Photo: Nalani Hernandez-Melo

Thousands of California high school graduates put college on the back burner last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. The drop, which mostly affected community colleges, might be temporary, but it shows the need to provide more support for students transitioning from high school to college. 

College Comeback aims to do just that. The new counseling program specifically targets recent graduates who want to go to college but don’t know how. 

Photo: Leigh Vogel

Chris Jones, a former assistant dean of graduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is running for governor in Arkansas. The nuclear engineer received a full scholarship from NASA to attend Morehouse College and went to graduate school at MIT. He’s helped astronauts build technology for use in space and was part of a team that doubled minority enrollment for MIT’s graduate school. But in the political sphere, he’s a newcomer.

In this interview, Jones talks about what he sees as the biggest challenges in higher education today—and why he hopes more academics take on public roles in their communities.

Undergraduate enrollment has dropped sharply at many colleges—down about 4 percent nationwide last fall, nearly 6 percent in the spring. That means college leaders, especially in a crowded field like the one in northeast Ohio, are fighting to stand out from the others.

Twenty-six nonprofit colleges and universities call the region home, including more than a dozen private institutions. Baldwin Wallace University, with about 3,100 undergrads on a 100-acre campus in Berea, is one of them. Leaders there are trying to set themselves apart by cultivating a wide range of partnerships to benefit both students and the institution.