ITHACA, N.Y. — It’s been two weeks since Tompkins County opened its temporary winter homeless shelter in a converted bank in downtown Ithaca. In the shelter’s first week of operation, fewer than half the people seeking shelter county-wide were housed there.

The temporary facility is part of a state-mandated program called “Code Blue” that requires counties to provide shelter, no questions asked, on nights when the temperature dips below freezing. 

The newly opened facility is the result of a major last-minute effort to stand up Code Blue services after the county was unable to hire a non-profit organization to manage the program, as it had in the past.

Tompkins County Administrator Lisa Holmes said on average, about 38 people sought shelter under Code Blue per night — roughly equal to the same period last year. Of those people, between 7-15 people a night stayed in the shelter.

The rest were housed in motels, as they had been prior to the opening of the temporary shelter on Nov. 25.

County officials have said one of their goals for the Code Blue program this year was to shift away from usage of motel rooms, citing concerns over cost and safety. Officials have also expressed a desire to encourage people to get shelter via a separate program that requires participation in job training and addiction treatment, among other prerequisites.

In prior years, the non-profit that operated Code Blue chose to house people almost exclusively in motel rooms during the winter months.

The county’s approach to the Code Blue program is decidedly spartan compared to last year. The former bank is set up as a congregate shelter, where beds are laid out in an open room with little privacy. 

People staying there must check their belongings in plastic storage bins and cannot bring any bags into the main shelter. There are restrooms but no shower facilities, and there are strict limitations on who can enter the building and when.

Some advocates and elected officials have questioned whether the county’s “tough love” approach will dissuade people from seeking shelter from dangerously cold weather.

Last week, a man died sleeping outside, just one block away from the new emergency shelter. A county spokesperson could not confirm or deny if the man, Roland Hoyt, visited the shelter that night, but said that if he did, he would not have been turned away.

Tompkins County Department of Social Services Commissioner Kit Kephart said while housing people in motel rooms may be more compassionate, doing so comes with additional costs and risks.

“[One] challenge with hotels is that once the door closes, you don’t know if that person is safe,” Kephart said at a recent press event. “They might be using substances and overdose.”

The county likely will not be able to fully phase out the use of motels any time soon. Many traditional, congregate shelter facilities are not able to accommodate certain people, like families with children, people with certain disabilities and those convicted of certain crimes. 

Ultimately, Kephart said, the goal is to have people apply for shelter through the more rigorous application system that is in place year-round — known as Temporary Housing Assistance (THA) — rather than through Code Blue. 

Currently, the people who apply and qualify for shelter through THA are almost exclusively housed in motel rooms. The county’s only year-round homeless shelter shut its doors in November after the county was unable to renegotiate a contract renewal with its non-profit operator.

While day-to-day numbers vary, the number of people who got shelter through THA was roughly double that of those seeking shelter through the lower-barrier Code Blue program. Some 74 people received shelter through THA, including four children.

When people seek shelter through Code Blue, they do not need to meet requirements they’d ordinarily face during the rest of the year. Such requirements may include limits on income, sobriety or participation in addiction recovery counseling. People also need to show that they’ve exhausted all other options for housing. 

Some advocates have said the requirements can be difficult to navigate, even with assistance from a caseworker.

Kephart said that while the THA program has more hurdles, it provides more comprehensive assistance than Code Blue.

“There’s much greater services that go along with the THA sheltering than there are Code Blue,” Kephart said. “Code Blue [sheltering] is really a mechanism to keep people off the street and warm and to get them through the night, whereas THA is really about building people’s ability to get into permanent housing.”

If you anticipate you may need to access emergency shelter, you can find more information and resources here or by calling or texting 2-1-1. During normal business hours, visit the Department of Social Services at 320 W. State Street, Ithaca, NY. After 5 p.m., go directly to the shelter, located at 300 N. Tioga Street, Ithaca, N.Y.

