The 35-year-old is laser-focused on her nursing program, caring for her five children and working at the college’s career services office.

“Being an adult learner, you have more of a grasp of where you want to go,” said Lazo, who is pursuing a career in midwifery. “I have life experience and I need something that����ap going to work for my children, and I know what I need.”

Colleges across the country are girding for the demographic cliff of fewer young people enrolling due to a . Because of this, Red Rocks Community College — with campuses in Arvada and Lakewood — is investing in its adult learner population, degree-seekers often overlooked in traditional higher education settings.

The attention seems to be paying off, as Red Rocks’ adult learners earn better grades and have higher retention rates than their younger peers, according to the school’s data.

The college used a $25,000 grant from the in 2023 to support adult learners – classified as students over 25 years old – who now make up 23% of Red Rocks’ nearly 9,750 students this spring.

That mirrors the statewide trend. Out of the 270,938 students enrolled in public Colorado colleges and universities in 2024 — the most recent data available — 26% of those students were 25 or older, according to .

At the end of 2023, Red Rocks launched a survey of its adult learner population to better understand the challenges they face and what resources they may need. More than 280 people responded, sharing stories like their difficulties in finding child care or challenges in scheduling classes that accommodate single parents and work schedules, said Evan Kravitz, director of the college’s .

The institution crafted a two-day conference for adult learners a couple of months later, featuring panels and speakers designed to reach that student population.

“Adult learners told us they wanted community,” Kravitz said. “They wanted to hear more and learn more and talk more to adult learners.”

When Lazo started at Red Rocks in 2024, the stars aligned. The adult learner in search of community decided to make it happen. She founded a club for adult learners that’s now flourishing.

“If you feel there is some inkling you might want to continue your education in your adulthood, I’m always like, ‘Go for it,'” Lazo said. “I’ve had so many amazing experiences and learned so much about myself.”

Children are welcome at the Adult Learners Club’s meetings and provided with games and movies to entertain them while their parents get down to business. The older students can help one another with technology that may not have been a part of their schooling, but is now a standard part of education.

They create study groups, get advice about work-life balance and child care, or just plain vent to each other and make friends.

“We all want to just help one another,” Lazo said. “We all relate to each other and… to be able to lean on each other is amazing.”

The club started as a monthly gathering, but it was so popular that students demanded to meet more frequently. Now, they meet weekly and often welcome a member of campus leadership to hear their concerns.

“They don’t do all the talking,” Kravitz said of leadership. “They would tell the adult learners, ‘I want to hear from you’ and, ‘What can I take back to leadership’ — and that was huge.”

Because of feedback from the club, Red Rocks picked four academic programs — law enforcement academy, welding, mental health and social work, and early childhood education — and created night classes for them starting next fall, said Lisa Fowler, the college’s vice president of student affairs.

“We as a college are really committed to providing flexible programming and student support services for adult learners,” Fowler said. “It’s always a focus, but even more now than ever.”

Rob Johnson, 48, was intimidated stepping onto Red Rocks’ campus in 2024, surrounded by younger people fresh out of high school.

“I had a lot of preconceived notions,” he said.

Johnson thought he was going to be the only guy there who was alive during the George H.W. Bush administration. He was not.

He thought the younger students would turn up their noses at him.

“That’s not the case,” Johnson said. “Everyone here is pretty helpful and nice.”

While working toward his business degree, Johnson stumbled upon the fliers for the adult learners club and felt he was being spoken to directly.

Johnson started at Red Rocks after entering recovery from drugs and alcohol in 2018. A lifelong flooring installer, he wanted to expand his offerings and is getting the business education to do so.

“It’s a huge opportunity for me,” he said. “I’m killing it here at school. I’m a straight ‘A’ student and have good momentum.”

Johnson showed up to the Adult Learners Club, made friends and now serves as treasurer. He praised the school’s president, vice president and other leaders for coming to meetings and hearing from their students.

“They’ve been adamant about showing their support and their interest in what we are trying to do, because I guess adult learners are going to be taking the spotlight over the next few decades because the birthrate is falling and people’s careers are going to be changing,” Johnson said. “The buzz around the adult learning community — it’s been cool to be a part of it.”

The investment in this demographic has been successful for the school.

According to Red Rocks data, adult students had a 86.2% success rate — the percentage of classes passed with a ‘C’ or better — at the college in 2025. Comparatively, students 18 to 24 years old had a 77.6% success rate.

In the 2024-2025 school year, 56% of adult learners who enrolled in fall 2024 either re-enrolled or completed their program or degree by summer 2025. Comparatively, the retention rate for students under 25 was 54.2%.

“What we’ve learned from our enhanced focus on adult learners is how dynamic it makes the college,” Fowler said. “We have people from all ages with different work experiences, military experience coming together, and it����ap made it a very rich student experience to have adult learners with us increasingly.”

The editor and publisher of the newspaper in rural northwest Nebraska looked in amazement at the resume for her newest reporter, A. Marie Hamilton: multiple degrees from a well-known journalism school. Seventeen years working for the . Several statewide awards for her coverage.

“We were all super excited,” Perez said of the April 2023 hire. “Like, wow, why would someone with that much experience, why would she be here?”

Slowly, though, Perez realized that not everything was as it seemed. Hamilton had a problem with authority, Perez said, and ruffled feathers with the town’s police chief and school board. She appeared to sometimes sleep in the office. Nobody ever met her husband, who she said was a district manager for a local cable company.

“We heard so many different things,” Perez said. “It turned out to be this melange of (expletive).”

In fact, A. Marie Hamilton wasn’t even her real name. Those bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Arizona State University? Never attained. No evidence exists that she worked for 17 years at USA Today-affiliated newspapers.

“In seeking truth, you have to get both sides of the story,” Hamilton said in her at the Nebraska paper, citing the quote .

This is the other side, a story rife with inconsistencies, false claims and, now, a slew of felony charges that could land her in prison for decades. A. Marie Hamilton is actually April Marie Morganroth. Before that, she was April McClellan. At various points in her career, the journalist reinvented herself to start fresh in new states, including Colorado.

Wyoming prosecutors last month charged Morganroth, 40, with 20 felonies in two separate criminal cases in which she is alleged to have falsified documents and lied under oath — charges that relate to her alleged acts as a private citizen, not as a journalist. But Morganroth’s previous stops in at least four states and numerous publications were also marked by falsehoods and fabrications about her background, The Denver Post found.

She was fired from a Boulder newspaper for inventing quotations and misrepresenting the stories of sources she had interviewed about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In Arizona, she was convicted of forgery after authorities said she falsified documents as she sought housing. In Wyoming, she claimed to be a muckraking reporter with a Ph.D. who was also in law school. She never sought either degree.

Now she’s facing decades in prison, leaving the communities she covered wondering: Who was April Morganroth?

“There are people who are liars, people who are chronic liars, and then there is mental illness,” Perez said.

Two journalism ethics experts told The Post that while there have been high-profile examples of reporters caught ���ǰ���, they had never heard of someone committing these ethical violations and then altering their identity to continue practicing the trade elsewhere.

“It’s safe to say this is historically unprecedented in the modern era,” said Mark Feldstein, the Richard Eaton Chair of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Maryland.

None of the editors interviewed by The Post who worked with Morganroth outside of Boulder said they found fabrications in her work, and the newspaper could not independently fact-check all of her published stories.

Morganroth, who is free on bail in the two criminal cases, did not return messages from The Post seeking comment.

‘It was always the perfect story’

In her writings and website biographies, Morganroth extolled the virtues of freedom of speech, of seeking the truth no matter the roadblocks and of adhering to strong ethical values.

