Reporters Roundtable On Vaccines and Visas

Jeff, I saw recently that you were on the CBS this Morning show a few weeks ago being interviewed about this wild college admission season that we're in. It's just remarkable how after years of being in the backwater of news, higher ed is suddenly leading the news many weeks.

Yeah, Michael, the story of how that CBS interview was conducted is one for another day. It was from the back of a van outside my house, but I think your point about higher ed suddenly being the hot beat is a good one. And on today's episode of Future you, we're bringing back an audience favorite, the Reporter's Roundtable.

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I'm Michael Horne.

And I'm Jeff Salingo. So we're really excited for this episode of Future youe because it includes reporters whose work we admire and read or listen to almost daily. But first, Michael, let's give some background to our listeners who might pay only faint attention, maybe to the state of the education beat at news outlets. I was reading the latest Education Writers Association State of the Education Beat survey recently, and there's this one stat I think sums up where we are today. Just 12% of survey respondents at general interest newspapers said their education staffs have grown in the past two years, while 39% said they've declined.

It's a striking statistic, Jeff, and I think sometimes with the explosion of information about higher ed these days on social media and outlets like Forbes, where I'm a contributor on all the newsletters that we get and even podcasts like this one. We just don't realize how much has been lost. You know, we no longer have those boots on the ground, if you will. There's just a real lack of reporters doing the day in and day out work of reporting, even on their local communities, you know, their schools, colleges, and students. And there's a quote from a newspaper journalist in the EWA study that you sent me that I just wanted to read. And it says when I was an intern eight years ago, we had five P12 education reporters said the report. And then as of this year, the Only P through 12 education reporter in our staff is me.

Yeah, it's, it's quite shocking, I think. And, and today we have three national reporters with us and this is the third time we've done an episode like this in the last two seasons. And it seems really popular with our listeners. So we're definitely going to bring it back next season. And I think we're going to try to bring on some local reporters for sure. But for today's episode, we're welcoming Alyssa Nadworny, who is a higher ed reporter from npr. And as soon as I think you hear her voice, I'm sure you'll recognize it from npr. We also have Nick Anderson, a longtime higher ed reporter and editor at the Washington Post, and Karen Fisher, who has been on the show before and who writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. And if you're interested in international higher ed, writes a weekly must read newsletter called Latitudes for Open Campus, which is a nonprofit news organization that is rethinking local reporting on colleges by combining national reporting with community newsrooms. Thanks to all of you for joining us. So let's start off with a question for each of you because you're all covering a beat that seems over the last year to have occupied an unusually large proportion of front page stories or pieces that have led the national broadcast media. One might assume that's good news for the state of the higher education beat itself. So how would you describe the health of the higher ed beat when it comes to getting attention in your own newsrooms? And Nick, let's start with you, because you've been probably doing this the longest,

I think that there's enormous appetite amongst our editors and our readers for higher education news of all sorts during the pandemic from the outset in March of 2020, when the earthquake really started rolling through campuses and dorms were shut down and students were sent home and virtual teaching became the norm. It's been a non stop appetite for our stories. And what's fascinating to me is that that appetite has continued even as there have been, of course, enormous social and political forces rolling through the country. We're obviously covering the racial reckoning on college campuses that is intense and unfolding in very interesting ways. The presidential election had huge effects on campuses. And so I have been heartened by the interest that has persisted in the pandemic situation for education. And I think that's because a lot of our editors and readers and listeners are seeing themselves in these institutions. They're seeing their children in these institutions they're seeing the pain that education is undergoing right now, and they feel it.

Alyssa, how about you? How about at npr? I mean, obviously higher ed has also competed with The K through 12 beat on in many newsrooms as well. What are you seeing there at npr?