New York State requires counties to provide shelter to anyone who asks when evening temperatures drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of disability status, income, sobriety or other factors.

The post County still reliant on motel rooms to shelter homeless this winter appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

CLEVELAND, Miss. — Although she won a scholarship to Mississippi State University, two hours’ drive away, Shamya Jones couldn’t get there because she had a new baby and no car.

So she enrolled instead at a local community college, then transferred to the four-year campus closest to her home in the rural Mississippi Delta — Delta State University.

She planned to major in digital media arts, but before she could start, Delta State eliminated that major, along with 20 other degree programs, including history, English, chemistry and music .

“They’re cutting off so much, and teachers [are] leaving,” Jones said. “It’s like we’re not getting the help or benefits we need.” The cuts “take away from us, our education.”

That kind of frustration is growing. Rural Americans already have far less access to higher education than their counterparts in cities and suburbs. Now the comparatively few universities that serve rural students are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors, blaming plummeting enrollment and financial crises. Many rural private, nonprofit colleges are closing altogether.

“We are asking rural folks to accept a set of options that folks in cities and suburbs would never accept,” said Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “It’s almost like, well, ‘This is what you get to learn, and this is how you get to learn it. And if you don’t like it, you can move.’ ”

When programs at rural colleges and universities are eliminated, “It’s not just, if this institution doesn’t do it, another one can pick up the slack,” Koricich said. “It’s that if this institution doesn’t do it, it just does not happen. It is not offered. It’s not an option.”

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to Hechinger’s free biweekly higher education newsletter. Want to learn more about rural higher ed? Try the free biweekly Open Campus rural higher education newsletter.

While large-scale cuts to majors in the years during and since the Covid-19 pandemic have gotten some attention, what many have in common has been largely overlooked: They’re disproportionately happening at universities that serve rural students or are in largely rural states.

Rural-serving institutions are defined by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, which Koricich directs, as those that share such characteristics as being located in counties classified as rural and a certain distance from metropolitan areas.

SEE WHICH SCHOOLS ARE CUTTING MAJORS

Even some flagship universities that serve rural places are making big cuts. The most widely reported were at West Virginia University, which is eliminating 28 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration. The University of Montana is phasing out or has frozen more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations. A similar review is under way at branch campuses of Pennsylvania State University.

But most of the cuts have occurred at regional public universities, which get considerably less money from their states — about $1,100 less, per student, than flagships — even as they educate 70 percent of undergraduates who go to public four-year schools. These kinds of schools are also more likely than other kinds of institutions to enroll students from lower-income families and who are the first in their families to go to college.

St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, for example, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics. The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40, including earth sciences, geography and environmental resources and hospitality administration. Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25. Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 undergraduate and graduate majors, minors and concentrations.

The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 majors. SUNY Potsdam is cutting chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other programs. The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing religious studies, drama, philosophy and concentrations in French and German.

Related: In this shrinking Mississippi Delta county, getting a college degree means leaving home behind

Among the many other regional public universities that are dropping programs and majors are Missouri Western, Eastern Kentucky, Arkansas State, Dickinson State in North Dakota and the University of Nebraska at Kearney. North Dakota State University has proposed cuts to 14 programs; the university did not respond to questions about the status of that plan.

“Some institutions have no other options” than to do this, because of financial problems and plummeting enrollment, said Charles Welch, president and CEO of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a former president of both Henderson State and the Arkansas State University System.

At Delta State, for instance, enrollment is down by nearly a quarter since 2014.

A drop in tuition revenue stemming from that decline created an $11 million hole in the university’s budget, President Daniel Ennis, told the campus last year. When Ennis got to Delta State, he also found the university was overestimating its revenue from facilities and merchandise.

“At a certain point there’s going to be less of everything — personnel, money, equipment and opportunities — because we have to right-size the budget,” Ennis said.

