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| Business Notes |
| Posted on Wednesday, October 07 @ 00:02:20 PDT (10 reads) | |
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Business notes
sundial beach resort & spa kicks off little pink dress nights
sundial beach resort & spa announced the kick-off of a new networking and social event series dubbed “little pink dress night,” with the inaugural little pink dress night slated for wednesday, oct. 7 from 5-8 p.M. In sundial’s captain’s catch bar.
coinciding with october’s international breast cancer awareness month, little pink dress night attendees are encouraged to wear festive pink in support of breast cancer awareness and join other women to raise money for sancap pink project. Sancap pink project provides mammograms for uninsured woman and assists local families with cancer related expenses.
“little pink dress nights will bring women together to network and celebrate the power of our local female entrepreneurs, artists, fighters and dreamers,” said sundial beach resort & spa general manager becky miller. “While each evening will be centered around don’t-miss fun and creativity, they’ll be a unique opportunity to tap our collective energy, learn something new, support one another and make a difference in our community – all while having a great time.”
miller added that she’s constantly amazed by the strength of the women of the sanibel-captiva community and that little pink dress nights grew out of that connectedness and sundial’s commitment to help support the best of the area.
local artist rachel pierce of rachel pierce gallery will be on hand throughout the night of oct. 7 and guests can watch as she creates a gorgeous, themed painting. Pierce’s work of art will be auctioned off at the end of the evening with a percentage of the proceeds benefitting sancap pink project.
sundial’s monthly little pink dress events will feature live music, specialty drinks tied in with that month’s theme and fun small plate offerings. In addition to a specialty cocktail and appetizers, sundial’s complete captains catch bar and restaurant menus will also be available.
after the inaugural october little pink dress event, the series will continue on the first wednesday of every month, with a different theme, experiences and cocktail making every little pink dress night extra special. Each event will highlight interesting local partners and invite guests to connect with them and each other in a meaningful way, such as a floral artist-led flower arranging workshop with make-and-take bouquets. Regardless of the fun and the theme sundial’s event team plans each month, each little pink dress night will support sancap pink project.
sanibel captiva community bank joins kindlee’s 10,000 acts of kindness challenge
sanibel captiva community bank is encouraging employees, customers and community members to help spread kindness throughout southwest florida by participating in the kindlee 10,000 acts of kindness challenge.
created by southwest florida nonprofit organization kindlee, the community-wide initiative encourages individuals to perform simple acts of kindness, share them with others and inspire a ripple effect throughout the community. Examples include helping a neighbor, encouraging a coworker, picking up litter, volunteering or simply going the extra mile to brighten someone’s day.
as part of the challenge, sanibel captiva community bank employees will track acts of kindness they complete or witness and share stories and photos that highlight the positive impact of those efforts. The bank also encourages customers and community members to participate by sharing their own acts of kindness on social media using #kindlee10k and tagging @kindleeswfl or by submitting it directly to kindlee at kelly@fayerlaw.Net.
the challenge reflects the bank’s longstanding commitment to supporting community involvement. Through charitable giving, volunteerism and financial education programs, sanibel captiva community bank has worked to strengthen southwest florida for more than two decades. Since its founding in 2003, the bank has contributed more than $5 million to more than 400 local charitable causes and employees volunteer more than 1,000 hours annually throughout the community.
kindlee is a southwest florida nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring kindness, strengthening communities and supporting children facing challenges. Through community service projects, educational initiatives, and the acts-of-kindness campaign, kindlee encourages people of all ages to make a positive impact through everyday acts of kindness.
sanibel captiva community bank has nine locations open throughout lee county.
sanibel captiva community bank welcomes isabella chirino
sanibel captiva community bank is pleased to announce the addition of isabella chirino as residential loan officer.
chirino is based out of the bank’s bridge branch, located at 9311 college parkway in fort myers. She will work with homebuyers throughout southwest florida, guiding customers through the mortgage process and helping them find lending solutions that support their homeownership goals.
chirino brings more than five years of consultative sales and relationship management experience to the role. Prior to joining the bank, she served as district manager at adp, where she ranked among the company’s top performers, consistently exceeding sales goals and building a network of referral partners. Her background also includes sales positions with unifirst corporation and enterprise rent-a-car.
chirino earned a bachelor’s degree in exercise physiology from ave maria university.
bank of the islands donates to community church
bank of the islands recently made its latest non-profit donation through its we love our islands program. Bank customer chris solomonides was the latest lucky winner. He chose the sanibel community church, where he serves as family pastor, to receive the bank’s $800 donation.
this donation marks $164,600 given away to date through bank of the islands’ we love our islands program. It also represents the bank’s ongoing commitment to doubling its weekly outlay for the program.
“the church is a mid-island neighbor of our sanibel office,” said bank of the islands teller operations supervisor heather harrison. “We are so pleased they are once again a we love our islands beneficiary. Making this donation is a great way to show how much we appreciate being your island bank.”
all islanders are invited to visit the bank’s sanibel or captiva offices to pick up a vehicle decal and learn more about the we love our islands program and how you and your favorite charity can become our next lucky winners.
the sanibel office of bank of the islands is located at 1699 periwinkle way, and captiva office is at 14812 captiva drive.
realtors host membership breakfast caravan
the sanibel captiva islands association of realtors hosted its member breakfast caravan on thursday, sept. 24, at the association’s office.
the morning gathering featured a special presentation by guest speakers marcia mchugh turner, tom uhler, tony lapi, and laura debruce from united way of lee, hendry, and glades county. The speakers highlighted the volunteer-driven organization’s dedication to improving community quality of life through fundraising, fund distribution, community building, volunteer advancement, and referral services.
the successful networking event was generously sponsored by bank of the islands and robb & stucky.
sanibel & captiva realtors host thirsty thursday social mixer
on thursday, sept. 24, the sanibel captiva islands association of realtors gathered members for a thirsty thursday networking social from 4:30 p.M. To 6:30 p.M. At cheeburger-cheeburger, located at 1975 periwinkle way.
attendees enjoyed an evening of local connection and camaraderie, made possible through the generous sponsorship of superior title.
lee health establishes dr. Larry antonucci scholarship
the lee health foundation board of trustees in partnership with the lee health board of directors is proud to announce the creation of the dr. Larry antonucci scholarship endowment fund, establishing a permanent legacy honoring the visionary leadership, service, and lasting impact of dr. Larry antonucci, who is retiring after more than four decades of advancing healthcare in southwest florida.
established with a $250,000 founding gift from the lee health foundation board of trustees, the endowed fund will create ongoing opportunities for lee health team members to pursue education, leadership development, professional certifications, and career advancement.
the board invites community members, physicians, grateful patients, business leaders, employees, and friends of lee health to honor dr. Antonucci’s legacy through contributions that will support future generations of healthcare professionals.
“for decades, dr. Larry antonucci has dedicated his career to serving patients, supporting caregivers, and strengthening healthcare throughout our region,” said dominic cameratta, chair of the lee health foundation board of trustees. “One of the defining characteristics of his leadership has been his unwavering belief that when organizations invest in people, exceptional care follows. This fund ensures that commitment will continue to benefit lee health employees and ultimately the patients and families they serve for generations to come.”
before joining lee health’s executive leadership team, dr. Antonucci spent 24 years as a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist in fort myers. He joined lee health in 2007 and served in a variety of leadership roles before being named president and chief executive officer in 2017. Throughout his tenure, he championed a culture of excellence, innovation, employee engagement, patient-centered care, and continuous learning.
gifts to the fund offer a meaningful way to honor dr. Antonucci’s enduring impact while investing in the people who will carry lee health’s mission forward for generations to come.
to make a gift in honor of dr. Antonucci, visit leehealthfoundation.Org/donate and select the dr. Larry antonucci scholarship endowment fund from the drop-down menu.
doc ford’s employees decorate lakes park’s annual halloween express route
team members from doc ford’s rum bar & grille on fort myers beach are once again helping transform lakes park from delightful to frightful for halloween.
doc ford’s employees volunteered on three separate occasions in late september to install decorations along the park’s mile long train track in preparation for the annual halloween express and fall festival. The labor-intensive decorating process begins weeks ahead of the popular seasonal event and is an annual volunteer tradition for the fort myers beach restaurant.