She wrote that she harps on honesty and accuracy as a foundation for earning and maintaining public trust. Her work must be consistent and principled, fair and independent.

“I aspire to bring truth, integrity and a personal touch to American journalism, unlike what we’ve seen since its early conception,” Morganroth once wrote on her .

But peel back the lofty rhetoric, and a different side of Morganroth emerges.

In 2007, Morganroth — then known by her birth name April McClellan — was charged with cashing a $5,000 welfare check in Arizona meant for her brother, according to court documents. She failed to respond to the bank’s efforts to seek restitution, authorities said, and attempts to locate her were unsuccessful.

“She then withdrew the $5,000 and disappeared,” investigators said in a criminal complaint.

McClellan pleaded guilty to one count of forgery, a class four felony, and was sentenced to probation.

In March 2008, McClellan was charged with three counts of felony forgery after Arizona authorities accused her of forging a court document, a Department of Corrections employment statement and a document from her previous landlord as she sought an apartment for rent, according to an arrest affidavit.

She pleaded guilty to one count and received probation.

McClellan, after her marriage to Scott Morganroth, started going by April Morganroth.

Bethany Barnes met April Morganroth around 2010 when the two worked at a Sears department store in the Phoenix suburbs, and the two quickly became close friends.

Over time, however, Barnes realized that it became hard to trust her friend’s word. Morganroth said things about her family that Barnes later learned were false. She would say she couldn’t hang out for a certain reason, only for Barnes to find out that Morganroth was somewhere else.

“She was always making herself look bigger than what was actually the case,” Barnes told The Post. “It was just a little bit of everything. You could tell she was being dishonest.”

These larger-than-life tales grew harder to tolerate, Barnes said. Eventually, the two lost touch.

“It was always the perfect story,” she said. “She did it very well. She lied very well.”

Morganroth graduated from , a community college, in December 2013 with an associate’s degree in digital photography. At the same time, she was finishing her first full semester at Arizona State’s .

On her blog, Morganroth promoted her services as a commercial and wedding photographer, showcasing her work in local galleries.

During her school years, she accumulated bylines for ASU’s student newspaper, appeared on the school’s radio station and did a , the state’s largest news organization, covering a variety of breaking news stories, including fires, floods and crime. A university spokesperson told The Post that Morganroth was enrolled at ASU at one time but never completed her degree.

Fabricated quotes and a retraction

In 2020, Morganroth moved with her husband and three children to Colorado, where she got a job in the joint newsroom of the Boulder and , newspapers owned by , which also owns The Post.

Her author page shared little in common with reality: She claimed she had been a newspaper journalist for nearly 20 years — even though she was just 35 at the time. She referred to her role at the Arizona Republic as a “full-time writer and multimedia journalist,” but an archived version of the from that time doesn’t show her name. Morganroth, on her , called it an internship.

She said she graduated summa cum laude from Arizona State.

On Sept. 11, 2021, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Daily Camera and Times-Call by Morganroth featuring reflections from locals who had been impacted by the day’s horrors.

Morganroth interviewed three Boulder residents, including a naval intelligen­ce analyst who recounted a harrowing story in which, she wrote, he watched Marines perform a heroic rescue of children from a nursery in the Pentagon. She quoted a flight attendant who, she said, was scheduled to work on 9/11 but switched her plans at the last minute. And she detailed the supposed experiences of a mental health clinician who, she wrote, didn’t know whether his daughter was alive or dead on Sept. 11.

It turned out that the three individuals said very little of what Morganroth wrote.

A few weeks after its publication, the Daily Camera , saying in a lengthy editor’s note that the story “substantially misrepresented” statements from the three subjects and fabricated many of the quotations attributed to them. One of the sources called his purported quotes “fictional.”

“I was absolutely horrified — like blood-pressure-spiked horrified,” said Mark Pfundstein, the former naval intelligence analyst, in an interview with The Post. “I thought, ‘My God, what will my colleagues think about this?'”

Morganroth, after the retraction, was fired, according to a from one of her colleagues. Mitchell Byars, who covered courts and crime for the paper, called for more due diligence in the hiring process.

“I feel there were some frankly easily identifiable red flags that I brought up with editors after her hire,” he wrote. Byars did not identify those warning signs on social media and declined to be interviewed for this story.

Colleagues, though, had noticed that Morganroth frequently retweeted far-right conservatives on social media, including U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert. Standard social media policies at newspapers forbid this type of political activity.

John Vahlenkamp, one of the editors who retracted the story, declined to comment on his investigation into Morganroth’s work or her tenure in Boulder.

An incident like this could have ended Morganroth’s journalism career. Instead, she pivoted.

New state, new name

In 2022, Morganroth popped up in the Wyoming journalism scene under a new byline: A. Marie Hamilton.

She worked for the , a newspaper in a small community in southeast Wyoming near the Nebraska border, for roughly a year, according to a review of her bylines on the site. Current ownership could not confirm her exact employment dates.

Morganroth’s father, in text messages with Barnes, the friend from Arizona, suggested that he knew that his daughter was running from trouble.

Child protective services “from Colorado was on April; she ran to Cheyenne this time,” Bill McClellan wrote to Barnes in June 2022, according to texts reviewed by The Post. “She thinks it’s okay to keep pulling her lieing (sic) and (expletive). Not working for her, I’d say.”

A few months later, McClellan told Barnes that “they will catch her soon enough.” McClellan died in 2024.

In April 2023, Morganroth took the job in Sidney, Nebraska.

Perez, the editor and publisher there, said Morganroth appeared to be “super knowledgeable” with professional writing chops. The editor said she never worried about the content of her reporter’s work — and only recently learned about what happened at the Daily Camera.

Still, Morganroth was difficult to manage, Perez said.

“Nobody knew what she knew,” Perez said. “Her attitude was: everyone was stupid.”

Many details about her life, though, just didn’t add up. The cable company that her husband supposedly worked for advertised in the paper. So Perez asked about him. The company said they had no idea what she was talking about.

Only four months after getting to the state, Morganroth said she was putting in her two-week notice. Perez didn’t fight her. On her way out, Morganroth told colleagues that the Nebraska newspaper company was starting a new outfit in Cheyenne and that they had asked her to be the editor, Perez said. None of this was true.

“That level of lying and thinking you’ll get away with it that goes beyond telling falsehoods,” Perez said. “That’s where you live in your own reality.”

A slew of felony charges

Once again, Morganroth started anew.

She returned to Wyoming, landing a job at the in southeast Wyoming, an hour north of Cheyenne.

Her listed accolades just kept growing: She now boasted more than 25 years of journalism experience, despite being under 40. The paper, in its , said she previously worked for National Public Radio and iHeartMedia. The Post could find no evidence of these employment stints.

Morganroth, still going by “Marie Hamilton,” earned the nickname “Little Miss Fact-Checker” by her peers at Wyoming Press Association conventions, the paper said, for “always providing clarifying and enriching accurate information about various news topics in our state.”

She again falsely claimed to hold both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Arizona State, and said she was in the midst of obtaining a law degree from the University of Wyoming. A university spokesperson said she was never enrolled there.

After the Record-Times briefly ceased publication, Morganroth launched her own media outlet called the , an “independent, community-centered” news organization focused on southeast Wyoming.

Its stated values: honesty and accuracy, integrity, ethical and watchdog journalism. Its motto: “Independent. Local. Unafraid.”

“I am unafraid to hold the accountable — accountable — and I have faced my fair share of credible threats, attempts to intimidate, blackmail and discredit because I refuse to allow elected officials to have a get-out-of-jail-free card,” she wrote.