Well, absolutely, what Nick said. I mean, the, the appetite for education stories in general has been huge this year, and then higher ed, too. I'm really glad you brought up the kind of like we're, we're seeing ourselves. There's all, there is a sense of nostalgia in some of this reporting, of like, I, I experienced this so differently than students this year are experiencing it. And so there's that element to kind of the interest. I also think, especially in the fall, nothing was really opening except for colleges. Like, it was kind of this big thing that everyone was paying attention to in that sense of like it's an experiment in a sense, like, what's gonna happen and what does it mean for our community? So I think I've kind of hooked people in in the fall, and that's kind of then led around the academic year. One thing I'm curious about is if the interest in higher ed from the pandemic is going to kind of spread into interest in policy, kind of as we see Biden's policy about what he's going to do with free college or even student loans. Like, is that connected to kind of the fact that we've been paying attention to colleges for the last year? So I'm really curious to see kind of what that has, where that goes this summer.

So, Karen, how about from your perch, because you obviously have worked for publications that have only covered higher ed for quite some time. How would you describe this in terms of what you've seen over your career?

I mean, for me, the evolution of this story has been interesting because I was on it very early on. I cover international education, and this was for a time only an international story. And so for probably six weeks, I was the only reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education covering the pandemic. And I was initially only covering it as an international story. What's happening to students and professors who were stuck overseas, what's going to go on with study abroad, things like that. Then it became, as the pandemic became more of a real thing here for us in the US I still was the primary reporter. That's been really interesting for international education. I think, as a niche within higher ed. It's one of those. It's like the truism, you don't know what you've got until it's gone. And certainly there's been this enormous drop in international enrollments. It was pretty much impossible for most international students who are coming to the US or new students to get here this year. Visas dropped by nearly three quarters. And so I think even within higher education, that became suddenly a much bigger thing of focus and attention because, oh, gosh, here are these students that bring so much diversity to our campuses and also payload to be here. And what happens if they can't make it? And that, quite honestly, even as we start talking about college reopenings, it's still an open question for this fall.

So Covid, understatement of the year, has obviously dominated all of the reporting this year. And so I'd love to dig a bit deeper onto this question. Alyssa, let's start with you. You've traveled to more than 20 campuses across nearly a dozen states this year to see how college actually looks in the time of COVID and it's been a fascinating road trip to follow. Tell us about that road trip particularly. What have you seen and learned that might stick in higher ed from this year long after the pandemic subsides?

Well, I think the biggest thing that's going to stick is kind of the student, the paying attention to kind of the student needs. I mean, almost every campus I went to wanted to show me their expanded food pantry, their emergency grants, their laptop loaner programs. So I think some of those supports for students that maybe were a very small program before are now big. And I was seeing that on private, small campuses, community colleges, state universities. So I think across the board, that's something that's going to stick. Of course, this kind of hybrid online learning, I think we're going to see course catalogs reflect that going forward. Even when folks are vaccinated and we're back in person, I think the course catalog is going to reflect that. There's going to be a lot more online options. Yeah.

And so Karen, you mentioned this earlier, right. Missing from a lot of campuses this past year were, of course, the thousands of international students who couldn't travel to the U.S. it's interesting, despite fears to the contrary, applications from international students were actually up. If I understand, for this coming fall, what's the state of applications? Where were they up? Will students actually be able to get to the US in the fall? And which institutions might be most at risk generally if students can't get here?

