Friend,
Welcome back to The PHENOM Update, our official monthly newsletter where we keep you updated on recent goings on in our campaigns and around the higher ed world!
“Spring Into Action” Luncheon a Success!
Thanks to everyone who attended! On Sunday, March 9th, PHENOM hosted our luncheon focused on bringing together higher ed advocates from all camps to discuss how to continue the push for more affordable and equitable public college in today’s political climate.
In addition to an awards ceremony to recognize the work of volunteers, the event had speeches from Reps. Carmine Gentile and Natalie Higgins (both sponsors of PHENOM’s legislation!), Greenfield CC Student Government President Michael Hannigan, and UMass-Amherst’s Professional Staff Union Co-Chair Andrew Gorry.
PHENOM Executive Director Henry Morgan, along with UMass-Amherst PHENOM student organizer Ruo Wu and Communications Chair Liam Rue, led a presentation on PHENOM’s four campaigns of 2025 and an explanation of each bill, from the Debt-Free Future Act to the Endowment Tax to the Adjunct Faculty Pilot Program to our Financial Aid Reform Bill.
The event concluded with a group discussion phase, with topics such as strategies for continuing advocacy, personal experiences with student debt, and different ways to make college debt-free.
While recognizing the uncertainty of the current political climate, speakers also pointed to signs of hope that we must build on to keep fighting for a better world. “We are in a state of revolution right now in the United States,” Rep. Gentile began. “One of the aspects of his revolution is to… tear down the Department of Education.” As this agency gave Massachusetts $700 million in education funding last year, Trump’s efforts to abolish it would be devastating, Gentile noted.
“We are now 50 years behind Western Europe,” Rep. Gentile said. “In the 1970s, Western Europe decided, ‘hey, higher education is a great thing… so it’s essentially been free for 50 years now’”.
“Free college changed my life,” said Greenfield CC SGA President Michael Hannigan, referencing the impact of the original free college program for residents 25 and older, MassReconnect.
“I’ve seen the impact it’s having on so many other people,” Hannigan said. “Now that it’s available to everyone, I’m seeing all types of people from different backgrounds coming back to school. And I know this wouldn’t be possible for them if it wasn’t free.”
What Do Community Colleges Need to Thrive?
While free community college has been a boon for all of Massachusetts, it has also resulted in rampant overcrowding as campuses don’t have enough staff or resources to handle the influx of students.
Community college professors and staff whom PHENOM has spoken with noted both the extreme strain from overcrowding they face, as there simply are not enough professors and support staff to handle the influx of new students.
In addition to the lack of enough full-time professors, other problems include the lack of more “student-facing” staff instead of more administrators. Student-facing staff are staff such as academic advisors, financial aid counselors, and admissions officers who directly help students. In the words of one respondent, “we don’t need more people telling everyone what to do. We need people doing the work.”
According to a Boston Globe report, enrollment is up by an average of 14 percent across all community colleges. Cape Cod CC (30.3 percent), Roxbury CC (24.4), and North Shore CC (18.8 percent) boast the highest increases.
Greenfield Community College (GCC) was among the campuses with the lowest increases, standing at 9.4 percent. But according to the school’s SGA President Michael Hannigan, the college is facing rampant overcrowding due to the lack of enough faculty and staff.
“We’re seeing an enormous enrollment increase at GCC… I mean, it’s a great thing, but one of the negative aspects is the increased workload it’s putting on adjunct professors who are teaching a large percentage of their classes,” Hannigan said at PHENOM’s March 9th “Spring Into Action” Luncheon.
“I’ve talked to advisors who say the classes are all full, they have nowhere to place people in those classes… so their workload is increasing exponentially from free community college.”
This has only exacerbated the working conditions of overworked, underpaid community college workers, particularly those of highly exploited adjunct faculty. “There’s tons of other issues adjuncts have with their health insurance and their pay rate,” Hannigan continued. Hannigan also noted that adjuncts are denied the basic necessity of office space to meet with students and do their jobs.
Another professor noted that “every office, every department, everywhere I work” seemed understaffed, from admissions to financial aid to advising. “We have administrators serving double, even triple duty.”
Another professor concurs that over-reliance on adjunct faculty is a key factor in community colleges’ lack of capacity, as year after year community college administrations have replaced full-time professorships with more temporary adjunct faculty roles with lower pay and dismal benefits, stability and dignity.
“[Adjunct faculty] are wonderful in the classroom but do no advising, committee work, assessment work, curriculum development, or department administrative work,” they said. The question becomes how much more effective adjunct faculty could be if they had the proper working conditions. (This is why we need to pass PHENOM’s Adjunct Pilot Program (HD.2545), which would test out massive improvements to adjunct faculty’s working conditions!)
“[W]hat quality education are you getting if faculty are teaching double and triple a normal workload just to make enough money to support their families?” one of the community college staff we contacted reasoned. This same professor echoed Hannigan’s concern about the lack of campus resources like office space, which is essential for doing Zoom classes and meeting with students.
So what do community colleges need to meet the moment and provide the best experience for students? The responses from these individuals point to the need for improved pay and treatment of adjunct faculty, as well as more funding for full-time professor positions and key jobs such as advising in financial aid, academics and admissions to help students as much as possible.
(As PHENOM’s Liam Rue noted in a January op-ed, making four-year state universities tuition-free would also help alleviate community colleges’ overcrowding while giving those colleges the students they need since they do not have enough students.)