But the American Association of University Professors, which represents faculty, said in a report that administrators are exploiting these problems to close programs “as expeditiously as if colleges and universities were businesses whose CEOs suddenly decided to stop making widgets or shut down the steelworks.”

Many of the programs affected are in the humanities and languages, making those disciplines less available to rural students than they are to urban and suburban ones.

These subjects “do much of the work of helping students dream beyond their realities,” said Michael Theune, who chairs the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, a private, nonprofit school that is also eliminating majors. “We are paring down the sense of the vastness of our world and the possibilities of university students to experience it differently.”

But Welch said states are often simply trying to reduce duplication among campuses in the same systems and compensate for having less financial support than flagship universities receive.

“The challenge that our institutions have is that they tend to be lower resourced than institutions in urban areas, or flagship institutions. They can’t rely on big endowments,” Welch said. The pandemic, he said, “threw a whole additional layer on top of what those institutions were already facing.”

Some rural-serving public universities and public universities in largely rural states have now undergone repeated rounds of cuts. Youngstown State University in Ohio, for instance, axed Italian, religious studies and other majors in 2021, then six more three years later. In all, more than 25 programs have now been eliminated there, many of them in the humanities.

The university points out that there were no students at all in 10 of those majors. But students and faculty say it was still important to offer them.

“It is easy to just write us off as, ‘Oh, well, do they really need that school?’ when there are so many other majors,” said Owen Bertram, a senior theater major whose program has so far escaped the cuts. “But I don’t think it’s that simple.”

Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

His classmates who will be affected by the changes “are such creatives at heart, and they all came here because they loved what they were doing,” said Bertram, who is also student government representative for the university’s College of Creative Arts. He said it’s hard to watch these students struggling with the questions, “Do I stay?” “Do I leave?” “Is it worth it?”

For rural students, there are few other places to go. About 13 million people live in higher education “deserts,” the American Council on Education estimates, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away.

“It is creating a second class of people to say, ‘You pay your taxes just like everybody else does. You vote like everybody else does. But you just can’t have the same choices as everybody else, because there aren’t enough of you here,’” Koricich said.

“In a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction. If you only have one option, you don’t really have choice.”

In many cases, this particularly affects low-income and Black students. At the University of North Carolina Greensboro, for example — another institution in a largely rural state, which is in the process of phasing out 20 degree programs, including anthropology and physics — more than half the students are low-income and 35 percent are Black, according to the university.

“UNCG should be a place where anyone should be able to come and get an affordable education in whatever they want,” said Holly Buroughs, a physics major who started a petition protesting the cuts.

“Is a first-gen student like me going to come next year and not see the UNCG that I fell in love with and the opportunities I had?” asked Azariah Journey, a second-year graduate student in history who comes from a rural town in Kentucky.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen private, nonprofit universities and colleges in rural areas or that serve large proportions of rural students have closed outright since 2020; some of the rural private institutions that remain are also axing majors.

The proportion of rural high school graduates going to college at all is falling. Fifty-five percent enroll right after high school, down from 61 percent in 2016, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Related: A community college promises a rural county it ‘hasn’t been left to die’

Dominick Bellipanni is one of the last remaining music students at Delta State as the department is being phased out. He received a scholarship, which he isn’t sure he would have gotten if his only options to study piano had been at the state’s larger, more competitive universities.

Bellipanni is from Indianola, a once-busy crossroad 30 minutes from the university, where he grew up hearing stories about businesses that once operated there but closed.

“Used to be, used to be, used to be,” he remembered people telling him.

Now he’s hearing that again.

His professors talk about how there used to be more music recitals, more scholarships, more money, said Bellipanni, who said he plans to leave the Mississippi Delta when he graduates.

“All you hear is, ‘We used to have this, because we used to have more students.’”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.

This story about rural college majors was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on strengthening local coverage of higher education. Reporters in the Open Campus Local Network who contributed: Mississippi Today’s Molly Minta, WUNC’s Brianna Atkinson and Signal Ohio’s Amy Morona. Sign up for Hechinger’s higher education newsletter. Listen to Hechinger’s higher education podcast.