Yeah, you're right, Jeff. Overall, applications were up about 10% through the college app. I think, though, that that is not even, I think worrisomely the biggest and by far the biggest center of students is China. It was down nearly 20% in applications. There's a lot of reasons for that, some of which really relate to the pandemic and some of which predate it, including just can they get here? But also questions about the geopolitical tensions between China and the US and the ways in which they are directly affecting students and student visas and policies that have been focused on them and some real questions about whether the Biden administration will continue that. I think, though, when I talk with colleges that that 10% number in terms of the increase, I don't think it's really being felt evenly. And so I think that there are some types of institutions that have really benefited and are seeing, and I think this is true in American applications as well, that are seeing much greater sort of numbers and have in some ways that reflects also the waiving of their colleges going test optional. You know, and in some ways the pandemic, I think it certainly, it's created unique pressures, but in some ways it just, it highlights and underscores and just exacerbates some of those, those challenges like the inequities and who goes where. And so one of the things I'm really wondering about the future for, for international enrollments, is it going to kind of, you know, exacerbate the haves and have nots so that, you know, certain very brand name institutions do A and other smaller colleges that were relying on enrolling a handful of students from abroad to help balance their budgets might not be able to rely on that in the future. Then I would also say more than for any other student group right now, what applications don't mean that much because can the students get here? Right now, only about half of consulates, American consulates, are open. There's enormous visa processing backlogs. I mean, just think about even students. Colleges are lobbying the State Department to push students up in the line and to make them a priority for visas. But there'll be two groups of essentially students trying to come through this very narrow pipeline. On top of that, there are still a number of countries that you cannot come here directly to the US from, including China, which again, a third of students from abroad at US Colleges, they're from China. Then vaccines, and I know we'll probably talk about that later, but it's really unclear how vaccine policy is going to play out in general and particularly how it's going to affect international students, most of whom either don't come from countries where they just don't even have access to vaccines, period. Or where they certainly don't have access to American approved vaccines. And so how are colleges going to deal with these sort of big unknowns, the V's, the visas and the vaccines.

So in other words, applications don't necessarily signal something in that way. So no, Nick. So Alyssa and Karen both talked about kind of the soon side of the pandemic, which of course you've already also reported on and you've also written about the institutional side. So thinking about what you were writing about last summer, how do you think this past year for colleges and universities overall went? Right? Like in terms of how they dealt with the pandemic. As you think about all those stories you wrote a year ago and now as you look back, and if I'm not mistaken, your own kids are in college, right?

Yeah.

How do you think colleges did overall? What's the state of this past academic year?

Well, I think they're probably going to give themselves a huge sigh of relief when they finish commencement season and then they will immediately turn to their budget bottom lines and say, oh, you know, because like, they have muddled through. They really have, in some ways they have muddled through with extraordinary effort from, you know, the faculty and the staff to help students through mental health, which has become a huge concern. And if anybody on college campuses thought mental health was a frill, they don't think that now. It's also worth noting that institutions really ramped up their COVID testing in record time. I mean, when, when have colleges ever turned on a dime and started operating, operating twice weekly, testing for tens of thousands of students? It's amazing that they were able to do that. Colleges, in essence, are very bureaucratic institutions in some ways, and yet they were pretty nimble in being able to sort of solve problems and get the students enrolled and in their own self interest, get the tuition dollars coming in. So, you know, will they give themselves a high grade? I don't know. I think they will at least say, well, we survived that. And they will probably then take a bunch of lessons from this and try to reform a little bit, both for pedagogical reasons and for fiscal reasons. One thing sticks in my mind about the changes of the pandemic that I think is worth noting is that in certain situations, zoom was better. Zoom is better. I've heard over and over again for faculty office hours, you know, the, the question of like meeting your professor and trekking over to their office and, and having a conversation. Well, it Just works better, I think, for students to, to do that by Zoom, at least in a lot of cases. Zoom is also better for huge lectures. In some cases where you have multiple student assistants, graduate teachers, or even multiple professors who are monitoring the chat string and answering questions in live sequence as they, as they pop up, you can do that a lot better through Zoom than you can in a jam packed lecture hall where people are snoozing in the back. So I think colleges are going to find some positives out of this. They're going to have quite a few fiscal pressures. And I think that is still to be determined based on how the enrollment season shakes out in the next several weeks.