“We have the students in the door now, but we have to make sure they are successful. We have to make sure they have professors that are qualified and are being paid a living wage,” GCC SGA President Hannigan concluded. “I’m excited about free community college, but hopefully that is just the beginning.”
Write Your Legislators To Support Increased Financial Aid Funding!
Massachusetts has made impressive strides in increasing financial aid funding in the past decade. But in 2025, yet another tuition increase means those increases will not be as impactful unless we also increase financial aid funding.
This is even more alarming given the doubts over how much education funding Massachusetts will receive from the Trump administration.
So what are you waiting for? Send our pre-written letter to your legislators (or write your own!) urging them to support more funding for financial aid in the budget!
Stay In The Loop and Follow Us on Instagram!
As we work to rally students and faculty across the state to fight for a more affordable, fairer higher education system, social media is the go-to way to keep our allies and communities up to date. Check out our official statewide Instagram page @massphenom, as well as our chapter pages @umassaphenom and @dartmouth_phenom!
In Other News
Trump Begins Gutting Department of Education
Since Trump’s November victory and even during his reelection campaign, there have been concerns over whether he would abolish the federal government’s Department of Education (DOE).
As experts have pointed out, for all the rhetoric, dismantling the agency is much easier said than done: the agency is protected by statute, so Trump would need a commanding majority of Congress to approve the decision.
However, that may not stop the White House from gutting the DOE as much as they can: the Department just announced it is cutting half of all of its jobs. For an agency that oversees the $1.5 trillion of federal student debt, gives extra funding to colleges and K-12 schools, and regulates civil rights protections for students, this is a major blow.
Given the sheer amount of student loans the DOE handles, Trump’s interest in transferring all of it to another agency would at the very least create extreme chaos for everyone involved and hurt students trying to pay for college above all.
The Trump administration has continually framed the move as part of their war on “wokeness” and DEI programs that support underrepresented students. Still, other motives include advancing the privatization of public K-12 schools through school choice, as well as less separation of church and state.
State Department Using A.I. to Revoke Visas of Allegedly “Pro-Hamas” Students
It is a dangerous time to be an international college student in America, and even more so one who disagrees with the current administration on issues such as those of the Israel-Palestine conflict and universities’ ties to the military-industrial complex.
The latest example is the highly controversial (and constitutionally dubious) revocation of Columbia PhD student Mahmoud Khalil’s green card due to his pro-Palestine activism on campus, which the Trump administration equated to supporting Hamas. According to an Axios report, the State Department under Sec. Marco Rubio is seeking to deport any foreign nationals involved in “anti-Israel” activism.
The report points out that this is not new: the Nixon administration similarly surveilled pro-Palestinian groups even if they were simply exercising the First Amendment rights.
Is College Really Getting Cheaper?
This Atlantic article argues that, in fact, colleges across the United States are getting more affordable. According to recent research, despite the perception that a college education is more expensive than ever, the average cost of attending has gone down by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation.
As advocates for more affordable, equitable higher education, this is a development we should all celebrate as great news. In the last decade, despite the public’s perception, we have made encouraging progress in turning the tide against exorbitant college costs! And it is great motivation for making our colleges even more affordable.
The article notes that, despite ever-rising sticker prices, the average student is actually paying less due to more generous Pell Grants and financial aid offerings as states have been reinvesting into public higher education for the past decade.
Massachusetts is evidence for this, if only going by the recent passage of free community college; the huge investment in MASSGrant; the Commonwealth’s 73 percent increase in financial aid investments from 2015 to 2024; and UMass System President Marty Meehan’s recent announcement to make all UMass campuses tuition-free for families making under $75,000.
But while this progress is commendable, we still have a lot more work to do before college is truly affordable for every citizen of the Commonwealth.
A 2024 UMass report notes that they have kept the average amount of student debt upon graduation flat at $31,000 – which, due to inflation, represents a small decline. But that is $30,000 more than where it should be! And when European countries not even as wealthy as Massachusetts have free college but we do not, why settle for anything less?
When so many students still have to juggle multiple jobs just to afford a college degree – or spend decades after graduation paying off loans instead of investing in their futures – it is clear that our colleges are nowhere near as affordable as they should be.
For this reason, while this article shows important progress, it should be taken with a grain of salt. The article also argues that students simply do not realize how affordable a private college education could be since lower-income students often can go for next to nothing; for instance, starting this year, students whose families make under $200,000 will be able to go to MIT for free.
Because of MIT’s four percent acceptance rate – and relatively low number of low-income students they admit, this would not really make MIT more accessible for low-income families unless they, you know, actually admitted more students! While admission to such elite colleges is life-changing, only a tiny sliver of underprivileged students benefit since they insist on ridiculously low acceptance rates that benefit no one but their own egos.
In addition, a recent New York Times story reports that more and more underprivileged students in Lynn, Massachusetts and other lower-income communities are giving up on their college dreams because of how expensive these institutions continue to be.
This is why PHENOM’s Endowment Tax (HD.1474/ SD.948) is such a great idea: through a small tax on these elite colleges that refuse to educate more low-income students, we would transfer enough money to make public colleges tuition-free for all residents. This way, everyone could go to college for free, not just if you get into Harvard or MIT.
Our Financial Aid Reform Bill (SD.2477/HD.2461) would also help our students take full advantage of increased financial aid funding to ensure it gets to every student that needs it.
In conclusion, while colleges have steadily become more affordable in Massachusetts, we must keep building on this progress and not stop until all public colleges are tuition-free.