“our team always looks forward to helping lakes park get ready for halloween,” said rebecca vizcarra, general manager of doc ford’s rum bar & grille on fort myers beach. “It’s become a tradition for us, and it’s rewarding to see everything come together knowing how many families will enjoy it throughout october.”
offered oct. 9-31, the halloween express operates weekdays, 10 a.M. To 2 p.M. And 6 to 9 p.M. And weekends, 10 a.M. To 9 p.M. Lakes park is at 7330 gladiolus drive in fort myers.
harry chapin food bank unveils refreshed brand as organization enters new chapter
harry chapin food bank unveiled a refreshed brand identity that reflects how the organization has grown and evolved while looking ahead to the future of hunger relief in southwest florida.
the refreshed brand reintroduces the familiar tagline – “fighting hunger. Feeding hope.” – Reinforcing harry chapin food bank’s mission: to lead our community in the fight to end hunger.
the organization will retain the harry chapin food bank name, which carries strong recognition throughout southwest florida and honors harry chapin’s legacy as an advocate in the fight against hunger. The updated identity moves beyond the guitar featured in the previous logo, introducing a more modern visual identity and updated color palette.
“this new look reflects how much harry chapin food bank has grown and where we are headed,” said richard leber, president and ceo of harry chapin food bank. “We are entering an exciting new chapter for our organization, one that will strengthen our ability to serve southwest florida for generations to come. Our refreshed brand represents that future while staying grounded in the mission and legacy that have guided us for more than four decades.”
the brand launch comes during a significant period of growth for harry chapin food bank. The organization serves more than 300,000 neighbors each month across charlotte, collier, glades, hendry and lee counties through its programs and feeding network of more than 175 agency partners.
harry chapin food bank is preparing to open its new 110,175-square-foot hunger action center in fort myers. The facility will more than double operational capacity and strengthen the food bank’s ability to respond to growing needs, support its feeding network and prepare for future emergencies.
the food bank is also preparing to begin construction in 2027 on a new facility in naples that will expand its ability to serve neighbors and support agency partners in the southern portion of its five-county service area. The naples facility is expected to open in 2028. |
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| Maintaining ethnic identity amid additive multilingualism: language attitudes an |
| Posted on Wednesday, October 07 @ 00:02:20 PDT (10 reads) | |
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Abstract
research traditions in language attrition tend to read a minority mother tongue’s retreat from public domains as a sign of one-directional decline. This study examines that equation through the case of the hmong in northern vietnam, where vietnamese dominates public institutions while hmong contracts toward family and community, and asks whether such a retreat is necessarily subtractive. The study draws on a qualitative, reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with six hmong speakers across three generations, with two comparison participants offering outsider and institutional perspectives. It is framed by social identity theory, ethnolinguistic identity theory, and the perceived ethnolinguistic vitality tradition. Findings reveal a clear domain-based functional differentiation: hmong is anchored as the first-choice language in family and ritual domains, vietnamese dominates public-institutional domains, and the two coexist in flexible bilingual practice in intermediate domains such as markets and social media. Across generations, affective loyalty to hmong remains stable and unmarked, even as instrumental reasoning tilts toward vietnamese among the young. Hmong speakers’ perceived vitality forms a distinctive configuration—high cultural-status perception, low institutional-support perception, and demographic optimism—that decouples from objective institutional conditions. Contrasted with the deeper language shift documented among the miao of guizhou, china, this case shows that ethnolinguistic vitality is determined not by ethnic membership itself but jointly by institutional environment, demographic ecology, and community networks. The retreat of hmong thus represents an additive multilingual configuration, marking the boundary conditions under which the attrition narrative holds and offering an empirical record of identity-driven language maintenance.
1 introduction
in the mountainous regions of northern vietnam, vietnamese has become the default language in public institutions such as schools, hospitals, and government offices; minority mother tongues remain active in everyday life yet hold no secure place in institutional domains such as formal education (nguyen, 2022). Among the younger generation, language choice in public domains tilts markedly toward vietnamese, and the space for hmong use contracts inward, toward family and community. Research traditions in language attrition and language endangerment tend to read such a retreat of the mother tongue from public domains as a sign of one-directional decline (schmid and köpke, 2017; fishman, 1991). But equating a narrower range of use directly with declining vitality risks conflating two processes that ought to be kept apart: a language ceding ground in public domains, and any shift in its standing within ethnic identity and emotional life, need not move in the same direction or at the same pace.
the conceptual resources for separating these two processes have long been available within bilingualism research. Landry and allards (1984) distinction between additive and subtractive bilingualism allows that a dominant language may be acquired at the expense of the mother tongue or, equally, be layered upon a secure first language, and ruizs (1984) language-as-resource orientation reframes the mother tongue from a problem to be overcome into a resource worth maintaining. Together they recast the question from whether hmong is retreating to whether that retreat is subtractive or additive—something that cannot be settled from the public-domain distribution of languages alone, but requires attention to how speakers themselves perceive and evaluate their language.
two further frameworks, set out in full in section 3, supply the terms for that inquiry. Ethnolinguistic vitality theory (giles et al., 1977) identifies status, demography, and institutional support as the structural bases of a group’s capacity to sustain its language, and its perceived-vitality strand (allard and landry, 1986) holds that it is speakers’ subjective appraisal of these conditions, rather than the objective indicators themselves, that drives maintenance behavior; this study adopts the perceived-vitality orientation. Ethnolinguistic identity theory (giles and johnson, 1987), extending social identity theory (tajfel and turner, 1979), treats language as a core marker of the boundary between “us” and “them,” which opens the possibility that loyalty to a mother tongue is anchored in identity rather than in practical utility and may therefore behave differently from its range of use.
set against the hmong of northern vietnam, this possibility falls squarely within two research gaps that have yet to meet. The first concerns the object of study. Research on minority languages within vietnam has largely centered on the ethnic groups of the central highlands, exposing the tension between language attitudes and mother-tongue maintenance in the school domain (nguyen and hamid, 2016, 2018). The hmong communities of the northern border, by contrast, have rarely been brought under systematic study of language attitudes and vitality. Existing work on the region sits more in ethnic politics and history (rumsby, 2022), and hmong-language research is centered elsewhere, notably on heritage-language education among diaspora communities in the united states (her, 2024). The second concerns findings. Vitality research on the hmong/miao has mostly traced a “low-vitality” trajectory, most typically in the urbanizing, diasporic context of guizhou, china, where the younger generation tends to treat the dominant language as an instrument of socioeconomic advancement (li et al., 2024; shen et al., 2021). Whether the border settlement, cross-border traffic, and different national language-policy environment of northern vietnam might give rise to another trajectory has so far gone empirically unanswered.
drawing these threads together, this study asks whether the narrowing of hmong use in public domains should be read as evidence of one-directional language decline, or whether the expansion of vietnamese may instead coexist with continued mother-tongue attachment and ethnolinguistic vitality. The frameworks above allow either outcome; which obtains in the northern vietnamese hmong communities examined here is an empirical question, addressed through three research questions: (1) how are language attitudes and perceived ethnolinguistic vitality distributed across generations and domains among the hmong of northern vietnam? (2) against the backdrop of vietnamese expansion, how do hmong speakers position their mother tongue in relation to ethnic identity, and through what resources and identity logics is that position sustained or eroded? (3) what does the resulting configuration imply for the language-attrition/endangerment narrative?
to address these questions, the study draws on semi-structured interviews with eight participants—six of them hmong speakers, the other two comparison participants, a commune official who married into the community (h7) and a kinh education officer (h8)—and proceeds along a cumulative line of argument. It first sets out the division of labor between hmong and vietnamese under a domain-based functional differentiation; it then traces the generational shift in the markedness of language attitudes; it uses the “same ethnic group, different trajectory” contrast with the miao of guizhou, china to throw the particularity of this case into relief; and on that basis it draws the findings together through perceived vitality and ethnolinguistic identity theory, opening a critical dialogue with the attrition/endangerment framework.