Well, speaking of enrollment season, as you said, many are wrapping it up right at this time of year, attempting to do so, as I suspect that finalizing the class will actually be a bit of a moving target for many colleges throughout the summer. But what we think of as the, you know, the traditional admissions cycle in this very unusual admissions year is really coming to a close. And there's been not only a bunch of upheaval in institutional finances, but family finances as well. And Alyssa, I know you've been looking at financial aid appeals and we know aid is a tool to lure students right and get them to enroll. But given institutional finances, colleges don't want to give way too much this year. So what's going on with financial aid? You have families on one side wanting more, and you have schools on the other side more than ever before wanting to give less.

Well, I think big picture what's going to happen is we're going to see fewer low income students enrolling in college. I mean, that I, this is the prediction and this is kind of what I've, what I've talked to folks about, that there just isn't going to be enough money to make up a lot of those financial aid gaps as there may have been previously. That said, the financial aid offices I have talked to know that probably appeals are going to be a big part of this process and they've been bracing for that and they budgeted for that. One of the things I've been really curious is about this appeals process. It's always been around, it's handed down by Congress, actually. It's called professional judgment. And it's basically in admissions. They can kind of, you can come back to the college and say, my situation has changed, I need more money and the college gives you some money. And you know, the ed department gave guidance this year about it. I think it's top of mind for a lot of families, maybe for the first time, who didn't know that this was possible because Covid happened and, you know, families are feeling it. But for me, the big question is we don't have any data on this process. We don't know how often it's successful. We don't know who gets it and how much they get. We don't know if there's any bias in that process. So in a year where this is expected to happen a lot, and I've heard anecdotally from families and financial aid offices that it is happening, people are being awarded more money in this process. It's kind of a black box. So that's something that I'm really interested in and kind of see how this plays out and if it makes the difference for students, you know, we'll see, you know, what that looks like.

Yeah. I mean, I've always wondered about professional judgment. Is it like, are they really giving enough to really make a difference, or is it just. Sometimes it seems like it's a couple hundred bucks, which I know for some people actually might make a difference, but it's not a huge amount of money we're talking about here.

You know what's interesting, though, is kind of like the psychological message. Like, maybe it actually isn't that helpful. But I have heard from a lot of families who are like, yep, we decided to go there because they gave us a little something. We're still taking out loans to make it work because we don't have enough. But it, like, just made us feel good. So I'm curious about that.

And we'll be right back with more from our Reporters Roundtable after this short break.

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And we're back on Future youe with the Reporters Roundtable. So quickly following up on that, Nick, you were earlier talking about how institutional finances have obviously been battered by the Pandemic going to be a major point of focus for administrators on campus. Federal stimulus might paper over some of those issues, but we've talked a lot on the show about whether colleges might close or merge or declare higher ed's form of bankruptcy, financial exigency. What's the outlook from your perspective after the pandemic?

For the last 10 years or so, I've been hearing people say colleges are going to close, colleges are going to close, and not many of them do. Some do. Some. Do you hear of a liberal arts college once in a while or some regional college, usually a private college? Obviously public colleges don't close that often. So I don't believe that we're about to see a mass extinction event of colleges. I just don't believe it. If you look at the enrollment numbers, the enrollment problems from the pandemic were really concentrated in community colleges. They're not going anywhere. Community colleges are here to stay.

Right.

And the enrollment appeared to be fairly solid in the public sector otherwise and in the private sector. Not that there weren't pressure points, but I would say that the financial risk here for colleges really is how they can sort of manage change. Change on campus, change in the model of teaching, change in the patterns of consumption of education. Will people want to come back to school the way they did before? I assume there's going to be a surge of interest in coming back in the fall and that there's going to be a sort of a temporary bump in people wanting to come back and be on campus and sort of revel in the fact that they have some normalcy that they've captured. Right. The big story is going to be how normal can normal be. Right. But long term, managing change and managing sort of the institutional imperative to sort of make sure your market base is solid and make sure that the 18, 17, 16, 15 year olds out there, that they're in your pipeline and you're finding them and that they can pay. Those are the big questions. And I think it's a lot more complicated than like, oh, are 50 colleges going to close next year?

