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**Weekly Update**

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**In this week's edition:** Once inaccessible, college admissions officers are now taking on the unusual role of guiding accepted students through the many steps to enrollment [link removed]. Around the country, Hispanic-serving colleges are hustling to find ways to replace cuts in federal funding [link removed]. Plus, answers to five big questions about the current state of student loans [link removed].

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Admissions counselors welcome admitted students to a presentation on the Augsburg University campus. Credit: Jaida Grey Eagle for The Hechinger Report

****College admissions offices take on a new role****

Kathy Cabrera Guaman not only survived the nail-biting process of applying to college; she got into three.

But the celebrations were short-lived. Now she was sitting somberly and absorbing how much work comes after that triumphant moment of acceptance and before she sets foot in a classroom in the fall. 

For incoming students at most colleges and universities, this has long meant slogging through endless and complex steps they’re left mostly on their own to figure out — financial aid, loans, majors, placement tests, class registration, housing, roommates, textbooks, a meal plan, health insurance, public transportation, immunizations.

That’s what brought Guaman to a conference room in the admissions offices of Augsburg University, where she’s decided to enroll and where admissions director Stacy Severson was walking her through those logistics. 

Severson explained what Guaman’s financial aid would and wouldn’t cover, when to register for classes, where to look for outside scholarships — even which express bus to take to the campus if she chooses to commute.

The support Severson was offering is part of a surprisingly novel approach now being rolled out nationwide to try not only to make the process of admission simpler, but to enlist admissions officers as guides for students navigating the equally complex process that confronts them after that. 

As generations of applicants to college have experienced, this is not the traditional role of admissions counselors, who have historically been sealed off behind closed doors and not available to help with any of these things — gatekeepers in a process seemingly meant to emphasize the exclusive nature of their institutions.

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**Hispanic-serving colleges scramble to fill gaps left by federal grant cuts**

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University leaders say California State University, Chico, is losing more than $3 million in federal funds, as part of a larger cancellation of more than $350 million in grants to minority-serving institutions (MSIs). Now, around the country, those colleges are hustling to find ways to replace or do without the money, which covered such things as research grants, laboratory equipment, curricular materials and student support programs — budget items whose benefits extended to all students, not only Hispanic students or those from other ethnic groups.

In making the sweeping cuts last fall, the Trump administration argued that MSI programs were racially discriminatory because, to be eligible for the funding, institutions had to enroll a certain percentage of students from a certain race or ethnicity. To be considered an HSI, a college’s full-time undergraduate enrollment must be at least 25 percent Hispanic.

Experts emphasize, however, that these colleges serve many low-income and first-generation students, regardless of ethnicity. 

“The thing about HSIs is that they’re so diverse,” said Marybeth Gasman, executive director of the Center for Minority Serving Institutions at Rutgers University. “They have really large numbers of Latinx students, but they also have large numbers of Black students and Asian students and low-income white students, too. I have to stress how short-sighted it is for the federal government to take this money away.” 

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****5 big questions to help you understand the current state of student loans****

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Did President Donald Trump make changes to student loans? Is there still student loan forgiveness? Here's what we know right now.

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Last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency set up to help consumers, received more complaints about student loans than in any year in the entire history of the bureau. [link removed]

****Reading list****

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