2 research background
the hmong stand among the larger ethnic minorities of vietnam, numbering close to 1.4 million at the 2019 national census and ranking as one of only six minority nationalities whose population passes the one-million mark (general statistics office of vietnam, 2020), with their settlement concentrated overwhelmingly in the high mountains of the northern border provinces of hà giang, ?I?N biên, s?N la, lào cai, and lai châu. The hmong language belongs to the hmong-mien (miao-yao) family and stands wholly apart from vietnamese, an austroasiatic language, so that the two share no mutual intelligibility and mark a sharp linguistic boundary between the minority and the national majority. Lào cai, the province in which the present fieldwork was carried out, adjoins the chinese province of yunnan along a frontier of roughly 180 kilometres. The hmong are its single largest ethnic minority, at over a fifth of the provincial population, a demographic weight that sustains dense everyday use of the language even as schooling, administration, and public services operate in vietnamese. At the same time, reported literacy among hmong aged fifteen and above sits near 54 percent, and senior-secondary attendance well below a third (general statistics office of vietnam and committee for ethnic minority affairs, 2020). These figures register the limited reach of formal institutions into the community and supply the material backdrop against which participants appraise the standing of their mother tongue.
the comparison that runs through the later analysis rests on the historical and linguistic kinship between these hmong and the miao of guizhou in southwest china. Miao is the official ethnonym applied in china to a category that gathers several distantly related hmong-mien-speaking groups, among them the hmu, the qo xiong, the a-hmao, and the hmong proper, and the hmong of vietnam descend from populations of this last subgroup that moved southward out of the mountainous provinces of southwest china principally from the eighteenth century onward (rumsby, 2022). China records roughly eleven million miao, more than a third of whom live in guizhou (population census office of the state council, 2022), making that province the demographic heartland of the group, so that the guizhou communities share ancestry, core linguistic features, and a wide range of cultural practices with the hmong across the border while inhabiting a different national polity, contending with mandarin rather than vietnamese as the dominant language, and following a distinct course of urbanization and internal migration. Setting the two populations alongside one another holds ethnic origin broadly constant and allows the divergence in their language situations to be read against differences of political environment, demographic ecology, and community network rather than against ethnicity itself, which is the comparative logic developed in the discussion.
participants form their attitudes within a specific structural setting. Language attitudes are not isolated individual psychology but are embedded in an intergroup structure of status and solidarity (feng et al., 2023). In vietnam, this structure takes the form of a language hierarchy with vietnamese as the national language: minority mother tongues, though constitutionally recognized, have long been marginalized within formal institutions such as education (nguyen and hajek, 2022), an institutional asymmetry that resonates with broader questions of language and power (razmjoo moghadam and barani, 2025). The language practices and perceptions reported in section 5 should be read against this structural pressure.
3 theoretical framework
this section follows the four theoretical threads anchored in the introduction and explains how they are organized into a framework that empirical analysis can work with. As shown in figure 1, the four modules connect in sequence from background to analysis: ethnolinguistic vitality theory sits at the top; it descends, through the three-dimensional subjective ethnolinguistic vitality questionnaire (sevq) scaffold, to dimensions that can be probed; ethnolinguistic identity theory then links these to language loyalty; and the whole is read through the lens of the language-as-resource orientation, together feeding into three sets of findings—domain-based functional differentiation, intergenerational attitude change, and the configuration of perceived vitality. The specific role of each module is set out below.
figure 1
3.1 ethnolinguistic vitality theory and perceived vitality
ethnolinguistic vitality theory defines the capacity of a language group to sustain its own collective linguistic behavior in intergroup settings as “vitality,” and breaks it down into three sets of structural factors: status, demography, and institutional support. In principle these can be characterized through external indicators such as census data, policy texts, and the linguistic landscape (landry and bourhis, 1997). What actually drives language-maintenance behavior, however, is often not these objective indicators themselves but group members’ subjective appraisal of vitality. Subjective vitality can be understood as a belief system about the present and future situation of one’s own group’s language: it both reflects reality and, by shaping members’ expectations about prospects, feeds back into their language choices (allard and landry, 1986). An observable gap therefore often opens up between subjective vitality and objective indicators, and the predictive power of the former over language attitudes has found empirical support (bourhis and sachdev, 1984). The central concern of this study is not how high or low hmong’s objective vitality is, but how hmong speakers read the situation of their language along the three dimensions of status, demography, and institutions; it accordingly takes a perceived-vitality orientation and does not measure objective vitality.
3.2 ethnolinguistic identity theory and the social identity tradition
what allows perceived vitality to convert into durable language loyalty is the marking function language serves at intergroup boundaries. Ethnolinguistic identity theory holds that language is often used as a core marker dividing “us” from “them,” so that loyalty to the mother tongue is not merely a communicative preference but at the same time a defense of a positive group identity (giles and johnson, 1987). The deeper grounding of this claim lies in social identity theory: group members are motivated to maintain a positive and distinctive group identity, and achieve such positive distinctiveness through markers that foreground in-group characteristics (tajfel and turner, 1979). Treating language as the most salient of such markers is an extension of the social identity framework by ethnolinguistic identity theory, not a direct claim of the former; and it is along this extension that a possibility crucial to the present case opens up: hmong’s ceding ground to vietnamese on the instrumental level does not necessarily weaken its standing on the identity level—so long as language loyalty is anchored in ethnic identity rather than practical utility, it can hold high even as the range of use contracts. This possibility frames rq2.
3.3 the language-as-resource orientation
if the first two modules explain why loyalty can be sustained, the language-as-resource orientation governs how this study reads the content of that loyalty. Ruiz (1984) distinguished three orientations toward minority languages: treating them as a problem to be overcome, as a right to be safeguarded, or as a resource worth maintaining. The resource orientation neither presupposes, as the problem orientation does, that the mother tongue is an obstacle to development, nor stops at the institutional claims of the rights orientation; instead it treats the mother tongue’s multiple functions as themselves an asset. The study adopts this orientation to provide an interpretive frame for participants’ reconstruction of the value of hmong—speakers do not make a single choice between an “affective” and an “instrumental” pole, but reinterpret the value of hmong along cultural, social, and affective dimensions at once. The resource orientation also lends conceptual support to the possibility of additive multilingualism: where the mother tongue is construed as an irreplaceable resource, acquiring vietnamese may become a gain layered on top of that resource rather than a replacement for it. Scholarship since ruiz has extended this orientation well beyond its original affirmative framing. Ruiz (2010) himself later reoriented the notion to separate the intrinsic worth a language holds for its speakers from its extrinsic value as a good exchangeable in wider markets. Subsequent commentary has folded economic capital, educational provision, and the politics of recognition into the resource frame, while cautioning that an uncritical appeal to languages as assets can slide into a neoliberal calculus that prices a tongue only by its market yield (hult and hornberger, 2016). This widened reading fits the vietnamese setting, where minority bilingualism has been argued to serve social mobility and mother-tongue maintenance at once rather than to constitute a deficit (nguyen and hamid, 2018). It lets the value of hmong be traced across cultural, economic, and identity registers together. The orientation adopted here therefore treats the mother tongue not as a sentimental residue set against a useful national language, but as a multidimensional asset whose cultural and affective worth is not cancelled by the instrumental gains that vietnamese brings.
3.4 the three sevq dimensions as a structuring scaffold
the three vitality dimensions outlined in 3.1—status, demography, and institutional support—need a workable interface for empirical analysis, which this study realizes through the sevq. Bourhis et al.’S (1981) sevq operationalizes vitality along precisely these three dimensions, and the study draws on it to design its semi-structured interview guide and to organize its coding around the three, but it does not administer the instrument as a scored scale, for two reasons. Psychometrically, the validity testing of abrams et al. (2009) shows that the sevq holds up as a single-dimension measure but lacks sufficient structural validity to separate three latent factors, so scoring and comparing the three dimensions separately on that basis has no robust warrant. By design, imposing a scaled administration on a small qualitative sample such as this one (six hmong participants) would carry no statistical-inferential weight and would also cut against the study’s aim of recovering speakers’ meaning-making. Noels et al.’S (2014) review of vitality measurement tools likewise suggests that the multidimensional structure of vitality is better suited to serving as an organizing framework for analysis than as a yardstick for precise measurement. The sevq is thus established here as an organizing scaffold rather than a measurement instrument, with its concrete operationalization and the corresponding honesty statement given in the methods chapter (§4.7).