Yeah, no, that. So that resonates. I guess the question from my follow up on that is will we see a rebound in the community college enrollments from your perspective? Or if not, do you think that there'll be more consolidation? Because while there's not closure of community colleges, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont have all looked at pretty sweeping consolidations of their community college system.

Yeah. So community colleges were. Everybody's keeping an eye on them, thinking that because of the economic downturn that community college enrollment would surge, and it didn't. It went down because of the pandemic and various problems with the social and health issues. But the counter to that is that when the economy does better, community colleges don't get as many new students. And so now that we're seeing the economy pick up, I'm not sure that community colleges are going to have a rebound. The wild card is Congress and the Biden administration. And you're seeing right now enormous discussion in Washington about community colleges, specifically about programs to give last dollar scholarships to ensure that people can go to community college tuition free, which is an experiment that's been tried in many states with some success. And you're seeing initiatives to expand the Pell Grants and initiatives to try to bolster community college infrastructure. So community colleges are really at the center of Washington policy right now. We'll see if that moves the needle on enrollment.

Yeah, that'll be fascinating. So let's talk about the international side of this then, Karen, because before the pandemic, it was a bright spot for many institutional finances, particularly before the Trump administration, I should also add. But, you know, many American parents thought it was good news that international students might not be able to get to the US because they thought it would open up more spots for their kids. And, you know, but you recently reported on a study that showed that international students actually don't, in fact, crowd out American students. Can you dig a little bit more deeply into what you found?

Sure. I mean, this study looked at about the last three, three decades of international enrollments at the undergraduate level and found no displacement. In fact, it found that the presence of international students seem to be correlated with more American students studying in the STEM fields. And of course, there's a lot of particular concern about displacement there, given talent pipeline being what it is. That's the most persistent myth that I have heard since I have been writing about international students. And it is true at a very small handful of institutions, institutions that are typically fairly selective publics, but it's just not broadly fairly selective publics in states with growing populations. So it's just not true elsewhere. I mean, you know, there are a lot of places in which international students were taking places with demographic, the demographic cliff being what it is, taking places that were going to go unfilled otherwise. And in some cases, institutions expanded and turned to, to international students. And they have been, as you pointed out, Michael, they were a very critical lifeline. I mean, another study, economists at the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, looked at what happened to the relationship between state budgets and state funding for higher education and specifically for flagship institutions and international students. And they basically made up the budgetary difference coming out of the last recession for a lot of institutions because they may be the biggest question mark along with those low income students who typically go to community colleges. I think that could be additional challenges. We were talking about the finances of institutions. They're not going to, I think, be able to necessarily count on these students coming in and, and making up the budgetary shortfalls that we might be experiencing in higher ed.

So let's focus on then one more giant question around all this, which is you said visas before and vaccinations. Let's dive into vaccinations part of this. Alyssa, I'd love to start with you because you reported recently on the rising number of college campuses requiring vaccinations for enrollment this fall. What did you find? And will this turn into another divide like open closed campuses last year or mask mandates or what else might we find?

Well, I guess we should start with the news from California, which is that the UC and the CSU system are planning to require vaccines with full FDA approval. So there is kind of an asterisk here, I think. The Chronicles reported more than 50 colleges have made requirements for fall. I actually don't think that it's gonna be as big of a divide as some of the open mask things. And the reason is because vaccines aren't new. Colleges have long required vaccines for folks, for residential, for residential students. I found we've had long, long had legal challenges to these mandates. I found a case nearly a century ago where a student in California sued the University of California for requiring a smallpox vaccine. Judge upheld. So there is that legacy. And also vaccines represent the promise of normalcy. I love what Nick said, that like the story in the fall is going to be like, how normal can we be? And I think vaccines are a big piece of that for residential college campuses. And so that I think is going to outweigh some of these, maybe more political leanings. The other thing is that we have had some surveys to indicate that perspective students and families are supportive of these vaccine mandates. And again, I think that's because it's connected to the in person experience.

