It’s been another busy year on the higher ed beat, and our reporters have been on top of the biggest stories and themes. Thanks for reading.

Do you have stories we should explore in 2024, or ideas you’d like to read about in this newsletter? Email me: [email protected].

Growing skepticism of higher ed

A major theme in our reporting this year is one that we fully expect to continue to grapple with in 2024: growing distrust in higher ed.

It’s a challenge facing community college presidents who need to boost anemic enrollment numbers while potential students see faster paths to opportunity elsewhere. And, it’s something we talked to residents about on visits to see our reporters in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Some are worried about the cost. Others are interested in the idea of college on paper — but they don’t see it fitting in their lives. 

“There are no big, splashy narratives that say, ‘Going to college is good.’ So it’s still really just the same narrative that’s been said forever, which is essentially, ‘College eventually pays more,’” Akil Bello, senior director of advocacy and advancement at FairTest, told Emma Folts at our partner PublicSource in her story about a downward trend in college-going. 

We believe that strong local reporting is key to combating this trust gap. Emma won a statewide journalism award for her work this year. (Watch this video to learn more about her work with Open Campus.)

Molly Minta at our partner Mississippi Today and Sneha Dey at our partner The Texas Tribune explored this skepticism in recent stories, too. In rural Mississippi, where getting a degree means leaving home far behind, college comes with tradeoffs. And in Vernon, Texas, the local community college is struggling to stay relevant. 

Nick Fouriezos, our reporter covering rural higher ed, found another rural angle to rising distrust in higher ed. Residents of Montgomery, W. Va. feel betrayed after West Virginia University moved WVU Tech out of town, into a larger city. 

“West Virginia’s decision to move WVU Tech is important not just for what it took away but also for the distrust it fueled with its departure,” Nick writes. “The residents of Montgomery feel abandoned by the state’s powerful flagship university, which also has become the state’s largest healthcare provider and employer.”

The return of student loan payments

This fall marked a major milestone for millions of Americans: The return of student-loan payments after a three-year respite. Forty percent of people didn’t make their first monthly payment this fall, the Education Department announced last week. 

We’ve been covering the return of loan payments all year — from the challenges facing formerly incarcerated borrowers and the particular burden of Parent PLUS loans, the Pittsburghers hoping for debt forgiveness, and the government’s options for relief. And, we’ve heard from borrowers about what they did during the pause — like a Chicago-area man who put his monthly loan payments toward adopting a baby.

We’ll continue to follow this issue, particularly as we continue to hear from confused borrowers and see struggling loan servicers. 

And, we’re watching another developing financial aid story: The unveiling of the revamped FAFSA later this month. Our reporters have localized that story from El Paso to Indianapolis. Are you a college counselor navigating the new form rollout? Please get in touch: [email protected].

Politics on campus

There are perhaps no reporters in the country more dialed into state politics and higher ed than our reporters at our partners The Texas Tribune and The Tampa Bay Times.

Kate McGee broke a series of the biggest higher ed stories of the year as she detailed how Texas A&M University backed off offering a high-profile teaching role to a veteran Black journalist, Kathleen McElroy, amid fear of backlash from the state’s conservative power brokers. 

Kate’s reporting led to the abrupt retirement of the university’s president, M. Katherine Banks, who had initially claimed to be unaware that the university watered down its offer. The university ended up paying McElroy — whose prior experience at the New York Times raised concerns among regents — a $1 million settlement. 

The hiring scandal is just one such example of outside interference in university-level decisions that Kate covered this year. She, along with Ian Hodgson and Divya Kumar at the Tampa Bay Times have reported on seismic shifts in their respective states — from the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices; attacks on tenure; and the overhaul of New College. 

“It’s funny because this year a lot of Texans have been saying that we’ve been really trying to just keep up with Gov. DeSantis and what he’s been doing in Florida,” Kate told me in a virtual event with Divya and Ian over the summer. “But Texas is a very big, powerful state, and they’re kind of a test case. What happens in our legislature really has a ripple effect across the country, and I think it’s a place to watch for what might be happening in other state houses moving forward.”

Our reporters have done great work on this topic this year — a few other can’t miss stories:

• Can John Sharp protect his maroon empire?

• Are Florida laws chasing university faculty away? Some see a ‘brain drain.’

• ‘We have to fight for it’: As more states bar DEI programs, public HBCU communities worry what it means for them

The future of admissions

Our reporters spent the year covering the fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling to end race-conscious admissions. We had day-of coverage across the country, from Mississippi to Cleveland to Indiana. 

And, we’ve gone deeper since then. WBEZ Chicago’s Lisa Philip showed what the debate over affirmative action has meant for Asian Americans, and spoke to high schoolers who wondered what to say in their college essays. 

And, other areas of admissions have gotten scrutiny, such as legacy admissions and merit aid. Both those practices fuel inequality, and legacy admissions in particular drives high admissions rates for wealthy students at the Ivy League. (Open Campus CEO Scott Smallwood shows how, in this interactive graphic drawing on Opportunity Insights data that came out over the summer.) 

There’s more to watch in this space.

“To me, college admissions remains a ticking time bomb where one side needs to change tactics—either colleges stop using all the enrollment management strategies they employ (like deferring most of their EA pool to protect yield) or students apply to fewer colleges,” higher ed author Jeff Selingo wrote in his newsletter this week. “Who will blink first?”

Support our work

Thanks for reading Open Campus this year. You still have a few more days to triple your donation of up to $1,000.

Your support will help us double our local reporting partnerships next year, deepen coverage of higher ed in prisons, and train student journalists from historically Black colleges.

And, you can show your support for our local newsroom partners as well with a donation to their year-end campaigns: 

• CalMatters in California

• WBEZ in Chicago

• Signal Cleveland

• Chalkbeat Colorado

• El Paso Matters 

• The Texas Tribune

• Mirror Indy in Indiana

• Mississippi Today

• PublicSource in Pittsburgh

• Tampa Bay Times

++ We’re accepting pitches now through Jan. 15 for one-time ambitious stories that local newsrooms want to tell with our support. If we accept a pitch, we’ll give the newsroom $10,000 and guide the reporter through the process. Learn more and apply.

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