4 materials and methods
4.1 research design
this study adopts a primarily qualitative, descriptive design, using reflexive thematic analysis to work through the interview data from the hmong participants. The aim is to recover how hmong speakers construct meaning around the situation of their own language, rather than to test statistical relationships among variables. No inferential statistics were performed at any stage; secondary materials were used only for descriptive background.
the interpretive stance of a reflexive thematic analysis makes the position of the researchers part of the analytic record. The research team is based at universities in yunnan, in southwest china, and works on the documentation of hmong dialects across the china-vietnam borderland, a background that supplies familiarity with hmong linguistic structure and with the broader hmong-miao cultural world while leaving the team external to the particular vietnamese hmong communities under study, positioned as cross-border academic outsiders rather than as members of the villages concerned. That external position carried both the risk of overlooking locally taken-for-granted meaning and the advantage of analytic distance. It was managed through three measures: the mediation of a local research assistant fluent in both hmong and vietnamese, interviews conducted in whichever of the two languages a participant preferred, and back-translation of the resulting chinese transcripts. In this way the trilingual reality of the borderland was handled by keeping hmong and vietnamese as the languages of the encounter and chinese as the language of transcription and analysis, with the assistant bridging any distance between the team’s command of hmong and the fine grain of participants’ speech.
4.2 study site and participants
fieldwork was carried out between march and may 2024 in lào cai province, vietnam, covering three hmong villages—lao chai, ban pho, and ta phin—and the town of sa pa. Using purposive sampling with attention to maximum variation—across generation, gender, community role, and village—we interviewed eight participants in total, in two groups, so as to capture the range of positions from which community members appraise their language. The core group comprised six hmong speakers (h1–h6) from the villages of lao chai and ban pho, stratified by generation into g1, g2, and g3 (two participants each, one man and one woman per cohort) and spanning a range of community roles—village ritual master, traditional embroiderer, village official, homestay operator, returned migrant worker, and student. The comparison group comprised two participants who were not native hmong speakers (h7, h8), engaged as key informants rather than as members of the analysed community; in each case the relationship was established through local introductions rather than prior acquaintance. H7, a commune civil servant in ta phin who had entered the community by way of a cross-border marriage from yunnan, occupied a partial-insider position through residence and kinship yet remained an outsider by upbringing and first language; she communicated with the team in vietnamese, with occasional recourse to the cross-border hmong-miao vocabulary she shared with the villagers. H8, a kinh officer in the district education office in the town of sa pa, held no hmong and was interviewed wholly in vietnamese, contributing the vantage of the institutions that administer schooling. The analytical roles of the two groups—evidentiary for h1–h6, referential for h7–h8—are set out in 4.3. Participant details are given in table 1.
table 1
| group | id | gen. | Sex | age range | education | occupation/community role | village | hmong/vietnamese proficiency (self-reported) | dur. (Min) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| hmong | h1 | g1 | m | 60–65 | no formal schooling | farmer; village ritual master | lao chai | hmong fluent/basic everyday vietnamese | 68 |
| hmong | h2 | g2 | f | 45–50 | lower secondary | homestay operator | lao chai | hmong fluent/fluent vietnamese | 55 |
| hmong | h3 | g3 | m | 22–28 | upper secondary | returned migrant worker | lao chai | everyday-fluent, limited vocabulary/fluent vietnamese | 58 |
| hmong | h4 | g1 | f | 55–60 | primary (incomplete) | farmer; traditional embroiderer | ban pho | hmong fluent/basic everyday vietnamese | 62 |
| hmong | h5 | g2 | m | 35–42 | upper secondary | village official | ban pho | hmong fluent/fluent vietnamese | 70 |
| hmong | h6 | g3 | f | 18–22 | upper secondary (in school) | student | ban pho | hmong fluent/fluent vietnamese | 45 |
| comparison | h7 | – | f | 30–35 | college diploma | commune civil servant (cross-border marriage, from yunnan) | ta phin | hmong limited/vietnamese fluent | 52 |
| comparison | h8 | – | m | 40–45 | university | district education-office staff (kinh) | sa pa town | no hmong/vietnamese native | 60 |
participant profiles (n = 8; hmong participants h1–h6, comparison participants h7–h8).
gen. = Generation cohort (g1–g3); dur. (Min) = interview duration in minutes. H1–h6 are hmong participants, included in the generational (g1–g3) and vitality analysis; h7 and h8 are comparison participants (see 4.2 and 4.3) and are not included in the generational stratification or thematic synthesis. Language proficiency reflects participants’ self-reported qualitative categories rather than psychometric measurement; ages are given in ranges to protect confidentiality.
4.3 data sources and their boundaries
the primary data for this study are semi-structured interviews with the eight participants introduced in 4.2, and the materials are kept strictly tiered by analytical weight. As described in 4.2, six are hmong speakers (h1–h6) and two are comparison participants (h7, h8). The six hmong interviews form the evidentiary basis for all interpretive conclusions on language attitudes and vitality. The two comparison interviews are used only for reference and for verifying institutional facts: they corroborate the public-domain and institutional configuration reported in section 5 but do not enter the generational stratification, thematic coding, or vitality synthesis; the asymmetry of access created by h7’s partial-insider position was contained by anonymisation and by this tiered handling. Provisions on minority languages in the vietnamese constitution and the education law, together with demographic and ethnic-education statistics, serve as traceable secondary background, describing the institutional and demographic setting in which participants are situated. On mother-tongue education specifically, unesco’s framework for assessing language vitality and endangerment (unesco, 2003) and unicef’s mother-tongue-in-the-classroom initiative in lào cai province (unicef viet nam, n.D) jointly indicate that hmong has long held a limited institutional position in formal education—a background read against participants’ perceived absence of institutional support. Neither the comparison interviews nor the secondary data enter into any inference of frequency or proportion.
4.4 data collection
the semi-structured interview guide was built around the sevq dimensions of status, demography, and institutional support (bourhis et al., 1981), and incorporated topics such as language attitudes, ethnic identity, and intergenerational transmission, formulated as open-ended guiding questions and follow-up probes that were used flexibly according to the flow of conversation rather than asked verbatim item by item. Interviews were conducted in hmong or vietnamese at the participant’s choosing and lasted 45–70 min; hmong-language interviews were assisted on site by a local research assistant fluent in both hmong and vietnamese, and recordings were transcribed, translated into chinese, and checked by a second person through back-translation to control for translation bias. The study was approved by the ethics review committee of yunnan normal university (approval no. Ynnu-2024-035). Given participants’ varying literacy levels and the qualitative fieldwork setting, oral informed consent was obtained from all participants before recording, as approved by the committee; the data were anonymized, and every participant is presented under a pseudonym. Beyond the interview recordings, the researchers kept field notes recording naturally occurring language practices in the settings where fieldwork took place, among them the choice between hmong and vietnamese at village markets and in family-run homestays, the language of exchanges at commune offices and in the presence of school-age children, and the code-switching that accompanied everyday intergenerational interaction within households. This observation was unstructured and contextual rather than governed by a formal checklist or coded as an independent data stream, since its purpose lay in situating and cross-checking the interview accounts rather than in generating counts of its own. Where an observed pattern converged with what participants reported—as in the routine switch to vietnamese once an interaction moved into an administrative frame—the field note enters the analysis only as corroborating context. It is rendered as researcher paraphrase, never as verbatim quotation, and carries no weight in the coding frequencies. This supplementary observational layer strengthened the triangulation described below by anchoring participants’ self-reports in the observable language ecology of the villages and the town.
4.5 data analysis and coding
analysis followed the procedure of reflexive thematic analysis (braun and clarke, 2006, 2019): repeated reading to gain familiarity with the material, then open coding, then deriving subthemes around the three sevq dimensions and distilling themes from them. Two researchers coded independently and then compared line by line, discussing disagreements until consensus (consensus coding); consistent with the methodological stance of reflexive thematic analysis, the study does not aim for a quantitative intercoder-reliability coefficient but treats divergences between coders as a resource for deepening interpretation. Coding was applied only to the data from the six hmong participants and yielded three themes and nine subthemes, whose structure and representative codes are shown in table 2; the language-as-resource orientation is not treated as a parallel theme but as an interpretive lens running through all three themes, developed together in the discussion (§6.2); the code frequencies in the table mark only how salient a theme is in the data, serving presentation rather than quantitative measurement. Policy and historical texts were reviewed separately along a diachronic line, serving background description only.
table 2
| theme | subthemes | representative codes (examples) |
|---|---|---|
| t1 domain-based functional differentiation | hmong anchoring in private domains; vietnamese expansion in public domains; bilingual addition rather than replacement | intimate family communication; monolingualization of administrative language; bilingual code-switching in markets |
| t2 intergenerational attitude change | cross-generational stability of affective loyalty; generational increase in instrumental rationality; latent fractures in transmission intent | hmong identity as inseparable from language; vietnamese and social mobility; gap between expectation and reality |
| t3 decoupling of subjective vitality from objective reality | cultural base of high status perception; perceived absence of institutional support; communal basis of demographic optimism | cultural pride; governmental indifference; perceived village-wide ubiquity of hmong |
thematic coding framework (3 themes, 9 subthemes).
each theme comprises three subthemes and their associated codes; the codes listed are illustrative rather than exhaustive. Codes were derived solely from the six hmong participants’ transcripts.
