch that shit on television. You guys will tell us Black families are poor because the women are too much in charge. But y’all want to watch that shit on television. So when there are Black healthy relationships, they’re calling it boring. That should make you question what it is you want to watch and why. Why do you want to see Black people as stereotypically dysfunctional? So Black people can’t win. 

Though AD and Clay say they’re not dating, viewers are speculating that they are still together based on their body language during certain moments of the reunion. But if some months from now they do announce that they are giving it another go, how should we interpret their decision?

I think we need to understand that AD and Clay are navigating some pretty complicated structural and agentic constraints as they are trying to find love. As we have discussed, no white woman on the show was like, “What do you think about race?” They have never asked that question. I will die on that hill. 

AD and Clay are still navigating gender and race in a way that white people simply will never have to. And so we need to extend to them the full grace that we give to humans because they are humans. 

The federal form used to apply for financial aid, the FAFSA, got an update this year — and so far, it’s been a mess. Many students who need money for college the most have been affected.

Now the US Department of Education is scrambling to smooth out the kinks in its rollout and send out college financial aid information this month for the upcoming school year.

Millions of college applicants who need grants, loans, or work-study funds complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, each year, and states and colleges use the form to determine which students are eligible to get them. 

The updated form will eventually make it easier for students to get financial aid, the department said. An additional 610,000 students from low-income backgrounds will receive need-based Pell Grants due to the new configuration — making more than 5.2 million eligible for the maximum Pell Grant award of $7,395 per year. 

“The delays are challenging, but colleges will be much better off, too,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told reporters at a roundtable in February. “If you’re a school that has a higher percentage of students with Pell grants, you’re going to get more than you would have ever gotten.”

However, students are experiencing major setbacks in completing the form, with technical roadblocks and application delays since the form was soft-launched in late December. The situation has gotten so challenging that groups who work with students particularly in need of aid say some are rethinking attending college altogether. 

“We tell our students that college is possible, regardless of their financial situation. But many of them, and their families, have this notion that there’s no way they can pay tuition. So it is the financial aid that makes it possible for them,” said Heather Wathington, the CEO of iMentor, an organization that helps first-generation students from marginalized communities get into college. 

“Not having this process roll out [smoothly] really undermines all the kids that are on the fence or unsure about whether they can go to college,” Wathington said. “This is sending them a message to say ‘you can’t go’ and that’s paralyzing.”

Why was the FAFSA redesigned?

The federal government developed and released a new FAFSA form because the former version, to put it plainly, was a major headache for students and families. 

The form hadn’t been updated since its predecessor, the Common Financial Aid Form, was introduced under President Ronald Reagan, according to the Department of Education. It had more than 100 questions and was notoriously complex. Then, in 2019, Congress passed the FUTURE Act, to give the IRS permission to share data with the Department of Education — meaning that students didn’t have to fill out information about family income that the government already had or go to the IRS’s website to transfer their data. The FAFSA Simplification Act, a federal student aid overhaul law passed in 2020, permitted major changes to various FAFSA policies and procedures.  

For example, the department’s Federal Student Aid office introduced a new measure to determine a family’s ability to pay for college. Whereas the previous formula asked about the number of family members in college, the new methodology determines family size based on tax returns. Pell Grants will be expanded to more students and eligibility will be determined based on family size and the federal poverty level, according to the Federal Student Aid office.

The department has called the improvements to the application “unprecedented.” The new form is supposed to be simpler since it includes the direct income data exchange with the IRS. The form is also shorter since it tailors the application based on an applicant’s responses. In some cases, it can be as few as 18 questions, according to lawmakers. 

But the launch of the form has been plagued with hiccups and inefficiencies, causing massive disruptions to the college application timeline and creating additional roadblocks for the most disadvantaged applicants. 

Historically, the FAFSA application had opened on October 1, allowing students to apply for funds, weigh their options, and make their college decisions by May 1. But this time, the new form wasn’t available until December 30, and then only for brief periods — the site repeatedly locked students out due to technical glitches and for maintenance.

The department resolved some of those issues in January, but decided to make a last-minute change to the financial aid calculation to account for inflation and said that it wouldn’t transfer students’ information to colleges until the first half of March, months behind the department’s initial January estimate. 

What has the FAFSA chaos meant for students and colleges?

The department’s decision to simplify the form was initially praised. But the delays have met with widespread criticism from lawmakers, students and families, colleges and universities, and others. 

As of February 27, more than 3.1 million FAFSA forms have been submitted since late December, representing about 18 percent of the 17 million students who typically submit a FAFSA each year. 