Her journalism, in practice, often blurred the line between objective news coverage and her own opinions.

On social media, Morganroth frequently posted her thoughts on gun rights, supposed corruption in the Democratic Party and President Donald Trump.

Morganroth took a particular interest in a planned near the town of Chugwater in southeast Wyoming. She published a on Nov. 25 — which she called an “investigation” — in which she falsely drew links between solar and wind farms and disabilities in children.

The story, published under a “Wyoming Sentinel Staff” byline, quoted a “Marie Hamilton” numerous times as an advocate for children with disabilities. Hamilton is listed on the news outlet’s website as the owner, publisher and managing editor. There’s no indication anyone else worked there.

Her involvement in the project, though, was about to get much more serious after she personally lobbied against the wind farm.

On March 9, prosecutors in Platte County, Wyoming, arrested Morgranroth and related to her opposition to the Chugwater energy project. Authorities allege the local journalist concocted letters of support from two area residents expressing their supposed objections to the project and lied under oath during a public hearing held by a state panel considering the proposal.

In a pre-hearing statement, she asserted she held three degrees from Arizona State, was pursuing a law degree, owned an unspecified local brand and operated various family ranching businesses in several states, an arrest affidavit states. She introduced herself as “Dr. Marie Hamilton.”

Two weeks after the initial charges, prosecutors in the same district against Morganroth. Authorities say she forged documents purporting to show that she had prequalified for a federal loan as she attempted to purchase a home in Chugwater, according to an arrest affidavit cited in local media reports.

Morganroth also claimed that she and her husband had been approved for a federal grant to do construction on the property to allow them to qualify for the loan, prosecutors alleged, submitting to the sellers supposed invoices from two companies for the work. Both companies told investigators and The Post that they never did jobs on this property.

“It was so impressive,” Jessica Logue, owner and CEO of Cowgirl Demolition and Excavating, told The Post. “She used my logo, faded it with an opaque excavator, and had all the verbiage right. I was like, ‘Who is this?'”

‘Detrimental to journalism’

Up until the arrest, people in southern Wyoming knew her as Marie Hamilton. When the news broke, editors at the papers she worked for expressed their disappointment and confusion.

Klark Byrd, managing editor at the Casper-based , said Morganroth covered the state legislature for a month this year, but she never filed paperwork with human resources to get paid. Despite numerous reminders, he said in an interview, the reporter wouldn’t submit her forms.

Boyd said he fact-checked her work and it was always clean.

“It’s always detrimental to journalism when someone in the profession breaks that kind of trust,” he said. “It wasn’t just public trust; she broke the trust of colleagues. It floored me when all the pieces finally came together.”

Lying about a journalist’s true identity calls into question what else they might have fabricated in their stories, the two journalism experts said, calling trust a bedrock principle for the industry.

“You expect this maybe out of priests who get bounced from parish to parish or doctors who get their licenses pulled in one state and move to another,” said Feldstein, the University of Maryland ethics expert. “But I’ve never heard of a journalist doing that.”

Publicly advocating on a topic you’re also covering as a reporter is a clear violation of journalism ethics, said Bob Steele, a former professor and director of the at DePauw University in Indiana. Since Morganroth served as the Wyoming Sentinel’s publisher, editor and reporter, there’s an even greater obligation to be honest, independent and fair in her reporting, he said.

Quoting oneself in the third person, meanwhile, breaks every rule of journalism, both experts said.

“It’s astounding,” Steele said. “It’s problematic to the nth degree.”

Steele and Feldstein said it’s important to characterize Morganroth’s behavior as an extreme outlier in the industry. The public, they said, should not see this as all that’s wrong with journalism. Even Pfundstein, the intelligence analyst whose story Morganroth mispresented in the 9/11 remembrance, said the incident did not shake his confidence or trust in the media.

Those who knew Morganroth previously said they weren’t entirely surprised by her alleged actions. They were just surprised she got caught.

“Part of me thinks she’ll wiggle out of this; that is her forte,” said Perez, the Nebraska editor. “Getting out of things is kind of her milieu. I’m popping some popcorn to see how she’ll get out of this one.”

We are concerned.

Two reporters with the non-profit, online news agency Denverite interviewed 18 people close to the Chamber about the exodus and found a troubling and recurring complaint about a “toxic culture” fostered by the Chamber’s CEO and president J.J. Ament.

That is not five people raising concerns, or even 10, but out of 25 people successfully contacted by the reporters at Denverite, 18 expressed concern. The other seven individuals described their time at the Chamber as positive or neutral. Several people were so adamant about their experiences that they bravely used their names to back stories about the bad behavior of one of the most powerful men in Denver’s business community.

And on top of that, Ament����ap control at the chamber is so poor that changes to the renowned training program – Leadership Denver – led to three of 50 members of the foundation resigning in protest to what Paul Lhevine described in a letter to the Chamber as changes that do not “honor the mission we have been fulfilling for decades.” Lhevine was not one of the individuals interviewed for the Denverite story.

Finally, the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade cut ties with the Chamber over what China Califf, the leader of the Small Business Development Center, described as concerns over the negative culture at the Chamber. Shortly after Califf resigned, the Small Business Development Center was moved from the Chamber to Red Rocks Community College.

That is a lot of smoke coming from the Chamber at a time when this city needs steady leadership that inspires confidence, not controversy.

The chair of the Chamber’s board says he is happy with Ament����ap tenure. Mowa Haile told Denverite that the problem is a controversial but necessary restructuring of the organization, not Ament����ap leadership or demeanor. Ament began requiring a 5-day in-person work week, and the Chamber’s vice-president for customer experience, Cayti Stein, said that change is what drove off a number of employees.

“The Board has confidence that the direction charted by J.J. and the leadership team best serves our members and the entire Metro Denver business community, as evidenced by the significant growth in membership over the past four years,” Haile wrote in response to questions from Denverite.

We can certainly imagine employees being disappointed about a return-to-office policy, but half of the Chamber’s staff left in the course of 15 months, Denverite found. Many Americans would be skeptical that, in this economy, so many people would be willing to leave a stable job over having to return to the office, no matter how difficult the commute or their personal circumstances.

More credible are employee stories about Ament’s abrasive leadership style, stories that Ament denies, calling himself a collaborative leader. The stories included allegations of: telling an employee who was later demoted and fired for insubordination that he didn’t care for her at a holiday party, threatening to fire employees in front of their peers, and an employee who said the organization failed to adequately address an incident where she was exposed to a nude photograph of a male colleague.

The city’s Chamber of Commerce is far more than just a marketing tool for local businesses, and now more than ever, Colorado needs the heart of downtown to thrive. The Chamber owns and rents the building it occupies. Like other landlords in downtown, it is struggling to break even despite growth in membership, relying on its foundation and other external organizations to balance the books.

While membership is certainly an important measure of the Chamber’s success – after all, those members pay the dues that keep the Chamber running – we are confident that the Chamber can find a leader who will support businesses and drive investment in the Chamber without driving off half of the staff.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Seated at a desk next to his mom, 9-year-old Nolan Kersey leaned in and whispered, “What’s ethnography?”

Mariyah Younger, 31, smiled at her son and helped him look up the definition — a research method in which someone studies a social or cultural group — on his tablet.

During class, Jordan tasked his students with wandering the university halls to take notes on their surroundings as if they were performing an ethnographic field study of the building.

Nolan and his mom walked through the Plaza Building on the Auraria campus, he with his tablet and she with a notebook and pen, documenting the world around them. They noticed Braille on the numbered signs posted outside each classroom. Specks on the ceiling tiles. Flyers advertising Spanish club events on bulletin boards.