Rural-serving public universities cutting degree programs

• St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics.
• The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40 programs, including earth sciences, hospitality administration and geography and environmental resources.
• West Virginia University is eliminating 40 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration.
• Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25 programs in disciplines including history, political science and biology.
• Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 programs and majors in English, physics, history and chemistry, all language courses except Spanish and minors in French, German and journalism.
• The University of Montana is phasing out, has frozen or has announced that it will closely monitor more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations.
• Delta State University in Mississippi has eliminated 21 degree programs, including history, English, chemistry and music.
• North Dakota State University announced plans to phase out 14 programs, including food safety and soil science, and has proposed getting rid of 10 more. The university did not respond to questions about the status of this process.
• The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 degree programs, including sociology, philosophy, industrial management, French and Spanish.
• The University of Nebraska at Kearney is cutting nine degree programs, including geography and recreation management.
• SUNY Potsdam is eliminating chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other degree programs.
• The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing degree programs in religious studies, drama, philosophy and classics, and concentrations in French and German.
• Missouri Western State University eliminated majors, minors and concentrations in English, history, sociology, political science and other subjects.
• Eastern Kentucky University shut down economics and other majors.
• Arkansas State University has shed programs in multimedia journalism and music, a master’s degree in criminal justice and others.
• Dickinson State University in North Dakota eliminated communication, information analytics, math, math education, music and political science, a university spokesperson confirmed.

Rural private colleges closing or cutting majors

In addition to rural-serving public universities and colleges, more than a dozen private colleges serving rural places have closed since 2020.

• Chatfield College in Ohio
• MacMurray College in Illinois
• Nebraska Christian College
• Marlboro and Goddard colleges in Vermont
• Holy Family College in Wisconsin
• Judson College in Alabama
• Ohio Valley University in West Virginia
• Lincoln College in Illinois
• Marymount California University
• Cazenovia and Wells colleges in New York State
• Finlandia University in Michigan
• Presentation College in South Dakota
• Iowa Wesleyan University
• Bacone College in Oklahoma lost its accreditation, filed for bankruptcy and stopped enrolling students

Many rural private institutions are also axing majors, including:

• Wittenberg University in Ohio
• Saint Mary’s University in Minnesota
• Keystone College in Pennsylvania
• Warren Wilson College in North Carolina
• Bethany Lutheran College in Minnesota
• Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio
• Illinois Wesleyan University
• University of Evansville in Indiana
• Northland College in Wisconsin cut its number of majors from 24 to eight

The post ‘Easy to just write us off’: Rural students’ choices shrink as colleges slash majors appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

By now, you know about the endless speculation on whether the incoming Trump administration might close the U.S. Department of Education. It remains just that: speculation. Congress would have to be involved, and even a Senate and House controlled by the same party as President-elect Donald Trump would not necessarily go along with this idea.

However, in a statement about his nomination of Linda McMahon for education secretary, Trump underscored his campaign pledge to disband the department, saying, “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”

The mere specter of shuttering an agency that commands more than $200 billion has led parents, students, teachers, policy experts and politicians to wonder about (and in some cases plan for) the possible effects on their children and communities. Collectively, state and local governments spend far more on education than the federal government does. With federal dollars connected to many rules about how that money can be spent, however, the Education Department does play a significant role in how schools and colleges operate. Deleting the agency would not undo federal law providing money for students in rural places, with disabilities or who come from low-income families, but doling out that money and overseeing it could get messy.

This week, Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota introduced a bill to unwind the Education Department and spread its work across other federal agencies.

The Hechinger Report tried to answer some of the questions raised by the possible dismantling of the department, consulting experts and advocates on student loans, special education, financial aid, school lunch and beyond. 