Data from the National College Attainment Network’s FAFSA tracker, which collects FAFSA data at local and national levels, has found that through February 23, FAFSA submissions for the class of 2024 were down about 57 percent compared to last year’s graduating class. The tracker also found that the application period has been “disproportionately sluggish” for high schools primarily serving students of color and students from low-income backgrounds. 

The issues have been ongoing. The department has kept a long public list of the issues that families have faced amid the rollout, including students who have been unable to save or submit the form, parents who have been unable to access the FAFSA despite starting the application for their child, or parents or students without social security numbers unable to start or reenter forms. A number of the issues have affected parents who are not US citizens or permanent residents. Some of the issues have been resolved with workarounds, while others are still awaiting a fix. 

The traditional National College Decision Day for a majority of colleges is May 1, but many schools, including Pennsylvania and Washington state schools, have pushed the enrollment deadline to June 1 while others have suspended their admissions deadlines until they get more information from the Department of Education. Other schools have switched to rolling admissions. Education policy experts have noted that the delays will mostly affect colleges that serve more low-income students and students of color. 

Once colleges receive this information later this month, they’ll race to get financial aid packages to families. But since processes have been reworked, they’ll have to run financial aid systems tests and carry out new student aid compliance requirements before they can send awards to students, the department said. 

These issues can set off a domino effect. The delayed transfer of FAFSA information to schools delays when colleges can start processing information and ultimately creates a stressful situation in which families must compare financial aid packages and make decisions quickly. Wait lists can be thrown off. Plus, some states and schools provide financial aid on a first-come, first-served basis, a reality that has worried families. The department has, however, assured families that everyone is in the same situation — though some students have been able to submit their applications while others have not. 

Others worry that students won’t be able to make decisions until the end of the school year in May and June. For marginalized students who need the support of nonprofit organizations and other assistance, new problems can arise during the summer. 

“Our Chicago students are basically out of school by late May and our program ends in June. So if school’s out and kids get these letters, who’s going to help them navigate this process? Will they give up? Will they be so frustrated and not sure what to do and how to enroll in a school?” Wathington said. Each year, iMentor helps more than 1,000 students complete the FAFSA. 

“The kids get discouraged, so we’re trying to keep their emotions high and the resilience up so they can get through the process of completing the form,” she said. “And keeping them hopeful.”

What happens next? 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has acknowledged the missteps but says the changes are necessary. 

“We’re working with different contractors on the backend and the processing to try to modernize everything. It’s become very frustrating,” Cardona told reporters. Part of the delay in getting the data out is in November his team learned that they had to make an adjustment for inflation. 

“Our projections for what students could get became impacted by inflation,” Cardona said. “We learned that that would result in $1.8 billion in the pockets of students if we used the new numbers. The formula and back-end stuff was set up, so we had to make a decision: Do we go with the numbers and leave $1.8 billion on the table or do we redo all that work we did because we want to get the $1.8 billion out? That’s a no-brainer. It doesn’t make it any easier, but we made that decision consciously.”

Last month the department announced that it was launching a “College Support Strategy” to send teams of federal financial aid experts to “lower-resourced colleges” to provide consultations as the schools assembled aid packages. While many colleges have already pushed back their deadlines for students to accept or decline admissions offers, the department is urging more schools to give students more flexibility and time to make their enrollment decisions. 

In the first half of this month, the department will begin sending batches of FAFSA information to colleges and state agencies. The department estimates that it will be able to transfer the majority of the information within weeks after that. 

“The delays are challenging. We’re going to do everything we can to get through these next couple months with our colleges. We’re sending them staff. We’re going to get through it and these colleges will be much better off. That’s more dollars for schools. At the end of the day, this is opening the door so much to higher education leveling the playing field.”

Though practitioners believe there will be hope for future classes of students, there’s worry that the delays will cause big problems for certain institutions and the current class of students that can’t be overlooked. 

“My guess is students will decide to go to the schools that they know are most affordable, said Wathington. “Here in New York, they’re likely to go to a SUNY but if they don’t hear from SUNY, and they’ve applied to CUNY and they know CUNY is much cheaper, they may just decide to go to CUNY school.” This is a problem for institutions concerned about their yield, she said. 

For some students, access will continue to be a problem.

“We don’t have the number of kids we want entering college and enrolling as it is,” Wathington said. “And with these rollbacks on race-conscious admissions, and now having the carpet swept out from under you in terms of aid and access, you’re just closing the door to kids who wouldn’t traditionally go into higher education.”