Back in the classroom, Nolan’s hand was the first to shoot up when Jordan asked students to share their findings. The professor called on the 9-year-old first.

“I noticed vending machines on every floor of the building,” Nolan said.

Jordan praised the young boy’s observation. The class nodded in affirmation, some cracking small smiles as Nolan turned his attention back to the handmade worksheet his mother had created, instructing him to write down what he had learned that day and how he was feeling.

About one in 10 students at MSU Denver is also a parent, according to university data. One in five college students across the country has children, according to national nonprofit , which aims to ensure all student parents succeed.

Younger is determined to make the pursuit of a degree at MSU Denver more accessible for students raising children. She is a new student fellow for Generation Hope’s , which works with college leaders, staff and students to make campuses more friendly to scholars taking care of kids.

MSU Denver is among five universities in the country selected to participate in the program, which focuses on improving policies, resources and support systems for parenting students.

If Younger couldn’t bring her son to class when needed, the communications major is not sure what she would do. The struggle of finding consistent child care is one hurdle preventing college-going parents from earning degrees.

“MSU is family-friendly, and we’re making it even more inclusive for families,” Younger said. “It’s wonderful to be a part of this. My kiddos know mommy goes to college, and now they’re inquisitive about college, too.”

Jordan’s willingness to go above and beyond, encouraging Nolan to participate, is just one example of the university’s commitment to families.

“At MSU Denver, we believe that a student����ap role as a parent is a strength, not a barrier,” President Janine Davidson said in a statement. “Through FamilyU, we are committed to creating a space where parenting students are fully seen, supported and empowered.”

Helping future parents

Younger works with departments throughout MSU Denver, including financial aid, student affairs and faculty, looking for ways to improve existing policies or procedures in the eyes of a mom, dad or caregiver.

So far, she has helped develop an with resources all in one place and planned events, including a “bring your kid to school” day welcoming parents and their children to campus. That event allowed kids to see the place where their caregivers learn, featured a kids’ clothing drive and free family portraits, and allowed the university to educate parents on what resources exist for them.

The program has also given parents the option to self-identify during school orientation for better data-keeping and so the university can email them resources and updates.

Surveying students and parents across the country, Generation Hope found that many felt disconnected from their college community, did not see family-friendly characteristics on their campuses and felt that student services like financial aid offices weren’t properly educated on how to serve parents. For example, child care expenses can be included to determine a student’s financial aid award, which many students — like Younger — didn’t know.

Younger has two toddlers in daycare while Nolan is in school.

The educates parents and pregnant students about medical accommodations they might qualify for, child care options on campus, lactation rooms, policies regarding students’ return to classes after childbirth, financial aid information and summer camp suggestions.

“We’re examining all of our policies and we are working with student parents to get their input on what policies are needed,” said Kristen Lyons, MSU Denver psychology professor and one of the faculty representatives on the FamilyU team. “When you support a student parent, you’re supporting their kids, and it directly impacts the whole family.”

Being a part of the FamilyU program provides a coach to analyze your institution, a customized work plan for your campus, quarterly cohort meetings, a paid student parent fellow and a meeting between Generation Hope and the university’s executive leaders.

“My hope is that people who are thinking about returning to college or starting it here at MSU Denver know the university is here to support them and their success,” Lyons said. “I hope that our student parents get to complete their dream of an education.”

Laura Delmonico’s three children have watched their mom plow through a psychology major with a minor in human development and family studies at MSU Denver.

Her 8-year-old walked in on her taking an online test last month. The little girl said, “You’re going to do great, Mom. I’m proud of you, and you got this.”

According to , the group most likely to have attended college three years after high school were students with at least one parent who had a bachelor’s or other degree and who believed their family could afford college. The group least likely to have attended college during that same timeframe was students whose parents had a high school diploma or less and who believed their family could not afford it.

“They see me staying up late and working hard, and they know what that means,” Delmonico said. “They know what hard work looks like. They see what it takes to do something you’re passionate about.”

Delmonico, 32, went to the University of Hawaii right out of high school but found it wasn’t quite the right fit. She moved back to Colorado without her degree, and then life — work, having three kids — happened.

When Delmonico decided she wanted to prioritize her college degree again, MSU Denver seemed like a good fit for the single mother: more affordable, flexible and used to working with non-traditional populations.

Delmonico is an online student and a teaching assistant in addition to being a mother.

College is a different experience this time around.

“When I first went to college, it was about having fun and meeting new people and sometimes going to class,” Delmonico said. “When you’re a parent, you don’t have time for that extra stuff. You are there to learn. You’re there to get work done. You do your best and stay up late and get up early, and you just get your stuff done.”

Delmonico is now involved in the student-parent advocacy work at MSU along with Younger and other parents. She enjoys the camaraderie of meeting other student parents and bonding over how exhausted they are, she said while laughing.

“I want to help lay some groundwork and get some things going because I want it to be better for all the parents that come after me,” Delmonico said. “When I cross the finish line, I want to make sure I’m turning around and helping all the waves behind me get across, too.”

A different journey

When Younger emailed Jordan earlier this semester to let him know that managing her child care needs along with in-person classes was proving difficult, he told her that his policy has always been that there’s no reason not to bring kids to class.

“It’s been awesome,” Jordan said. “I really like it when the kids are there. It gets the enrolled students participating a little more actively, as well. I think that meeting any students where they’re at is a really important part of teaching and makes class more accessible and meaningful.”

Jordan’s own experience growing up might influence his policy.

When the professor was in first grade, his mom started taking basic courses at a San Diego community college — something no one in his family had done.

“My first memories of what college was as a concept were hanging out with my mom in a composition class,” Jordan said. “As someone who didn’t have college grads in my family, it normalized (that) this is a thing adults can go do to learn things and better their life.”

Now, 9-year-old Nolan sits in Jordan’s class, taking in the college experience for himself.

College, he said, is “really cool.” The people are “extra polite” and sometimes you walk around campus and find people performing or making art or playing games. His favorite thing about college so far is the Starbucks on campus, he said as his mom rolled her eyes and laughed, promising a sweet treat after class.

In the mornings, it’s a mad dash out the door for Younger and her three children as she gets the younger two to preschool and Nolan to elementary school. She downloads her class readings and listens to them in the car on the way to morning drop-offs.

Once a week, she picked up Nolan from school late as she raced out of her college courses and fought traffic. His school told her they’d have to call Child Protective Services if she was late again, so she decided to pick him up early once a week and bring him to class with her.

“I had a sense of guilt about it, but I am doing the best I can, and he is engaged here and learning so much,” Younger said. “He is doing his homework, and I make him worksheets, and I know he is getting a lot out of it. I am a mom and a student, and I take both of those jobs seriously.”

After Younger graduates in the spring, she plans to pursue her master’s degree and eventually work in higher education so she can help other student parents like herself earn their degrees and better their futures.

“You get there when you get there, and it’s OK that the journey looks different than those around you,” Younger said. “My goal is to see parenting resources become institutionalized.”

The state is home to 14 , or public colleges and universities with a high percentage of specific demographic groups — Hispanic, Native American or Black students, for example — and a large concentration of students with financial need.

In Colorado, 13 of those schools are designated as , meaning they have 25% or higher Hispanic or Latino undergraduate enrollment. One school, Fort Lewis College, is a .

“We’re going to continue to do our best to meet the needs of our students, but it will be challenging, given we’ve been greatly supported by these resources for many years,” said Kristyn White Davis, vice president of enrollment management, marketing and extended studies at Colorado State University Pueblo, which is losing more than $3 million.