Nothing is out of the realm of possibility, however complicated. A much smaller agency that guided Congress on science, the Office of Technology Assessment, simply had its budget set to zero back in 1995 — and just like that, it was gone. The Education Department, created in 1979, reaches far wider and deeper, into essentially every community nationwide. Its impact is felt not so much in what students are learning every day but whether their schools can pay for the special equipment or training that might be essential for some students with disabilities; if they can pay to have an extra teacher to work with struggling readers; whether a student from a low-income household can get federal grant money to pay for college; and whether a college student with a federally backed student loan might ever have it forgiven.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

At the same time, many education programs, as well as some that touch schools, exist entirely outside of the Education Department. It doesn’t oversee the education of students whose parents live on military bases, for example, or students who attend school on Native American reservations. (Those programs are managed within the Defense and Interior departments, respectively.)

The Education Department also doesn’t run the school lunch or breakfast programs, which are overseen by the Agriculture Department. The nation’s biggest child care programs for low-income families? Those aren’t part of the Education Department’s job, either; they are managed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

We tried to explain all of that here. What questions do you have that we didn’t answer? Write to us: editor@hechingerreport.org. We will update this list.

Early education

What would happen to federal early education programs?

The most well-known and biggest federal early childhood programs, Head Start and the Child Care Development Block Grant, are not a part of the Education Department — they’re administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. So they would not be directly affected by an Education Department shutdown.

But Education does oversee and pay for some smaller early learning programs and early childhood research. For example, the Preschool Development Grant — Birth through Five, provides funding for state early learning programs and is overseen jointly with HHS. Other programs, such as Promise Neighborhoods and Full Service Community Schools, also address the early years and family support.

The Department of Education also is home to several research centers that focus on young children, many of which conduct long-term students or research aimed at improving the lives of infants and toddlers with disabilities. Those programs, if they were not cut, would have to move to another agency.

K12 Education

What happens to Title I and other money that the department doles out?

Closing the Department of Education would not undo it. Title I — a program established in 1965 that provides money to schools with large numbers of low-income students — is part of federal law. If the Education Department were to be eliminated, the most likely scenario is that Title I money would flow through another federal agency. Major cuts to the program are unlikely.

While Trump and others close to him have said they would like to cut federal education funding streams like Title I, any cuts would need to go through Congress — where that funding has broad political support among both Republicans and Democrats. That is especially true for Title I: Almost all school districts in the country get a share of that money.

So it’s unlikely Title I “would ever see an actual cut, and certainly not a substantial cut,” said Nora Gordon, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She said even members of Congress who are hostile to other federal programs that allocate funds for low-income families would be reluctant to defund Title I.

Related: What education could look like under Trump and Vance

Do I have to worry about special education?

There would be bureaucratic upheaval if another agency took on oversight of education of students with disabilities, but the special education law itself, and the money allotted to it, would not change without an act of Congress.

The law now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed in 1975, four years before the Education Department was formed. At that time, it was administered by the department of Health, Education and Welfare (now known as the Health and Human Services department).

About 7.5 million children are now served under the IDEA. For fiscal 2024, the department oversaw about $14 billion in funding for school-aged children, with smaller pots of money going to infants, toddlers, and other special education-related programs.

Through the Education Department, the government sets rules for states, districts and schools about how children should be identified for possible disabilities and how families, parents and schools should work together to create a child’s “individualized education program,” a menu of the supports and services they should receive.

Does this mean everyone will get a private school voucher?      

Regardless of the future of the Department of Education, Trump could, with the support of Congress, take some action to expand school choice nationwide. Republicans in their official party platform made universal school choice, in every state, a top priority. The idea didn’t go far under Trump’s first education secretary, but political headwinds may make it easier for him to achieve some policy wins this time.

During the first Trump administration, then-Secretary Betsy DeVos pushed to expand school choice, largely through charter schools and private school vouchers. Congress, however, ignored her budget request in 2018 for $400 million to fund their expansion. A year later, DeVos pitched $5 billion in tax credits for individuals and businesses that contribute to scholarships for students to attend private schools. Trump resurrected the idea in early 2020, and again as an option for parents frustrated with prolonged school closures during the pandemic. A bill to create the tax credits died in committee.

