2024 was a big year for Open Campus. We added five newsrooms to our Local Network and started a Texas-specific collaborative. Every day, we saw the power of local beat reporting to inform and strengthen communities. We were even recognized with several industry awards. 

Read more about the impact of our work. And, if you value the work we do to improve Americans’ understanding of colleges in their communities, please consider supporting our year-end campaign.

❄️ This is our last Dispatch of the year! We’ll be back in your inboxes on Friday, Jan. 10. Happy holidays! 

Protests and financial aid barriers: Four headlines from 2024

The FAFSA causes chaos 

At the start of 2024, the government released the updated free financial aid application, the FAFSA. It sparked a wave of issues. Mixed-status families couldn’t access it for a time and some immigrant students lost out on aid. Endless glitches and limited customer support made it hard to wade through. Some students ended up enrolling at colleges without knowing the aid they’d receive. Across the country, FAFSA completion rates dropped. This was undoubtedly one of the biggest through lines of our coverage this year, as the FAFSA is a critical first step for students to access help paying for college. 

“’Will our students be able to pay for college this fall?’ is the question at hand for us,” Sharon Oliver, the associate vice chancellor for enrollment at North Carolina Central University, told the UNC Board of Governors back in the spring.

The Education Department has since made a raft of fixes, nudges to get students to complete the form are working, and the 2025 cycle is off to a smoother start. Along the way, we highlighted bright spots, like a peer mentorship program in New York City designed to help steer low-income students heading off to college.

Student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza spread

Pro-Palestinian protests took hold of college campuses across the country in the spring, the result of long-simmering anger over Israel’s war in Gaza. Our local reporters covered this sensitive situation with nuance, and tracked what was happening long before it became a mainstream news story. They were there for key moments, such as when police tear-gassed protesters at the University of South Florida and swept the encampment at Case Western Reserve University. 

And, because they understood the powerful role universities played in their communities, they brought complexity to the situation and produced more thoughtful coverage. In Texas, this meant highlighting the hypocrisy of dozens of arrests after years of conservative lawmakers espousing free speech protections. In Mississippi, it meant calling out the racist jeers of counter-protesters.

Our reporters also focused on more than just confrontations. They captured the closure of a social-justice hub at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, as well as moments of dancing and generosity at Northwestern and the University of Chicago.

And, they highlighted the voices at the center of the fray, including pro-Israel students in Pittsburgh and seniors in Texas who fear their involvement in demonstrations will hinder their post-college plans.

This was also an opportunity for our Open Campus team to provide expertise that sharpened this coverage. We coached reporters on how to approach encampment reporting, and provided templates and tipsheets for filing public-records requests about arrests and police involvement. I wrote more about our approach at the time:

DEI attacks continue

We continued to cover attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and free speech on campuses. This is a trend that I am certain will continue into 2025, particularly as we begin covering higher ed under President Donald Trump’s administration. 

North Carolina’s public university system banned DEI initiatives over the summer, a move that stoked fear among the LGBTQ community. Our partnership with WUNC was first to capture how North Carolina’s 16 universities were handling the directive — they shut offices, eliminated staff positions, and rebranded initiatives. Rebranding was a common tactic — we saw this happen in Mississippi, to give just one example. 

We also saw what happens when universities are faced with ambiguous guidance — they tend to over-correct, taking stances that are more restrictive than perhaps lawmakers even intended.

I wrote in June about how this is the point of DEI bans: It was “always meant to be an ambiguous enterprise to really curtail discussions that certain individuals viewed to be inappropriate,” Antonio L. Ingram II, assistant counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, told me at the time. 

Public regionals facing financial issues 

We wrote a lot about financial problems facing public regional universities.

Delta State University and Cleveland State University embarked on layoffs and buyouts to help close a $40 million budget hole. In North Carolina, UNC Asheville and UNC Greensboro were forced to cut several majors.

We also explored how these financial issues affect rural universities. In a collaboration with The Hechinger Report, three of our reporters visited rural universities and regional flagships in Mississippi, North Carolina, and Ohio to report on program cuts and what they mean for students. 

“All you hear is, ‘We used to have this, because we used to have more students,’” said Dominick Bellipanni, a music major at Delta State.

🎄 A holiday reading list 🎄 

Of course, we don’t just report on news as it happens. The beauty of beat reporting is that our reporters around the country are enmeshed in their communities, producing stories you wouldn’t get otherwise. A few of my favorites from the year, for your holiday fireside reading: 

• Slings and arrows set aside in Allegheny County Jail-based ‘Hamlet’ workshops (Maddy Franklin, PublicSource) 

• Indy’s lost Black neighborhood: How IUPUI displaced thousands (Claire Rafford, Mirror Indy) 

• A suburban family promised Chicago students help paying for college. Then they backed out. (Lisa Kurian Philip, WBEZ)

• Fritos for lunch, Skittles for dinner: Many HCC students can’t get fresh meals on campus (Miranda Dunlap, Houston Landing) 

The promise of free tuition, and the challenge of talking about it

Minnesota this year began giving out free-tuition scholarships to students attending its public colleges. This has brought bills down for more than 16,700 people so far, and one of the program’s main supporters in the Legislature hopes to see it expanded. We dug into North Star Promise in partnership with MinnPost — it’s the fifth of our local story collaborations, a new initiative we began in 2024.

For North Star Promise recipients living on-campus, they still must contend with the cost of meals and room and board. This is a core challenge to talking about programs like Minnesota’s North Star Promise, which is a last-dollar, tuition-only scholarship.

They’re effective, particularly when designed as simply as Minnesota’s is. But the cost of college is complicated to talk about, and families don’t always understand what else they may owe. That’s something the state has been proactive about, hosting in-person and virtual workshops around the state and walking financial aid advisers through the specifics.

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