The federal money being cut often funded campuswide positions or initiatives such as career counseling centers, college recruitment efforts, internship coordinators and services for low-income and first-generation students, education officials said.

“These initiatives didn’t just serve Hispanic students — they benefit the entire student body with supports aimed at boosting student success across our colleges and universities,” said Angie Paccione, executive director of the , in a statement. “… Now, because of these cuts by the Trump administration, many institutions are being forced to dismantle these efforts, hurting students and Colorado’s economy.”

Democratic state legislators identified the following six institutions as being the most impacted by the funding cuts:

• in Alamosa
• in Durango
• in Fort Morgan

On Sept. 10, the announced an to grants for minority-serving institutions, calling the program discriminatory and unconstitutional.

“Discrimination based upon race or ethnicity has no place in the United States,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a news release. “To further our commitment to ending discrimination in all forms across federally supported programs, the department will no longer award minority-serving institution grants that discriminate by restricting eligibility to institutions that meet government-mandated racial quotas.”

The $350 million in discretionary funding that was going to support minority-serving institutions in 2025 will be diverted to “programs that do not include discriminatory racial and ethnic quotas and that advance administration priorities,” the Education Department said.

‘It will have a long-term effect’

The , which serves more than 124,000 students at 13 colleges across the state, is bracing for the loss of more than $5 million to its campuses.

One of those schools, Lamar Community College, is poised to lose nearly $3 million. The money would have funded five new positions, including a role working with middle- and high-schooler students in the rural, southeastern Colorado community to engage and recruit them for college, the college’s president, Rosana Reyes, said.

The grant was administered last October and recruitment work began in the spring, Reyes said. After concentrated engagement with local K-12 students, Reyes said Lamar Community College saw a 14% increase in first-time college students enrolling. The money, she said, helped students from all kinds of backgrounds continue their education.

“We can’t remember the last time we had such a huge increase in that population,” Reyes said. “It’s a great example of what this grant was going to do. The additional positions would have been a game-changer. The loss of this grant is not going to stop us from looking for more opportunities to serve our students. But it will have a long-term effect.”

For years, the state has the eradication of educational attainment gaps, noting that higher education increases the likelihood of community members having better health outcomes and

Colorado has the highest number of residents with a college credential in the nation, at 62.9% for adults between the ages of 25 to 64, . However, Black and Hispanic educational attainment rates were at 41.6% and 30.3%, respectively, during the same time period.

The , the and the sent a letter to the state’s congressional delegation and Gov. Jared Polis this week urging action on the federal funding cuts.

The letter said the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding for minority-serving institutions would primarily impact Colorado’s two-year colleges and rural institutions.

“Meaning that, once again, we are taking away opportunities for economic mobility from those already at the greatest disadvantage,” the state legislators wrote. “Our federal government has chosen to limit access to educational opportunity in pursuit of a harmful narrative that serves to only further divide Americans from one another.”

‘We are a scrappy institution’

CSU Pueblo had been awarded $3.6 million in federal grants that are now discontinued.

White Davis, one of the campus’s vice presidents, said that amount of money represents a “substantial” loss for a smaller, regional institution like CSU Pueblo, which serves around 4,000 students, nearly 34% of them Hispanic.

The grant money was focused on student support services, advising roles and internship coordinator positions, White Davis said.

“We intend to do the very best we can and are working as a campus leadership team, as well as our faculty resources, to think of creative ways to continue to provide critical student support services, but we have to acknowledge some of those support services students are accustomed to having may not be available in the future,” she said.

Adams State University in Alamosa will lose a nearly $2.5 million grant intended to help local high school students take advantage of concurrent enrollment credits to make the transition to college easier and more affordable, said Jacob Rissler, the school’s vice president of advancement.

“That would have been serving all students,” Rissler said. “But we are a scrappy institution. We do the best we can with what we have. We don’t have the funding we typically would have, but we’re still going to do our mission to serve all students.”

Rissler said Adams State will seek out private donors and philanthropic foundations to make up for the lost funds.

The position sat vacant for six months. The students at the Denver college who were waiting to learn the popular trade saw their program paused, stalling their education.

“Whenever you have a vacancy for an instructor position, it’s really hard to find candidates,” said Gideon Geisel, Emily Griffith’s dean of trades, business and technology. “You turn over every possible stone you can think of, and usually it takes a really long time — and that, ultimately, does impact students.”

Emily Griffith Technical College is the public postsecondary and adult-education arm of the system and one of three technical colleges in the Colorado Community College system. The school offers various , or CTE, certificate programs like barbering, welding, water quality management and computer networking.

Career and technical education, the product of what are more commonly known as trade schools, is now offered in middle schools, high schools, community and technical colleges, and even some four-year universities across the country.

Due to instructor shortages, Emily Griffith has been forced to close programs — most recently, a program on computer-aided design and building information modeling.

The college employs about 26 full-time and 40 part-time credentialed instructors. Substitute instructors provide support when needed. At the moment, Geisel said, the trade school is fully staffed, but that doesn’t account for the long waitlists its programs have. Administrators anxiously await the next staff vacancy, knowing it could mean another program closure or indefinite pause.

The technical college has experienced long delays between losing an instructor and hiring another, resulting in program interruptions and delayed completion for students, including in accounting, massage therapy and automotive services.

To help remedy the problem, state officials are looking to coax trade workers out of retirement or entice aging employees with labor-intensive jobs to take on the less physically taxing career of instructor at Colorado’s trade schools.

The ongoing CTE instructor shortages at Emily Griffith are emblematic of a nationwide problem compounded by , but not enough instructors to meet that demand.

“This is not isolated to Emily Griffith,” Geisel said. “This is a metro-area-wide challenge, a statewide challenge, a nationwide challenge. It’s one thing to have the student demand for it. It’s another thing to have the supply to meet the demand.”

Teaching a new generation

Colorado supported 1,367 CTE programs across 329 schools and 154 districts during 2023-2024 academic year for the more than 125,000 CTE students enrolled in high school, according to . For postsecondary options, the state offered 716 CTE programs across 20 community and technical colleges, as well as in the .

Schools in the state awarded 21,005 postsecondary CTE certificates and associate degrees during the 2023-2024 academic year. Nearly 80% of employed graduates are working in an occupation related to the CTE program they completed, with median wages ranging from $54,550 in construction to $80,760 for a registered nurse, according to state data.

Corbin Lewis hopes to be among the CTE graduates soon. The 19-year-old is a welding student at Emily Griffith who hopes to work on a pipeline to gain experience before owning his own rig and starting an oil and gas company.

The teen took a welding class at Douglas County High School and found he enjoyed working with his hands more than traditional book learning. His father and grandfather both worked in trades, and he intends to follow in their footsteps.

“You’re getting to do what you would do out in the field,” Lewis said. “It’s a really good community around here.”

In the automotive services wing of the campus during a recent visit, a group of students huddled beneath a vehicle perched on a hydraulic lift, wielding tools as they learned about changing transmission oil.

Gary Kreider has been an automotive instructor at Emily Griffith for two years. He was previously the shop foreman at a local Toyota dealership for nearly 40 years.

When his body told him it was time to get out of the labor-intensive job, the 63-year-old heard about a trade instructor position through which he could pass along his expertise.

“I physically wanted out, but I still had something to offer a new generation,” he said.

Kreider is refreshed to be teaching young folks who are engaged in mechanic work. At the dealership, he said he struggled to fill positions, but now he’s on the other side of the pipeline, imparting his knowledge onto bright, eager learners.

He enjoys the teaching aspect, but there’s an unexpected bonus he’s come to cherish: vacation time.