As part of the agenda for his next term, Trump has pledged to allow families with a 529 college savings plan to spend up to $10,000 a year per child on homeschool education. The GOP also wants to expand education savings accounts, or ESAs — a polarizing program that allows families to pull their children out of public school and use a portion of state per-pupil funding on private school tuition, homeschool supplies and other educational costs. At least a dozen states since 2020 have created ESA programs, with some offering universal enrollment regardless of a family’s income level and with few restrictions on taxpayer money being spent on religious education.

Rural opposition has stalled such legislation in states like Texas, and voters in November rejected school choice measures on ballots in three states. But in recent years, the Supreme Court has expanded the religious rights of parents and sectarian schools. Trump’s next education secretary is also likely to have an easier time clearing school choice legislation with Republican control of both the House and Senate.

Related: School choice may have its biggest moment yet

What would happen to school lunch, and free and reduced-price school lunches?

Nothing. Eliminating the Department of Education would likely have little or no impact on the school lunch program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, not the Education Department, runs the vast National School Lunch Program, although the data collected by schools about the number of students who qualify for low-cost or no-cost breakfast and lunch powers a lot of the education agency’s work. About 30 million kids participate in the program on a given school day — including students at public charter schools and some nonprofit private schools.

During Trump’s first term, as part of a collection of pandemic-related measures, he approved providing school lunches to all students, regardless of their household income. Several states have since kept up that effort since the pandemic option expired, offering free meals to all students no matter their family earnings. And a growing number of schools in other states now offer meals to all students if a large enough number qualify for free lunches. Earlier this year, a Republican budget proposal, called Fiscal Sanity to Save America, said that option should be eliminated.

Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, created by the conservative Heritage Foundation, but that document also calls for reining in spending on school meals. “Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective and represent an example of the ever-expanding federal footprint in local school operations.”

What happens to education research and the tracking of students’ academic achievement?

The work of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research and statistics arm of the Education Department, is mandated by law and would not disappear overnight even if the agency were abolished. IES collects and aggregates data from more than 19,000 school districts around the country to give the public a national picture of our decentralized educational system, from counting the number of students and dollars spent on schools to tracking class sizes and years teachers stay in the job. IES disburses millions of dollars each year to researchers to develop new ideas for improving instruction, and it evaluates programs afterward. One-fourth of IES’s $800 million a year budget goes to administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which is an important yardstick for measuring academic achievement among fourth and eighth graders.

All three of these functions — statistics collection, research and assessment — theoretically could be transferred to other agencies, according to former IES director Mark Schneider, whom Trump appointed to a six-year term during the former president’s first term. Education research could shift to the National Science Foundation, which already awards grants for educational research along with the Department of Education. The statistics unit, also known as the National Center for Education Statistics, could be folded into the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the main statistical agency of the federal government. A new home for the NAEP test is less obvious.

Schneider said that talk of eliminating the department may invite more scrutiny into what its research arm does. Advocates could try to capitalize on this scrutiny as an opportunity to lobby for an overhaul of the research division, he said.

Higher Education

What happens to student loans if the Department of Education is abolished?

Student debt won’t disappear even if the Education Department does. The federal agency contracts with the loan servicers that manage nearly $2 trillion in student loan debt and oversees the programs that can lead to loans being forgiven, such as for teachers and people who work in public health. “The terms and conditions of the loans don’t change just because the agency changes,” said Betsy Mayotte, president of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, which offers advice and guidance on student loans to borrowers. If there is no Education Department, it’s likely that student loan oversight and debt collection would shift to the Treasury Department. “I expect that at least initially the servicers wouldn’t even change.”
Aside from that,Republicans in Congress, who will soon control both chambers, have proposed a College Cost Reduction Act, which would increase the amount of federal Pell grants for third- and fourth-year college students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in fields considered to be in high demand. It would also simplify the student loan repayment process and end certain kinds of loans available to parents, graduate students and low-income learners. It would hold colleges and universities, rather than taxpayers, responsible for loans on which their students have defaulted.