Yeah, Nick, I would just like to add on the question of political divides, if you just look right now at the public universities, public university systems that are adopting vaccine mandates, they're in California. We just had one today in Maryland. The University System of Maryland, UMass, Amherst, Rutgers is in New Jersey There's a pattern there that's blue, there's a blue, there's a bunch of blue universities that are coming out in the public sector. And I, I have not seen a red state flagship. Looking for the red state flagships, looking for the. How about UT Austin? How about the University of Alabama, how about the University of Florida? Show me a red state flagship that adopts a vaccine mandate and then I will say, ah, well, maybe it's not such a divide, but until then I see a divide.

Well, in fact, I would point out that you have the precise opposite. UT Austin couldn't put a mandate if they wanted to because their governors put an executive order in. And you have some other, you know, states where legislatures are moving to, you know, basically prohibit colleges from enacting mandates.

Well, I wonder how much of it is the emergency youth authorization, because that's true, that that is new. We don't have a legacy of that. And so actually the legal precedent doesn't apply to that. So I kind of wonder if that's a holdback for a lot of these colleges.

Could be. But I would also, I would also just add that like this is an unfolding situation.

Absolutely.

In days things can change. In a couple weeks things can change. So you know, I think it's something to keep an eye on. I'm not going to declare that there's a great, a great red blue divide right now, but there's the potential for one.

No, it's definitely been, it's definitely unfolded in the early innings. We shall say along those lines. Karen, I'd love you to add the international angle on this because there's a huge set of questions around international students, their access to vaccines, American approved vaccines, how campuses might handle some of those questions. So could you dimensionalize some of that conversation for us?

Yeah, I mean, as I said, the availability of vaccines around the world is just incredibly variable. You know, you have a number of countries that have, you know, vaccinated single digit percentages of their populations. And you know, we were talking about the divides, the divides within the American population. Will that sort of persist within the international student population too? Where, you know, European students, for example, who do have access to, to American approved vaccines are much more easily able to come here. Whereas if you are in South America, Africa, you're not getting vaccinated, what's going to be the policy? And it gets really into weird sticky things. If you come on a visa, you can't come very far ahead. So are you going to have to be quarantining for the first couple of weeks, if you're an international student, whereas your classmates can go to class and how is your institution going to be planning for that? And of course then there's the really big variable of places like China have their own vaccines. There are not American vaccines there. So are you going to basically run gamble that you're going to make those students get vaccinated twice? And so there's a lot of questions. And as Nick said, I think we are very early on and I think colleges will be thinking more through that policy. But right now it's just one more sort of variable that adds to the uncertainty about the enrollment picture for next year.

I'm going to bet you, Nicole, that the question of international students and whether they've been vaccinated or not is going to be trumped by the question of can you pay tuition. Therefore, the colleges that have admitted these students and want to enroll them will make extra efforts to get them to the United States a little early. You know, find a way to get them the vaccine if they don't have it and roll out the vaccine red carpet for them, you know, so that, so that everything feels and is perceived to be as smooth as possible to get them here to America.

Yeah, it's going to be a fascinating dynamic. And on that note, I just want to, as we start to wrap up, we had an audience question. We actually had many audience questions for you. I'm just going to pull out one because I think it's interesting about the state of the beat, if you will. And it's from Andy Palumbo, the AVP for Enrollment Management and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. And Andy said that I'm sure higher ed reporting, like everything else, has been more challenging during the pandemic, but have there been any positives? Has finding new voices in our institutions been easier? What adaptations to your own work might remain in a post Covid world? Alyssa, you obviously went out to campuses, so maybe you kick us off, but then love you each to have a quick reflection on that.