4.6 sample sufficiency and quality assurance
sample sufficiency is argued here through “information power” rather than thematic saturation (malterud et al., 2016): the aim is focused, the core sample (six hmong participants) is highly specific, the work is guided by established theory, and the interviews—conducted in participants’ mother tongue, with concrete and detailed accounts—together mean that a smaller sample is needed (braun and clarke, 2021). Quality was safeguarded through triangulation (cross-referencing interviews, policy texts, and macro-level statistics), two-person consensus coding, and thick description of key contexts. The limitations of sample size and a single region are addressed further in the discussion.
4.7 a key honesty statement
this study uses the three-dimensional sevq framework as a scaffold for organizing qualitative inquiry and coding, not as a scored scale to be administered; all judgments about vitality in the text are therefore perceived vitality as reflected in participants’ accounts, not measurement results, and no scale scores or proportions derived from them are reported. The synthesis of vitality and attitudes rests on the six hmong participants (h1–h6) alone; h7 and h8, as comparison participants offering outsider and institutional-insider perspectives, do not count toward the vitality judgments concerning the hmong participants. On this basis, the study’s claims to a “contribution” are confined to what is qualitative, region-specific, and perception-based.
5 findings
the language practices of the hmong participants fall along a clear gradient from private to public domains, and the overall pattern is additive rather than subtractive: hmong holds a secure first-choice position in the family and ritual domains, vietnamese dominates in the domains of public institutions, and the two form a flexible bilingual coexistence in intermediate domains such as markets and media. Along this gradient, language attitudes shift across generations in a discernible change of markedness, while hmong speakers’ perception of their own language’s vitality comes systematically decoupled from the objective institutional environment they inhabit. The three sections below present these three sets of findings in turn; the synthesis of vitality and attitudes rests on the six hmong participants (h1–h6), with the comparison participants (h7, h8) serving as the institutional-side and outsider reference only in setting out the public-domain language configuration.
5.1 functional profile: domain-based functional differentiation
in the family and intimate social domains, hmong is the first-choice language and is nearly impossible to displace, and this choice carries an identity meaning beyond that of a communicative tool. An older participant who doubles as the village ritual master (h1, g1) read the choice of language within the home directly as a measure of ethnic belonging: “at home we speak only hmong. If my son comes back from outside and speaks vietnamese to me, i feel he’s no longer one of us.” The irreplaceability of the ritual domain is more absolute still: even a young participant who had done urban migrant work and reported his own hmong vocabulary eroding (h3, g3) insisted that ancestral worship must be in hmong: “the ancestors don’t understand vietnamese. If you call on them in vietnamese, they won’t answer you.” Even in the youngest generation, hmong retains priority for emotional expression—a student (h6, g3) described it this way: “when i’m angry or really happy, what comes into my head is hmong. Vietnamese always has a layer in between; it can’t quite get that feeling across.”
the public-institutional domains present the opposite configuration, and this study’s grasp of that configuration owes precisely to the differing positions participants occupy within it. For ordinary speakers, vietnamese dominance in the public domain registers most directly as the lived experience of bearing the cost of communication: a homestay operator (h2, g2) recalled the language gap in the medical setting—“when you see a doctor you have to speak vietnamese; the doctor doesn’t understand hmong. Sometimes the pain was bad and i didn’t even know how to say it in vietnamese, so i just bore it.” Seen from inside the institutions, the same configuration is experienced by grassroots hmong cadres as a structural dilemma: as a village official, h5 (g2) was clearly aware in the interview of hmong’s marginalization at the policy level, describing his position as caught between “those above requiring vietnamese and the ordinary people below who can’t understand it.” The two comparison participants (h7 and h8) further sketch, from the external and institutional sides, the vietnamese monolingualization of the administrative and school domains—administrative business is transacted in written vietnamese, and school instruction is conducted entirely in vietnamese. Three observations from three different positions point to one phenomenon: hmong lacks an institutional place in formal public domains, which therefore become the dominant space of vietnamese.
the private and public domains do not stand in a zero-sum relation; rather, a flexible additive bilingual practice arises in intermediate domains such as markets and media. H1 described the language switching at market day as almost automatic: “when an old hmong woman comes to buy my vegetables, i speak hmong; when i run into a kinh person or someone i don’t know, i switch to vietnamese. My head just turns over by itself.” Social media has given rise to a new written-hmong practice: h6 reported that “on facebook i message my hmong friends in hmong, spelling it out with vietnamese letters, and when chatting with everyone i use vietnamese too—often mixing the two.” H3, away for migrant work, likewise kept up hmong use through phone calls and gatherings of fellow villagers. The bilingual coexistence in these domains is not one language replacing another but an additive division of labor that follows the function of the domain. The private–intermediate–public functional gradient is shown in figure 2.
figure 2
5.2 intergenerational attitudes: change in markedness
along this domain configuration, the language attitudes of the three generations show a reorganization of markedness: within the family and the ethnic group, hmong remains the unmarked default and it is the use of vietnamese that carries marked significance; whereas in instrumental appraisal oriented toward social mobility, this marking relation gradually reverses across generations. Affective attachment is highly consistent across the generations and remains unmarked—using hmong needs no reason. A middle-aged participant (h2, g2) linked transmission of the mother tongue to the ancestors recognizing their descendants: “my parents taught me hmong, and i have to teach my children, so that our ancestors can recognize their own descendants.” The village official (h5, g2) put it more emphatically: “hmong is the soul of us hmong people—it’s in your bones. If you’re born hmong, you have to speak hmong.”
against this stable affective loyalty, the balance of instrumental reasoning tilts clearly toward vietnamese, and the tilt grows more open the younger the participant. H3, returned from migrant work, appraised the economic value of hmong almost coldly: “farming takes skill, getting a loan takes vietnamese, and going out to work you have even less use for hmong. What’s hmong worth?” In domains oriented toward schooling and employment, giving vietnamese priority is gradually turning from a “marked” act requiring explanation into a norm needing no justification—a strategic orientation that recurs across participants and is especially pronounced in the accounts of the younger generation.
it is precisely at the juncture of transmission intent that a latent fissure opens between sentiment and action. Participants almost uniformly say they want their children to keep hmong, yet they generally concede that the environment is no longer something an individual can control. H2’s sense of powerlessness is representative: “of course i want my children to speak hmong, but these days they’re at school and outside all day—that environment, there’s nothing you can do about it.” Intergenerational friction sometimes surfaces directly within the household; h6 relayed her younger sister’s reaction: “when my mom tells her to speak hmong, she even says mom is old-fashioned and that she can’t understand what she’s saying.” The older embroidery artisan (h4, g1), facing the erosion of hmong among her grandchildren, framed the rift as a restrained compromise: “seeing that my grandson barely knows hmong, of course it hurts. But i can’t blame him—times are different, and you can’t let the language hold the child back.” This rift has not yet broken transmission, but it shows that vietnamese is gradually acquiring unmarked default status in the peer interactions of the younger generation, while the maintenance of hmong rests increasingly on conscious effort at the level of identity rather than on the natural support of any domain.