The Biden administration’s relentless and embattled attempts to forgive some student loan debt are almost certain to come to an abrupt end. Many have been blocked by courts anyway, and Trump and his allies have characterized them as an unfair transfer of wealth from people who didn’t go to college to people who did.

What about grants and aid for paying for college, and the FAFSA?

Even without an Education Department, it is unlikely that the Pell grant — which most low-income students use to help pay for college — would disappear. Congress controls who is eligible for Pell, so the Trump administration couldn’t decide on its own to change or take away the grant. Pell has long had bipartisan support in Congress, and it is very unlikely that a Republican-controlled Congress would get rid of a grant that is relied on by so many constituents.

House Republicans have, however, proposed changes to eligibility and the award amount. A version of the College Cost Reduction Act has a chance of passing since Republicans will soon control Congress. The bill would peg the Pell award to the median cost of a college program, instead of basing it on the particular cost of the program or college where a student is enrolled. In practice, this means students enrolled in a program that is more expensive than average, whether due to the price set by the institution or due to a higher cost of living in that area, could see their award reduced. In addition, the determination of financial need would no longer take into account a family farm where the family resides or a family-owned small business that has fewer than 100 employees.

McMahon, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, also supports changes to Pell. She wrote an opinion piece in September promoting what’s known as “short-term Pell.” Right now, for the most part, Pell can be used only to pay for education programs that last 15 weeks or more (about one semester). McMahon supports a bill, which has some bipartisan support, that would allow federal aid dollars to pay for short-term programs that train students for particular jobs.

Critics worry such an expansion could take Pell dollars away from traditional programs. They note many short-term programs (for example, welder and HVAC programs) are already Pell-eligible and that shorter programs, including many run by for-profit companies, often don’t have good results. A recent report showed no improvement in employment for students who used short-term Pell.

While last year’s FAFSA rollout was broadly criticized, there seems to be no appetite to further complicate students’ ability to access federal financial aid. In fact, the College Cost Reduction Act includes a requirement that would simplify and standardize college financial aid offers so that students have an easier time understanding and comparing them.

Related: How four universities graduate their low-income students at much higher rates than average

This story about the Education Department was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post What might happen if the Education Department were closed? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

ITHACA, N.Y. — An elderly woman accidentally drove her small car through the window of the poll site at the Linderman Creek apartment complex around noon Tuesday. There were no injuries reported and none of the election equipment was affected. Officials moved the polling site to a different community room located elsewhere on the property.

Voting resumed at 1:57 p.m., just 87 minutes after the incident was reported. Voters who still need to cast their ballot can do so at 101 Conifer Circle, downhill from the original polling center. 

County officials said they “can confirm no malicious intent related to the accident.”

Ithaca Fire Department (IFD) Chief James Wheal said that while no one was harmed, the structural damage to the building made it unsafe for voting.

“That dispatch made us nervous,” Wheal said. “It sounds troubling on a day like this.”

Wheal said IFD received the initial call at 12:30 p.m. 

“Fortunately, it’s early in the day, so there’s time for people to figure out their plans,” Wheal said. 

If anyone was prevented by from voting by the incident, they can go request an affidavit ballot, said Tompkins County spokesperson, Dominick Recckio.

The driver, Debbie Strite, said she accidentally crashed her car while trying to park. She said she intends to vote for Kamala Harris.

Strite said protecting women’s rights and their securing access to abortion were the biggest issues driving her to the polls. She accidentally stepped on the gas instead of the brakes and ended up driving through polls instead, she said.

Dave Smith, a poll worker, was walking through the polling site when he heard a big crash.