She added, “I want to be hopeful for next year, that it ends up being all the things that Secretary Cardona is expecting, but I think for this year, there will be a deep impact on access. There are kids who are going to be harmed by the fact that it didn’t happen for them. They’re caught in between a system that was and a system that’s changing.”

America’s colleges and universities are embroiled in yet another debate about admissions. 

This time, they’re rethinking their positions on standardized testing. 

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, several elite colleges made the submission of SAT and ACT scores optional for applicants.

Testing had become a hassle, with limited testing locations and time for students to get prepared. The anti-testing movement had long contended that standardized tests reinforce racial and economic inequality and that reliance on them harms students from disadvantaged backgrounds. During the pandemic, those students faced additional roadblocks. Schools loosened restrictions to simplify the process for everyone. 

But last week, Yale University announced that it was reversing course. 

Going forward, students must include test scores with their applications, and for the first time, the school is allowing applicants to report Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exam scores in place of SAT or ACT scores. 

The move follows two others reinstating testing requirements of some kind: Dartmouth College earlier this month and MIT in 2022.

So why are (a few elite) school leaders changing their minds? 

They’re pointing to new research that says that test scores are actually helpful for admissions decisions — and beneficial for marginalized students.

Do standardized tests make school admissions more or less fair?

The anti-testing movement has long held that tests maintain inequality and are a disservice to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. 

There are reasons for that: Tests can be discriminatory. 

A study from Opportunity Insights, a group of Harvard economists, found that “students from low-income families and other less advantaged backgrounds have lower standardized test scores and are less likely to take the test than students from higher income families” due to “differences in school quality, neighborhood exposure, and many other environmental conditions.” 

But that wasn’t their central finding. They and the other researchers fueling the recent admissions reversals have found that test-optional practices harm students from low-income backgrounds. 

That’s because when given the option to submit scores, these students decided not to submit them out of fear that their scores weren’t perfect. 

Instead, admissions counselors have found that strong scores from students of lower-income backgrounds are an indicator that they would excel academically in college.

What does the research say about how universities use test scores?

One thing college admissions officers consider when evaluating a potential student is: Will they succeed here? And researchers have tried to determine the connection between test scores and that college success. 

In one study, Dartmouth researchers found that test scores were a better indicator of college performance than grades, essays, or teacher recommendations. 

And importantly, researchers found that test scores help admissions officers better pick out high-achieving less-advantaged applicants. 

Under the test-optional policy, “many high-achieving less-advantaged applicants choose not to submit scores even when doing so would allow Admissions to identify them as students likely to succeed at Dartmouth and in turn benefit their application,” the researchers wrote. 

The Opportunity Insights researchers similarly examined the connection between test scores and student success at IvyPlus institutions (the eight Ivy League colleges plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago). 

They found that “Even among otherwise similar students with the same high school grades, […] SAT and ACT scores have substantial predictive power for academic success in college.” These researchers also found that higher high school GPAs are not associated with higher college GPAs. 

Yale’s research has identified the same thing. In its announcement, the school wrote, “test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT.” 

In short, according to Opportunity Insights’ findings, it can be the case that tests reinforce inequality generally but also allow schools to identify individual kids who are academically prepared despite challenging circumstances.

What happens next

Yale and Dartmouth have emphasized that test scores are simply one part of their whole-person review processes. 

Using test scores in the years before the pandemic had not harmed Yale’s diversity efforts, the university said in its announcement, citing gains in the number of admitted first-generation college students and under-represented minority students. 

And it’s worth pointing out that some of the wealthiest applicants never stopped testing and submitting scores when possible.  

Adam Nguyen, who founded Ivy Link, a firm that helps students gain admission to selective colleges, never changed the advice he gave to clients.

“I can tell you that a number of things on the application are ‘optional,’ but to get into the Ivy League and other elite colleges, an applicant has to go above and beyond the minimum requirements,” he said.

And for wealthy students, that can mean paying firms like his tens of thousands of dollars to help curate outstanding extracurricular resumes, design showcase projects, and bolster their grades. Comparatively, he said, “standardized tests are probably the avenue where kids” can excel with fewer resources.

Meanwhile, the anti-testing movement has said the attention to the test-optional reversals is excessive. An overwhelming majority of US colleges and universities remain test-optional. 

At least 1,825 four-year colleges in the US — or more than 80 percent of them — will not require SAT or ACT scores for fall 2025, according to FairTest, an organization that advocates against testing requirements.

“Despite a media frenzy around a single Ivy League school reinstating testing requirements, ACT/SAT-optional and test-blind/score-free policies remain the new normal in undergraduate admissions,” said FairTest executive director Harry Feder.

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