Well, I guess there's a bit of irony in my answer because what I was thinking when I heard that was that one of the things it's just allowed me to connect more with students on kind of a more constant basis, like on cell phone and text messaging and Twitter DM and kind of like this check in system that I didn't really have before where I have a whole group of students from lots of different institutions that I'm just kind of like, okay, this Happened, like, what's your reaction to that? Or like, in the summer with kind of the international. The ice, you know, when international students come, it was just like, oh, like, checking in. That was a moving target for, like, three weeks of reporting. And it was just like a constant kind of communication. So that is a totally different way of reporting. For me, that's directly a result of the pandemic.

Nick, what about you?

I think of Union County College in New Jersey, Community College, where I went. I think of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where I went to check out their preparations before Thanksgiving to make sure that everybody was traveling safely. I think of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where a fantastic visit right before their school year started and their school year crashed.

It was a quick start and end. Yeah.

And, you know, in fairness to Chapel Hill, their school year got back up and rolling. But I think it's been fantastic for the Beat because it's forced us to get out there by getting out there, literally in person, when possible, to those places, or getting out there by working the email, working the zoom, working the phone, and talking to as many people as possible to say, you know, hey, there's a crisis. What's going on? How are you dealing with it? It's a perfect excuse to talk to people.

Karen, what about you?

I mean, I would circle back, for one, to a place where we started, which is just. It's made what we do, it's sort of demystified it in a way, and it's just made it so much more relatable. Everybody, you know, went to college themselves or have children. And these are very sort of immediate questions. And so, like Alyssa, I hear from kind of the parents and the students themselves more and more directly than I ever did before and through so many different channels. Personally, I used to be on the road a couple of weeks every month, both within the US and traveling internationally. And I thought that that was going to really be a detriment for my reporting. And there's some weird, strange immediacy about Zoom reporting that I thought I would hate. But, I mean, I reported a story where I spent hours and hours on the. On zoom with students in China and students, international students here, who are effectively quarantining in their own. On their own campuses. And strangely, we. We got to know each other and built a lot of that rapport that I usually associate with spending, you know, several days on the road with somebody. And so I do wonder what my own reporting will look like when I have both the option to travel again. But also I think Zoom's going to stay with us, both educationally, but also probably as a reporting tool.

So that leads perfectly into the last question I have for you all, which I guess is a bit of a lightning round question. But as we wrap up, I we've all heard about a bunch of stories that you all are going to be tracking over the coming weeks, months, and into the fall to see how normal is normal and so forth. But what's the story that we should all be talking about right now that we're not? That's maybe below the radar, but that you're interested in and that you think we ought to be paying attention to? Karen, let's start with you on this one and then we'll go around the group.

Well, I'm actually heartened that we have been talking about it a little bit today, which is that just the ways in which the pandemic is going to exacerbate the inequities that already exist in higher education. I think that is true both domestically here in the US it's also true internationally. It's true for institutions. I'm interested to see both what the impact is and if the pandemic shines a light more on that. So we, we start paying more attention and our readers start paying and listeners start paying more attention to it, too.

Alyssa, what do you have on your list?

Well, I am thinking about those half a million students that didn't go to college this year and what happened to them. I mean, the class of 2020.

Yeah, the missing class. Right.

Where, where'd they go? Will they ever go back to college? It's wild. I mean, I try to think. I wish I could do a story on it once a week.

Yeah, no, that's a good one. Nick, last word on what you're following two things.

The racial reckoning on college campuses is intense and enormous and needs to be delved into in multiple ways. And I also am completely fascinated by how colleges and the actual classroom experience is going to change in a semi permanent way. Nothing's ever permanent, but in a semi permanent way, what's the pandemic effect in a positive way, on the way students learn.

Thanks all for a terrific conversation today and for making time for us as well. Michael and I are going to pass on our usual commentary segment this week because we'll be back with the final episode of the season next time where we're gonna have plenty of time to chat. So until then, thank you for listening to Future Youth. Please take care and please get those shots so we all can find some sort of normalcy in our lives again.