5.3 subjective vitality: a high-loyalty perceptual configuration
placing these attitudes back within the ethnolinguistic vitality framework, the hmong participants’ perception of their own language’s vitality forms a configuration decoupled from their objective circumstances. On the status dimension, participants affirmed the cultural value of hmong with near-unanimous strength, and this affirmation is rooted explicitly in cultural self-assurance rather than socioeconomic prestige. H6, drawing on history and art, asked rhetorically: “we hmong have thousands of years of history, our language is so rich, all those patterns and those songs—who dares say our culture isn’t high?” She went on to reject the notion that languages rank above one another: “some people say hmong is country talk, backward talk. I don’t agree. Language is language—how can there be high and low, noble and base?” For h1, speaking hmong connects directly to ethnic dignity: “the hmong have already taken plenty of scorn out there; if we don’t even speak our own language, we can hold our heads up even less.”
on the institutional-support dimension, however, participants’ perceptions are uniformly low. The elderly h1 summed up this absence as government inaction: “the government says it respects minority languages, but where is the actual action? I’ve lived more than sixty years and never seen the government do a thing for hmong.” The scarcity of hmong in the media came up repeatedly as well; h2 noted that “there has never been a hmong channel or a proper hmong program on television.”
perception on the demographic dimension, by contrast, turns optimistic, grounded in the density of the hmong population at the village level and the high everyday visibility of hmong. H3, taking village size as his evidence, asserted that hmong will not disappear: “our village is four hundred-some households, all hmong. Step outside and it’s all hmong. You think hmong could disappear? No way.” The village official h5, in a slightly hyperbolic register, stressed the binding of hmong’s survival to the group’s survival: “how could hmong ever disappear—unless every hmong person were dead?” Taken together, the three dimensions constitute a high-loyalty, low-support, high-optimism perceptual configuration. What calls for caution is that this demographic optimism, grounded in everyday village visibility, may mask the intergenerational transmission rift exposed in 5.2—perceptual optimism and behavioral, latent loss being two sides of the very same decoupling.
6 discussion
the findings of this study point to a judgment that runs counter to the attrition narrative: in the northern vietnamese hmong communities examined here, the retreat of hmong from public domains has not been accompanied by a decline along the identity dimension but instead coexists with a highly stable ethnolinguistic loyalty. The four sections below place this judgment, in turn, back into dialogue with theory and the existing literature: first establishing the “additive rather than subtractive” argument through the china–vietnam hmong contrast (6.1), then explaining how identity can be sustained as the range of use contracts (6.2), next accounting for how the vietnamese context shapes this configuration (6.3), and finally delimiting the study’s limitations and boundaries of applicability (6.4).
6.1 additive rather than subtractive: a counterexample to the attrition narrative
what matters about the domain-based functional differentiation set out in the findings is not which domains hmong has ceded but the manner of the ceding: the anchoring of hmong in the family and ritual domains has not been eroded by the vietnamese-ization of the public domain but is, on the contrary, sustained through the flexible additive use of both languages in intermediate domains. This is a relatively stable configuration—hmong anchored in the private domain, both languages sharing the intermediate domains, and vietnamese dominant in the public domain—hereafter the additive steady state. Such a form is hard to grasp through an attrition framework of one language replacing another. Language-attrition research largely attends to the systematic loss of mother-tongue competence under pressure from a dominant language (schmid and köpke, 2017), whereas the “retreat” of hmong in this case is a functional redistribution across domains rather than a decline in competence or loyalty—closer to an additive than a subtractive bilingual configuration (landry and allard, 1984). Distinguishing “decline” from “redistribution” also aligns with recent rethinking of language revitalization: revitalization is not a simple reversal of past losses but a search for a more resilient path to survival under existing conditions (wiltshire et al., 2024).
the market vendor who moves between hmong and vietnamese according to the customer before him, and the young speaker who writes hmong in vietnamese orthography and interleaves the two on social media, are drawing on one repertoire rather than switching between two bounded codes. These practices are best understood as translanguaging, which treats a bilingual’s languages as one integrated repertoire rather than two sealed systems (garcía and li, 2014). Reading them in this way rather than as mere code-switching clarifies why the expansion of vietnamese need not erode hmong: the added language widens the repertoire on which speakers draw instead of displacing the resource already in place. This is the additive rather than subtractive logic at the centre of this account.
setting this form against the miao of guizhou, china brings into view two trajectories into which the same ethnic group has diverged under different political and social environments, as shown in table 3. Existing research on the guizhou miao presents a deeper language shift: the dominance of miao in the family domain contracts, the younger generation treats mandarin as an instrument of socioeconomic advancement, and a loosening of language from identity emerges amid urbanizing diaspora (li et al., 2024; shen et al., 2021). The hmong of northern vietnam, by contrast, sustain both the security of hmong in the private domain and a tight binding of ethnic identity, under conditions of border settlement, cross-border traffic, and a different national language-policy environment. Notably, the education system plays a similar role at both sites—school monolingualization is the main structural driver of language shift in each—which indicates that the divergence of the two trajectories springs not from the presence or absence of educational pressure but from differences in other conditions: community demographic ecology, cross-border networks, and identity binding.
table 3
| dimension | hmong in northern vietnam (this study) | miao in guizhou, china (existing literature) | contrast |
|---|---|---|---|
| domain use pattern | hmong anchored in private domains, vietnamese dominant in public domains, bilingual addition in intermediate domains | contraction even in private domains; mandarin dominant in market and workplace; digital domains trending monolingual | marked difference |
| intergenerational transmission | latent fractures but no rupture; hmong still primary in the family domain | deeper rupture; markedly lower hmong fluency among the younger generation | marked difference |
| identity–language relationship | language tightly bound to identity; “one who does not speak hmong is not hmong” consistent across generations | loosening of the language–identity bond; cultural customs and descent partly substitute for language | marked difference |
| subjective vitality perception | high cultural-status perception, low institutional-support perception, demographic optimism | generally low across dimensions; more pessimistic perception of demographic trends | partial difference |
| role of the education system | vietnamese monolingualization in schools, the main structural driver of language shift | mandarin monolingualization in schools; boarding systems further compress family hmong time | similar pattern |
| community language-attitude tenor | pragmatic but not pessimistic; bilingualism positively valued among the young | pragmatic but more pessimistic; bilingual attitudes lean toward replacement | marked difference |
comparison of ethnolinguistic vitality trajectories: hmong in northern vietnam versus miao in guizhou, china.
the vietnam column derives from the qualitative synthesis of six hmong participants in the present study; the guizhou column summarizes existing literature (li et al., 2024; shen et al., 2021). “Contrast” denotes a qualitative judgment and involves no quantitative comparison. The role of the education system is a similar pattern across both sites—a shared structural constraint rather than the source of trajectory divergence.
this “divergence” is not isolated within the wider landscape of vitality research. Finland’s swedish-speaking minority, where institutional support and demographic base are relatively ample, can sustain both ethnolinguistic identity and perceived vitality at a relatively high level (lindell et al., 2023); against this, the hmong of northern vietnam sustaining high loyalty under markedly weak institutional support throws into relief just how far identity and community ecology can substitute for the function of institutional support. The same resilience is seen in other heritage-language communities: sustained investment at the level of family and cultural practice can keep a mother tongue vital under unfavorable external conditions (bilgory-fazakas and armon-lotem, 2025). Together these contrasts indicate that the level of hmong vitality is determined not by ethnic membership itself but jointly by the institutional environment, demographic configuration, and community ecology in which it is embedded.
this contrast gives the “counterexample” its concrete content: the hmong of northern vietnam do not prove the attrition framework wrong but mark out the conditions under which it holds—when the mother tongue is still construed, along the identity dimension, as an irreplaceable resource, and the community’s demographic ecology can still support everyday use, a retreat from the public domain does not necessarily slide into one-directional decline. Reading every narrowing of mother-tongue use as a portent of decline would miss the additive steady state as one possible stable form.