“I saw glass coming down on the car inside the building,” Smith said. “Everything as I watched was being spread across the room.”

The debris did not hit the voting machines, he said.

After a brief examination, first responders deemed Strite in good health. She was taken home by a Sheriff’s Deputy. 

“I think the other guy is not good,” Strite said before leaving the poll site. “Anything [Harris] does, I think will be better than him.”

Correction 5:15 p.m.: A previous version of this story misspelled the word “brakes.”

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ITHACA, N.Y. — On Thursday night, Ithaca may be greeted by a rare geomagnetic spectacle, potentially showing residents the Northern Lights and bringing possible impacts to critical infrastructure technology. 

A solar flare erupted from the sun Tuesday evening and arrived to Earth at 11:15 a.m. Thursday. The latest predictions anticipate the storm will go on until Friday, according to the NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). Those interested in viewing the Northern Lights will have the best chance overnight from Thursday to Friday, though it will depend on weather conditions at the time.  

The flare that erupted Tuesday was rated as X-class, the strongest category of flare. 

A Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) accompanied the solar flare, sending “solar material and embedded magnetic fields” hurtling through space and toward the Earth, said Shawn Dahl, the service coordinator for the SWPC. 

The sun is nearing its peak level of activity during the 11-year solar cycle, a period generally marked by an increased number of sunspots during which the sun experiences more solar flares and more CMEs. Last May, the Earth was hit by a historic geomagnetic storm, causing auroras to be visible as far south as Florida, but Dahl does not think Thursday’s storm will get this strong. 

Regardless, Thursday’s CME may prove strong enough to paint the night sky with the glow released by molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in our atmosphere. The molecules are excited by the energetic electrons brought here by the storm. When these molecules relax, they glow, Hysell said. 

For the best opportunity of catching a glimpse of the light show, Ithaca residents may want to travel southwest to avoid the less stable air northeast of the city, said meteorologist and Ithaca Voice development reporter Brian Crandall. 

For ideal conditions, residents will also want to avoid places with light pollution and too much foliage, he said. 

The aurora may be visible as far south as Alabama and northern California, but with the advances in smartphone photo technology, people have been able to readily see the red aurora much farther south than previously.

Geomagnetic storms are measured on a scale from G1-G5. Since arriving this morning, the storm’s intensity has been observed at G4, but there’s a slight chance the strength will increase to G5, according to the SWPC.

At this level of intensity, the storm could not only pose problems to the power grid, but also for spacecraft operations, radio communications and GPS. Passengers and crew high altitude airplanes flying through polar latitudes may also be exposed to solar radiation. As of Thursday afternoon, there’s a 40% chance of a strong to extreme radio blackout, according to the SWPC.

To reach Earth, this CME traveled 93 million miles, crashing into the Earth at one and a half million miles per hour. Luckily for humans and all other living beings on Earth, the planet is very good at shielding life from the impact of solar storms, said professor David L. Hysell, who studies ionospheric plasma physics at Cornell University. 

“At the same time, humanity has gotten much better with making its systems resilient to phenomena like what’s taking place today,” Hysell said.

However, if the storm is sufficiently intense, Hysell said there’s a possibility it could blow out transformers, though it is more likely that it will just trip breakers.

That being said, alerts have been raised in the wake of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton because the geomagnetic storm has the potential to put increased stress on the region’s already precarious grid and communications system. 

“We’ve already been engaged with FEMA. […] This time, with all the hurricane relief efforts going on and the inbound hurricane going into Florida and across the peninsula, we found it prudent to immediately contact them now,” Dahl said during SWPC’s Wednesday night presentation.

This Monday, a less severe G3 geomagnetic storm hit Earth. As far as SWPC knows, the storm had no significant impacts to communication when it came to hurricane response.

If residents choose to stay up until midnight and chase the lights out into the country, Hysell suggests avoiding self-driving cars because the storm may impact the vehicle’s positioning system.

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