Kreider went from working 60 to 70 hours a week at the dealership to about 40 hours a week with the bonus of academic-calendar vacations.

“I’ve never had that much time off in my whole career,” he said.

An ‘encore career’

A lack of skilled instructors means schools can’t train the next generation of electricians, HVAC technicians, welders and other professionals.

The implications are far-reaching, Emily Griffith’s Geisel said.

From the infrastructure we rely on in our daily lives to the repairs needed to our transportation to the operators who make the water we drink safe, the trades are crucial to keeping our cities running as needed, he said.

“Why we’re so important for entry-level employment is a lot of people in the trades are getting older and they’re looking to us for that talent because the trade jobs are not going away,” Geisel said. “We’re still reliant on them.”

Catherine Imperatore, research and content director for the , offered some reasons why the shortage is happening.

Because CTE educators come from industry, they often lack traditional teaching experience and need to learn it on the job, which can be daunting, she said. It can be isolating if you’re the only CTE teacher on campus. Sometimes CTE teachers are asked to take on additional roles like leading student organizations such as , Imperatore said.

Pay is also pivotal. Many trade industries pay better than teaching, Imperatore said.

Sarah Heath, the career and technical education director with the Colorado Community College System, oversees CTE education across the state and is working to fill the instructor gap.

Tracking how many CTE jobs are vacant is difficult, Heath said. If a program gets cut and the job goes away, there’s often nowhere to document the change. The same goes for program pauses, she said.

After the pandemic hit universities hard, Heath saw a resurgence in young people turning to trades. Trade programs across the state have waitlists so long they require lottery systems because there aren’t enough teachers.

The state is addressing the dearth by reaching out to industry retirees, informing them that an “encore career” awaits in the classroom. Heath and her colleagues are partnering with human resource departments so that employees departing trade jobs can get information about instructor positions during their exit interviews.

Heath is also looking to connect with local or aging-focused groups to pitch retirees on passing along their hard-earned career skills while still having summers and holidays off for leisure.

The Colorado Community College System and the Emily Griffith Technical College each have programs in which industry workers without teaching experience can get the training and credentials they need to be classroom-ready.

“, and then we’ll figure it out,” Geisel said. “As long as you’ve worked in industry, it will translate.”

Heath also wants to connect with business owners and industry professionals who might not have the bandwidth to leave their jobs to come teach, but would welcome students to learn on-site.

Some Colorado schools, particularly in rural areas where job candidates are even fewer and farther between, are looking within when it comes to filling CTE positions, Heath said. For example, an employee who maintains the school bus fleet could be tapped to teach auto shop.

Anyone interested in learning more about becoming a trade school instructor or partnering with trades education is asked to email the Colorado Community College System’s CTE team at CTE@CCCS.edu and share their industry and location to be connected to the right person.

“I wish that trades folk, when they’re ready for a change or nearing the end of their career, they’d really consider continuing the gift and make sure their knowledge and expertise is passed along to the next generation that the local communities desperately need,” Geisel said.

Updated 12:20 p.m. Sept. 19, 2025: This story has been updated to correct a photo caption that misidentified Emily Griffith Technical College instructor Matt Sartorio.

Last month, the Education Department slashed $600 million in grants that funded the training programs, alleging the money supported the types of diversity, equity and inclusion programs that have been since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January.

Across the country, the grants paid student teachers to gain experience in classrooms, funded scholarships for aspiring teachers, and sent teachers to workshops to learn from peers. As recipients scramble to appeal the cuts, many say they could lead to fewer well-prepared teachers in classrooms, particularly in subject areas and regions already struggling with shortages.

“I think what����ap unknown at this moment is how many individuals are going to continue to go into teaching, who may just have had their scholarships disrupted,” said Kathlene Campbell, CEO of the .

On Thursday, eight Democratic state attorneys general — including Colorado’s Phil Weiser — in U.S. District Court in Boston. Weiser joins the attorneys general of California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin in the litigation.

“The Trump administration’s unlawful termination of critical teacher preparation grants will have devastating impacts on rural communities across the state,” Weiser said in a news release. “When schools are unable to find qualified teachers, students suffer. Teacher shortages can result in larger class sizes, canceled courses or classes staffed with teachers less able to teach a subject.”

A Department of Education spokesperson said the federal agency does not comment on pending litigation.

In Colorado, nearly $2.8 million in funding that addresses the state’s ongoing teacher shortage in rural communities is at risk, Weiser said.

On Feb. 7, the Education Department terminated grants awarded to K-12 teacher training programs in Colorado and across the country, including a $6.5 million grant the received for its program.

The NxtGEN program partners with four rural community colleges — , , and — and 57 rural Colorado school districts to locate, recruit and prepare teachers to graduate and stay in the their rural communities.

About $2.8 million of the grant remains unspent and at risk, Weiser said.

“The NxtGEN program has been very effective in addressing teacher shortages in Colorado,” the attorney general’s news release said.

The program graduated 19 teachers who are now working at rural K-12 schools. Nearly 80 candidates are in the pipeline preparing to follow their lead.

“There’s a huge need for teachers to instruct children in reading, writing, math and science in rural communities,” CU Denver officials said in a statement to The Denver Post. “According to Colorado Department of Education data, rural schools in Colorado had 1,028 vacant teaching positions in 2021, many of which went unfilled for most of the year. NxtGEN CO was approved in 2022 and designed to help address that gap.”

The Department of Education’s cuts will result in 21 jobs lost or reduced, an estimated 50 new teachers lost for rural school districts where teacher shortages exist, according to the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.

In their lawsuit, the attorneys general argue the terminations — issued without warning and with immediate effect — violate the , a federal law by which federal agencies develop and issue regulations. The attorneys general seek a temporary restraining order to prevent disruptions to the teaching programs.

Federal money makes up a significant portion of budgets in some rural districts, which rely more on grants and philanthropy because of their limited tax base, said Sharon Contreras, CEO of the , a collaboration among North Carolina school districts. A grant to that group supported teacher recruitment and retention, providing scholarships for teachers pursuing master’s degrees if they agreed to return to the area and serve as principals for three years.

“These districts struggle to attract teachers,” Contreras said. “They struggle to attract principals because they can’t compete with larger districts.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The classroom is where she had wanted to be, but Mills wasn’t sure how to achieve her dream of being a teacher while juggling both work and school. She attended in Washington, D.C., for two years, but moved back to Colorado in 2020 because she couldn’t afford tuition.

Mills worked as a librarian at until she joined a new initiative — the — that the launched during the 2024-25 academic year and which pays her to co-teach while she earns a degree.

“I always wanted to do something with kids,” Mills, 24, said, adding, “It����ap something I wanted to do but I had no way to go about it without the program.”

The Cherry Creek School District launched the Aspiring Educator Pathway in hopes of solving Colorado’s growing teacher shortage and building a pipeline of educators for the district’s classrooms.

The district is spending $760,000 to pay 16 apprentices salary and benefits. The money comes from positions that are unfilled throughout the district, spokeswomen Ashley Verville said.

The program is akin to a medical residency, with future teachers getting trained inside Cherry Creek’s elementary and middle schools while they earn a bachelor’s degree from the .

The district pays participants an annual salary and benefits that total $47,500 as they complete their training and finish their education. And this year’s apprentices had their tuition fully covered via a grant from , a state program that pays tuition and other fees for community college students studying to work in high-demand fields.

Cherry Creek’s new program follows in 2023 that allowed the to develop an alternate route for people attaining their teaching licenses. Under the district����ap program, participants receive their degree from the Community College of Aurora but their licensure comes from the Cherry Creek School District.

