Photo: Cassidy Araiza/The Washington Post

America is betting big on the semiconductor industry. Congress has approved $53 billion in funding, and the White House just announced preliminary agreements to give billions in grants to corporations such as Intel, TSMC, and Micron. 

Now comes the greatest challenge of all: finding workers to make it a reality. To prepare enough Americans to run the industry, the United States has to rapidly expand community college training, high school vocational programs, and apprenticeships. This might sound easy. It’s not.

Ongoing student protests over Israel's war in Gaza have led to arrests, suspensions, expulsions, and canceled commencement ceremonies. So what happens to those students later, after the national attention moves on? 

In this interview, Robert Kelchen, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, discusses the potential consequences of activism.

Finding a steady pool of affordable tutors for elementary and middle school students in under-resourced communities isn't easy, and that’s where Nikita Dutt, a second-year student at the University of California, Davis, comes in. Leaders of some organizations say that college students like Dutt help swell the number of tutors available in K-12 classrooms and may also allow schools to more sustainably fund them.

College students benefit, too. They receive payment for their services through federal and state-funded scholarships, and many develop a passion for teaching.