6.2 why identity can be sustained as the range of use contracts
if hmong has clearly given way on the instrumental level, how does its ethnic loyalty remain stable across generations? The clue offered by the findings is that this loyalty is anchored in identity rather than practical utility. Ethnolinguistic identity theory suggests that when a language serves as a core marker of intergroup boundaries, holding to it is in itself a defense of a positive group identity (giles and johnson, 1987). The cross-generationally consistent formulation in this study—“one who does not speak hmong is not hmong”—is a direct expression of this mechanism. The link between identity and attitude also finds empirical support: the strength of ethnic identity can significantly shape an individual’s language attitudes toward the mother tongue (shabtaev et al., 2024), providing corroboration for “identity-driven loyalty” beyond the present case.
as shown in §3.3 and figure 1, the language-as-resource orientation is an interpretive lens unifying the foregoing findings rather than a parallel theme. This identity logic and the language-as-resource orientation reinforce each other. Participants’ construction of the value of hmong exceeds the affective–instrumental binary—hmong is understood at once as a carrier of cultural memory, as social capital for in-group trust and cross-border connection, and as an affective bond of intimacy and belonging. Understanding the mother tongue as a multidimensional resource means that acquiring vietnamese constitutes not a replacement for hmong but a gain layered on existing resources (ruiz, 1984). In an environment of limited institutional support and low measurable vitality, affective attachment and cultural practice at the family and community levels may still sustain the mother tongue’s continuation, as corroborated in other heritage-language contexts: research on family language policy in pakistan shows the protective effect of family dynamics and cultural practice on transmission (fatima and nadeem, 2025), while the responsibility for maintenance does not stop at the family—grassroots action at the community level can constitute a compensatory mechanism in the absence of institutional support (inan and harris, 2025). Grassroots practices in this case, such as elders teaching children to sing hmong songs, accord precisely with this direction.
the robustness of the identity–language binding does not mean it bears no tension. Research on overseas hmong communities shows that when younger generations negotiate dual cultural belonging in mainstream society, the intergenerational loss of linguistic competence can decouple from the persistence of identity—a person can identify strongly as hmong yet no longer use hmong fluently (mckenzie et al., 2024). Research on intergenerational transmission likewise suggests that childhood family-language experience significantly influences one’s language-policy orientation in adulthood, producing considerable variation in transmission intent across generations (pagé and noels, 2024). These two threads corroborate the latent rift in findings 5.2: although hmong loyalty in this case is stable across generations, transmission from g2 to g3 already shows early signs that identity and competence may separate. This makes intelligible the internal consistency of the three-part configuration noted in the findings: the perceived absence of institutional support has not dissolved language loyalty because the roots of that loyalty lie not in institutions but in identity and community ecology—though these roots may not, on their own, withstand the long-term structural pressure of the educational and economic domains.
6.3 continuity and a filled gap in the vietnamese context
the findings of this study continue an established line in research on minority languages in vietnam while filling one of its gaps. Research on language choice among the minority groups of vietnam’s central highlands has shown that the division of labor among languages across domains often follows a logic of power and solidarity, with the dominant language becoming the unmarked choice in formal domains while the mother tongue sustains solidarity within the group (nguyen and hamid, 2021). The reorganization of markedness observed here among the hmong of the northern border—vietnamese becoming the unmarked default in the peer interactions of the younger generation while hmong retreats into a marked in-group choice—is consistent with this logic, indicating that the mechanism is to some degree transferable across ethnic groups and regions.
widening the view to a broader range of minority multilingual cases, the generality of this mechanism and the particularity of the present case come into view together. Research on the language ideologies of 1.5-generation korean immigrants in new zealand shows that a contraction in the range of mother-tongue use can run in parallel with the persistence of identity construction (park, 2022), consistent in direction with this case’s pattern of “narrowing range yet undiminished loyalty.” In china’s southwest, adjacent to northern vietnam, research on zhuang trilingualism in guangxi reveals the tension between education and ethnic-language agency (wu and silver, 2023), while research on the language policies of multilingual families in the southwest documents families’ efforts and difficulties in maintaining the mother tongue under the pressure of the dominant language (lam et al., 2025)—the latter echoing the family-language-policy situation of the guizhou miao and further showing that the additive steady state of this case is not the regional norm but a product of specific conditions. Even within a linguistic landscape absolutely dominated by chinese, the visibility of minority languages still forms part of their perceived vitality (he and chen, 2024), which suggests that linguistic visibility in public space carries non-negligible significance for the maintenance of hmong.
the difference from the central highlands case is equally telling. The border settlement and cross-border traffic of the northern vietnamese hmong furnish hmong with community demographic support and cross-border use scenarios that the central highlands groups may not possess, which partly explains why this case displays stronger language loyalty than earlier vietnamese research. The institutional environment, meanwhile, forms a shared constraint: minority mother tongues, though constitutionally recognized, lack substantive support in education and public services (nguyen and hajek, 2022), and the vietnamese monolingualization of schools is, in this case as in the central highlands case, the main driver of language shift. Hmong’s current steady state thus rests more on community ecology than on policy support.
6.4 limitations and boundaries of applicability
the conclusions of this study must be understood within the boundaries of its design. The core synthesis rests on qualitative interviews with six hmong participants across two hmong villages in lào cai province (lao chai and ban pho), with one comparison participant interviewed in each of ta phin and the town of sa pa to provide external and institutional-side reference; the region and scale of the sample mean that its purpose lies not in statistical generalizability but in exposing a form of language vitality that has lacked empirical record until now. On the criterion of information power, this sample suffices to support thick description of meaning-making in a specific community (malterud et al., 2016), but whether the additive steady state portrayed here applies to other hmong settlement areas in vietnam still requires further research to test.
vitality judgments rest on participants’ perception rather than objective measurement—both the orientation of this study and its limit: perceived vitality reveals how speakers understand the situation of their own language but cannot substitute for an independent assessment of objective vitality indicators, and the decoupling between the two itself awaits tracking through a mixed design in future work. Inferences about generation call for particular caution: this study compares the discourse of three generations at a single point in time, an apparent-time design, so the generational differences presented are strictly cross-sectional differences in the current attitudes of different generations, not a direct observation of one group’s change over time; whether the latent loss from g2 to g3 will accumulate over time into a transmission rupture lies beyond what this design can determine and must await longitudinal tracking. These boundaries both delimit the study’s claims and sketch the directions for subsequent work.
7 conclusion
taking the hmong community of lào cai province in northern vietnam as a case, this study examined language attitudes and perceived ethnolinguistic vitality against the backdrop of vietnamese expansion. It shows that the retreat of hmong from public domains does not constitute one-directional decline but a functional redistribution across domains—hmong anchored in the private domain, vietnamese dominant in the public domain, both languages sharing the intermediate domains. Under this configuration, hmong speakers’ affective loyalty to the mother tongue and their ethnic identity remain stable across generations, and multilingual competence is construed as a resource layered on the mother tongue rather than a replacement for it; the “retreat” of hmong thus belongs to an additive rather than a subtractive multilingual configuration.
setting this configuration against the miao of guizhou, china brings into view two vitality trajectories into which the same ethnic group has diverged under different environments, and from this follows a judgment of theoretical significance: the level of ethnolinguistic vitality is determined not by ethnic membership itself but jointly by the institutional environment, demographic ecology, and community networks in which it is embedded. The “high cultural-status perception, low institutional-support perception, demographic optimism” configuration presented in this case portrays a form in which language loyalty stays high even where institutional support is absent, offering a clear instance of the claim, within ethnolinguistic vitality theory, that subjective and objective vitality may decouple: when the mother tongue is still seen, along the identity dimension, as an irreplaceable resource, and community ecology can still support everyday use, a retreat from the public domain need not slide into decline.
theoretically, this study uses a borderland minority case to mark out the boundaries of applicability of the attrition and endangerment narratives, and provides an empirical record of additive multilingualism as a form of language maintenance. Practically, it suggests that for vietnam’s mother-tongue education policy to take effect, it might build on the high affective loyalty and additive orientation already present in hmong communities, gradually creating institutional space for hmong in the educational and media domains so that community resilience gains support at the policy level. Given the constraints of sample size and region, a perception-based orientation, and a cross-sectional design, these judgments still require testing across a wider range of hmong settlement areas and through longitudinal and mixed methods, so as to clarify how far identity-driven language maintenance can withstand long-term structural pressure.
statements
data availability statement
the raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.
ethics statement
the studies involving humans were approved by the ethics review committee of yunnan normal university. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The ethics committee/institutional review board waived the requirement of written informed consent for participation from the participants or the participants’ legal guardians/next of kin because owing to the low-risk, qualitative nature of the study and the varying literacy levels of the participants—several of whom had little or no formal schooling and limited written-language proficiency—requiring written informed consent was considered inappropriate and potentially exclusionary. The ethics review committee of yunnan normal university (approval no. Ynnu-2024-035) therefore approved the use of oral informed consent in place of written consent. Before any recording, the purpose of the study, its procedures, the voluntary nature of participation, the right to withdraw, and the data-anonymization measures were explained orally to each participant in their preferred language (hmong or vietnamese), and oral informed consent was obtained from every participant and documented by the research team.
author contributions
jy: conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, writing – original draft. Xm: conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, project administration, supervision, writing – review & editing. Wb: formal analysis, investigation, validation, writing – review & editing.
funding
the author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. This work was supported by the major project of the national social science fund of china “atlas of hmong dialects in china” (grant no. 21&zd302).
conflict of interest
the author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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the author(s) declared that generative ai was not used in the creation of this manuscript.