The initiative builds on another program at the district in which high school students work and are paid to be paraprofessionals, or teacher aids, in the district����ap classrooms, Superintendent Chris Smith said.

“I do believe this is going to change the way we educate teachers to be teachers across the country,” he said.

Sixteen apprentices, including Mills, are currently participating in the program at seven schools in the district. Leaders of the Cherry Creek School District hope to expand the initiative so that 400 apprentices are participating in four years, Smith said.

The district will begin recruiting a new batch of apprentices for the program’s second year in January.

“There’s not as many teachers graduating from our teacher colleges,” Smith said. “…The cost of higher education is driving teachers away from the teaching profession because you don’t get into teaching to make a whole bunch of money. You get into teaching to make a difference in the lives of a whole bunch of kids.”

Widespread staffing shortages have persisted in Colorado districts since the start of the pandemic, making it difficult for schools to have enough teachers, bus drivers and substitutes.

Statewide, districts and — or BOCES, which provide educational services, including special education programs, to districts — reported 3,425 total staffing shortages during the 2023-24 academic year. Nearly 70% of those shortages were for teachers, from state education department.

Districts and BOCES had 2,388 teacher shortages last school year, almost double the 1,197 shortages districts reported five years earlier, the data showed. The teacher openings were either staffed by what the state calls a shortage mechanism, such as a long-term sub, or went unfilled.

“We have a growing and somewhat silent crisis around the teacher workforce,” said Van Schoales, senior policy director at the , a nonprofit that conducts education research.

“There’s a zeitgeist that teaching sucks these days,” he said. “It����ap perceived to be, and by many measures, it has gotten more difficult over time. The perceptions are that it����ap not rewarding. The perceptions are that it����ap harder to make a difference.”

Schools also have become a battleground for culture wars playing out across the country, as politicians, parents and educators debate how to teach topics such as race and gender identity.

And teacher wages haven’t kept up with rising housing costs or inflation, Schoales said.

Several districts, including those across metro Denver, increased employees’ wages in recent years. But educators have said they still can’t buy or rent homes in the districts where they teach. The problem is so pronounced that some districts, particularly those in Colorado’s high country, are becoming landlords and building tiny homes so that their teachers have places to live.

When teachers finish the Aspiring Educator Pathway program and stay to work in the Cherry Creek School District, they will receive the salary of a fifth-year teacher. This means their annual pay will start at $65,343, which is $4,000 more than if they were a first-year teacher, according to the district.

Educators who go through the program will receive a higher starting salary because they will have spent as many as four years in classrooms co-teaching with mentors. Apprentices will get more than 4,000 hours in the classroom, compared to the roughly 750 hours they would typically receive as student teachers through traditional programs, Smith said.

“Almost all of their time will be spent in our schools with the mentor co-teaching,” Smith said.

So, he said, not only is the program creating a pipeline of teachers, but also better preparing them to be in the classroom on their own than traditional programs.

The process to become a teacher “is old” and students spend much of their time learning the theory of education, he said.

But teaching isn’t just knowing how to help someone learn. A teacher also needs know how to plan lessons, manage a class and connect with students — skills that can only really be developed when a person is inside a classroom and working with children, Smith said.

And that, he said, is the benefit of the district����ap new program.

Mills, the apprentice at Ponderosa Elementary, said that by being in the classroom, she’s not only getting to learn from a seasoned teacher, but she’s also building connections in the school and district. Most of her classes for her degree are online.

If it wasn’t for the program, Mills would still be a school librarian. Now, she said, she wants to teach first grade.

“I love my class,” she said. “It makes me really happy to be here.”

Despite the perception that provider shortages are a rural problem, none of Colorado’s 21 health regions — including Denver and the surrounding counties — have enough doctors, nurse practitioners and other medical workers to meet their residents’ needs for care, according to data collected earlier this year by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

Single counties in the metro area are their own regions in the state’s statistics, while less-populated parts of the state are grouped together. The state’s data doesn’t quantify how many more providers each region needs.

Colorado’s best-served regions had enough providers to offer 81% of the primary care visits (in the San Luis Valley) and 72% of the mental health and addiction care (in Denver) that their populations needed, according to the state’s data.

In parts of the high country and the Eastern Plains, the available appointments met one-fifth or less of the need for both types of care.

States can sometimes recruit doctors and other providers from areas that have a greater abundance, but that strategy is expensive, said Joshua Gottlieb, an economist at University of Chicago who has studied health care markets.

Ultimately, states need to either increase the supply of providers, or come up with creative ways to get more out of each one they have, such as having a doctor oversee nurses and technicians who do most of the hands-on care, he said.

“I don’t think we have, as a society, explored how far we can push that,” Gottlieb said.

Colorado has taken steps since the pandemic to increase its supply of providers, including:

• in the most recent legislative session for colleges to expand their health care programs, including the creation of a new medical school at University of Northern Colorado
• Paying for classes and materials for community college students going into one of 14 health care careers that require two years of training or less, through the
• Creating “stackable” micro-credentials that allow students to quickly start working in the mental health field

In most cases, the changes are too recent to see any effects, and UNC’s osteopathic medical school won’t enroll its first class until the fall of 2026.

Only the Care Forward Colorado program, which started in 2022, , which show about 5,600 people have participated, but only two in five have graduated. That rate is still an improvement over students working toward the same certificates who didn’t receive Care Forward funding, though: less than one in four of them had graduated at the time of the evaluation. Others may graduate in the coming year.

A spokesperson for Gov. Jared Polis’ office said the state is on the right track to fulfilling its health care workforce needs.

“We are saving people money, breaking down barriers to education and training, and developing a stronger workforce to fill in demand jobs and power Colorado’s economy now and in the future,” the governor’s office said in a statement.

Combating shortages is a long-term proposition, to say the least.

Nationwide, almost three-quarters of federally defined health professional shortage areas , which opened up higher reimbursement rates and loan forgiveness options to physicians willing to work there. (The federal designation only counts physicians and deems an area to have a shortage if the ratio of residents to doctors is above a cutoff, while the state’s numbers include other types of providers.)

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, the country expected an oversupply of physicians, and medical schools cut back in response, said Shoshana Weissman, a fellow at the think tank R Street Institute. That set up the current situation, where essentially all states have shortages somewhere, she said.

Colorado has taken some important steps, such as allowing physician associates to practice without a doctor’s supervision, Weissman said. The state could do more, though, including making it easier for immigrants who were providers in their home countries to find suitable jobs here and allowing pharmacists to provide more routine health services, she said.

“Anything they’re trained to do, they should be allowed to do,” she said.

The state also is trying to bring more people into the behavioral health workforce via “micro-credentials” that let them do entry-level work in mental health and addiction treatment, sometimes after as few as two classes.

Callico Jones, chair of behavioral health at Pueblo Community College, said students have the option of gradually stacking the micro-credentials until they earn a certificate, and then of building on that for a degree in a behavioral health field. Students who’ve completed the micro-credentials typically handle tasks such as helping patients find resources, which allows clinicians to focus on providing treatment, she said.

Pueblo Community College is . About 100 students are enrolled in the college’s behavioral health programs, which also include certificates and an associate’s degree.

While some people in the field are leery of graduates who are taking the new path, it marks a return to the tradition of apprenticeship, since their students will work under licensed clinicians, Jones said. And given the “dire straits” of Colorado’s health workforce, any new professionals will help, she said.

“Before higher education existed, people learned by doing,” she said.

Little research on what works

States have tried a variety of strategies to increase their health care workforces, but they generally haven’t studied which ones work, said Briana Last, a researcher at Stony Brook University in New York who focuses on access to mental health care.

The National Health Service Corps has the most data behind it, and it shows that most people don’t stay in the areas where they served their stint to get loan forgiveness more than five years, she said.

Last’s review of the available studies found each behavioral health provider participating in the corps gave about 1,300 visits per year that the centers where they worked couldn’t have offered otherwise. Only about one-third stayed in the shortage area where they worked after their service time ended, though.

Whether that marks a success in temporarily increasing access or a failure to address shortages in the long term depends on your viewpoint, Last said. While the federal government hasn’t collected much data on why providers leave, incomes tend to be lower in shortage areas and workloads tend to be higher, she said.

“You need to have a bigger carrot” to convince people to stay long-term, she said.

Most of the federal health workforce programs focus on loan forgiveness, but states might have more success if they reduced the cost of getting an education in the first place, via scholarships, Last said.

“A lot of people can’t afford college. A lot of people can’t afford graduate education,” she said.

When UNC’s new osteopathic medicine school is up and running, one of its goals is to work with K-12 schools and local health care providers to create “pipeline” programs that gradually expose kids to health careers, said Dr. Beth Longenecker, the school’s first dean.

Osteopathic doctors, or DOs, learn how to , in addition to prescribing medications and performing conventional procedures. While DOs can work in any medical specialty, they tend to pursue primary care because of the field’s emphasis on looking at patients’ wellbeing holistically.

Educating more primary care providers and people willing to work in underserved areas were two of the top reasons funders in Colorado got behind a new medical school, Longenecker said.

“I love the fact that the focus is, how do we recruit students who wouldn’t consider going to medical school,” she said.

The osteopathic medicine school also plans to offer a rural medicine track and set up rotations for students to train at least part-time in federally qualified health centers and in rural and frontier counties, Longenecker said. If they can find the start-up funds, they have the goal of helping providers create 45 residency slots over the next five years, she said.

“If you can have exposure where you can see the impact on a rural community, I think that will inspire our students,” she said.

Where new doctors complete their residency can be at least as important as where they attend medical school, with those who train in underserved areas more likely to practice there.

Residency lasts at least three years, which is enough time that trainees become part of a community and consider staying, said Brianna Lombardi, director of the University of North Carolina Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center. The programs aren’t easy to set up, though, and rural hospitals likely would need significant federal support to make it happen, she said.

“It’s really easy for the academic centers to train a lot of people, because that’s how they’re set up,” she said.

Increasing the number of medical graduates is only part of the solution, though, said Dr. Robert Cain, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine.

More young doctors need the option to complete their residencies in rural areas, but small hospitals may not be able to handle the upfront cost, which can exceed $150,000 for each resident, he said. The federal government reimburses hospitals for training expenses, but only after the first three years.

And none of that is a substitute for increasing pay and respect for primary care providers, Cain said.

“What we haven’t done is resource primary care and promote primary care so people want to go into it,” he said.

Dual-enrolled high school students are closing in on accounting for nearly half of Colorado’s community college enrollment, according to fall 2024 enrollment data.

Of the 88,118 students enrolled at the two-year level, more than 39,000 students statewide are still in high school, the Colorado Community College System reports. The share of dual-enrolled students has steadily increased each year. Nationally, about , according to 2022-23 numbers.

In light of the of the state’s concurrent enrollment system — where high school students enroll in college classes — Colorado lawmakers and other education advocates want more information on the long-term benefit of these programs as well as the overall costs to the state. Lawmakers have passed laws that call for studying how to streamline and improve a system that has been built piecemeal over the years.

In total, high school students accounted for almost 90% of enrollment increases at the community college level this year. Since the pandemic, high school students have become a main driver of community college enrollment in the state.

The numbers were climbing even before 2020 amid greater emphasis on exposing students to college-level work, said Sarah Heath, system vice chancellor of academic and student affairs.

“We really have focused on the value of high school plus,” Heath said. “That has resonated.”

About 3,100 new students enrolled this year in Colorado community colleges, with a 2,770 increase in high school students, according to October numbers.

Among students who are beyond high school, enrollment ticked up only slightly. These older adult students traditionally represented the bulk of community college enrollment, but colleges have had more trouble .

“We haven’t had much growth” in that segment, Heath said, “except for some online pieces.”

Nationally, community colleges fared better than public four-year universities in enrollment in part because of the number of high school students who are also enrolled in public two-year colleges.

National numbers show a this fall over last year.

Here’s a closer look at the changing face of Colorado’s two-year colleges:

What do we know (and not know) about the students?

The majority of high school students take college classes part-time, or less than 12 credits. This has led to an increase in part-time students at colleges.

Of the 88,118 community college students enrolled this year, including high school students, only 22,715 enrolled full-time.

Many high school students also likely never set foot on a college campus thanks to the increase in high school teachers who are certified to teach college-level courses, according to Heath.

By the time students graduate from high school, they’ve typically earned only a few college credits. Still, state leaders have said that this helps offset the overall cost of a college education for them. saved about $53 million in tuition through these opportunities.

The new community college enrollment data doesn’t break down figures for overall high school student diversity, but past reports show these programs are mostly representative of the state’s K-12 ethnic and racial makeup. About half of all students in 2021 were white, a quarter were Hispanic, and about 3.5% were Black.

The report did not include information on how the programs benefit lower-income students in the state, or those students who would benefit the most financially from these programs.

Where are students dual-enrolled?

Most dual-enrolled high school students live on the Front Range in urban and suburban communities, although many rural districts have a higher percentage of their students participating in programs.

In total, Colorado has 561 cooperative agreements between school districts and two- and four-year colleges. Only two districts in the state do not participate in dual enrollment.

Of the two-year colleges, Front Range and Arapahoe community colleges have some of the highest numbers of district partnerships. Those colleges enroll almost 25,000 high school students, or about 62% of the dual-enrolled student population.

The highest participation rates are in rural districts such as in Crowley, Edison, and Silverton, where more than 70% of high school students are dual enrolled.

Who pays for dual enrollment?

In most cases, the districts and state pay for the cost of offering these programs.

Programs like ASCENT, where students attend college in their fifth year of high school but also get support from their districts, now require students to fill out the FAFSA so they’re eligible for Pell grants, or federal aid to students from lower-income backgrounds. The Pell grants then offset the cost of college incurred by the state. This year, the state is projected to spend .

Most partnerships between the community colleges and districts are structured to be cost neutral, so community colleges only charge for services to support dual enrollment, Heath said. But districts must hire staff, provide classes, and support students.

Nationally, some have wondered whether these programs are the best use of state funds. For example, whether states are just subsidizing college for students who would already plan to go.

— about two-thirds of them — end up on a college campus after they graduate from high school, compared with most other states. It����ap not entirely clear why, but the number decreases if students are from lower-income backgrounds, according to the Community College Research Center.

What do lawmakers want to change?

Colorado lawmakers say they recognize the value of dual enrollment, especially because national research shows these programs can help eliminate gaps in who gets to college. But they also want more information on the state’s many programs.

what it has described as a fragmented early career and college system built over many years. Colorado has numerous programs, but not every district offers every program.

Each program has different reporting requirements, making it hard to measure how programs are working individually and as a whole. Colorado lawmakers enacted legislation this year that:

• Directs the state to perform a comprehensive financial study to analyze how much the programs cost the state and districts;
• Compiles long-term data on program outcomes;
• Expands college opportunities for high school students; and
• Seeks to find a comprehensive direction on college and career education.

is a reporter covering higher education and the Colorado legislature. Chalkbeat Colorado partners with on higher education coverage. Contact Jason at jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.