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summary
keywords
additive multilingualism, ethnic identity, ethnolinguistic vitality, heritage language maintenance, hmong, language attitudes, minority languages, social identity theory
citation
yu j, ma x and bo w (2026) maintaining ethnic identity amid additive multilingualism: language attitudes and ethnolinguistic vitality among the hmong of northern vietnam. Front. Psychol. 17:1919125. Doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1919125
received
25 june 2026
revised
08 september 2026
accepted
21 september 2026
published
07 october 2026
volume
17 - 2026
edited by
anastassia zabrodskaja, tallinn university, estonia
reviewed by
seong man park, dankook university, republic of korea
yining wang, guangxi minzu university, china
updates
copyright
© 2026 yu, ma and bo.
this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (cc by). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*correspondence: xueyan ma, xuey23m@163.Com
disclaimer
all claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher. |
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| Earnings Edge of a U.S. College Degree Is Shrinking |
| Posted on Wednesday, October 07 @ 00:02:20 PDT (9 reads) | |
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By jim shimabukuro (assisted by claude)
editor
after four decades of growth, the earnings edge of a u.S. College degree is shrinking. A look at how far it has fallen, where it may go by 2031, who is moving in on the territory, and whether colleges’ countermoves are working.
in the spring of 2022, a typical american worker with a bachelor’s degree earned about 87 percent more per hour than a comparable worker with only a high school diploma. By the spring of 2026, that edge had slipped to about 78 percent. The numbers come from a working paper posted to the social science research network in september by economists josé azar, mireia giné, and javier sanz-espín, who tracked the college wage premium using federal current population survey data. In the authors’ words, “after expanding for four decades, the u.S. College wage premium is experiencing a sustained contraction,” which they describe as “the first sustained negative relative demand growth in a series spanning back to 1914” (cowen, 2026). Over the same four years, real hourly wages for college graduates fell about 2 percent while wages for workers without degrees rose about 3.3 percent (farrington, 2026).
nine percentage points is a modest drop in a premium that remains large. A degree holder in 2026 still out-earns a high school graduate by more than three-quarters. But the direction has changed, and it has changed at the same moment that public belief in college has collapsed. On october 1, gallup reported that only 31 percent of americans now call a college education “very important,” down from 70 percent in 2013. “The 64-point gap between them in 2013 has shrunk to just two points today,” wrote gallup’s megan brenan, comparing those who rate college very important with the 29 percent who now say it is “not too important” (brenan, 2026).
in the united states, the odds are rising that a degree is losing economic value, and the evidence has hardened in the past six weeks. The results are nuanced. The decline is concentrated in particular majors, particular kinds of jobs, and the first few years after graduation. Abroad, the picture runs from relative strength in much of the oecd to graduate gluts in china and india. And the forces pushing the premium down are not all the same force.
what the numbers show
start with the young, where the strain shows first. The federal reserve bank of new york reported that in the second quarter of 2026, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 stood at about 5.6 percent, and 42 percent of them were underemployed, meaning they held jobs that do not typically require a degree (federal reserve bank of new york, 2026). Recent graduates now face higher unemployment than the workforce as a whole, a reversal of the long-standing pattern in which a fresh diploma bought a measure of protection.
two new federal studies tie part of this to artificial intelligence. Census bureau economists found that after chatgpt’s release in late 2022, employment among 22- to 24-year-olds fell about 12 percent over ten quarters in the industries most exposed to ai, and graduates from ai-exposed majors saw starting earnings drop about 13 percent (gioino, 2026). According to staffing industry analysts’ summary of the work, the authors wrote that “this earnings decline is comparable in magnitude to the earnings losses associated with graduating into a large recession” (staffing industry analysts, 2026). Most of these graduates did not end up jobless. Roughly half of the earnings loss came from lower pay within their field, and the other half from graduates moving into restaurants and retail (gioino, 2026).
on september 22, the federal reserve bank of dallas published a parallel analysis. Samuel dodini and tucker smith found that graduates from majors with 10 percentage points more exposure to ai automation saw a 1.7-point relative decline in employment after 2022, and those who found work earned about 5 percent less. Graduates in exposed fields were more likely to go on to graduate school, but master’s degree holders in those fields saw similar wage declines, which led the authors to conclude that “the returns to formal upskilling within ai-exposed fields may be limited” (dodini & smith, 2026). Computer science, computer engineering, and languages topped the exposure list. Nursing, education, and psychology sat near the bottom.
students noticed. Goldman sachs economists reported in june that computer science and programming enrollments each fell more than 10 percent in the 2025–26 academic year while healthcare and engineering rose, and a gallup survey found 42 percent of bachelor’s students had reconsidered their major because of ai (lichtenberg, 2026).
other evidence cuts the other way, and it is just as recent. In september, ucla economists robert fairlie and jane wu published a national bureau of economic research paper that compared new graduates in summer 2026 with older graduates and with young workers who had no degree. They found no significant spike in unemployment for the new graduates relative to prior years, even using a broader measure that counts graduates who wanted a job but had stopped looking (fairlie & wu, 2026). Summer unemployment for graduates aged 22 to 25 was 7.3 percent, inside the 6.3 to 7.8 percent band seen since 2022 (panganiban, 2026). The authors cautioned that “these findings do not rule out larger effects in the future” (panganiban, 2026). The census and dallas fed studies measure a hit to pay and job quality. The ucla study measures joblessness. They are compatible: ai so far appears to be pushing graduates down the job ladder more than out of work.
students and recent graduates themselves remain largely convinced. A lumina foundation–gallup study released in february found that 75 percent of current students and 71 percent of college graduates agree their degree is worth the cost (hrynowski & marken, 2026). The skepticism is strongest among adults looking at college from the outside.
why it is happening
azar and his co-authors estimate that ai exposure accounts for roughly 28 percent of the 2022–2026 decline in the premium (cowen, 2026). Tyler cowen, who flagged the paper on his blog, said he does not see ai as the primary driver (cowen, 2026). Writing in city journal’s newsletter, robert verbruggen noted that the ai exposure measure is an estimate and that the study does not prove causation, while also observing that “jobs with higher exposure have fared progressively worse” since 2022 (verbruggen, 2026). That leaves about 70 percent of the decline to explain.
several forces fill the gap. The first is supply. The share of young adults with a degree has climbed for decades; across oecd countries, 48 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds now hold a tertiary qualification, up from 27 percent in 2000 (hillman, 2025). When graduates become the majority of young workers, a degree stops sorting candidates the way it once did. The burning glass institute put it bluntly in 2025: “for the first time in modern history, a bachelor’s degree is no longer a reliable path to professional employment,” citing lean post-pandemic staffing, more cautious hiring, and a surplus of degree holders alongside ai (burning glass institute, 2025).
the second force is the other side of the wage ledger. Wages for workers without degrees rose faster than graduate wages after 2022, driven by tight labor markets in construction, logistics, health support, and the skilled trades (farrington, 2026). The premium is a ratio, so it falls when the bottom rises, even if graduates are not doing worse in absolute terms. In this period, they were doing slightly worse.
the third force is cost and debt. Total u.S. Student loan debt sits at about $1.86 trillion, with an average federal balance near $39,547 (farrington, 2026). When the payoff shrinks while the price stays high, the calculation tips for students at the margin. In 2025, new york fed economists jaison abel and richard deitz still put the return to a bachelor’s degree at 12.5 percent a year, “a rate well above the threshold for a sound investment,” but they warned that students who start and do not finish “incur at least some of the costs but enjoy far fewer benefits” (abel & deitz, 2025).
the fourth force is trust. Gallup’s july survey found confidence in higher education at 38 percent, down from 57 percent in 2015. Among those with little confidence, 31 percent cited perceived political agendas, 30 percent cost, and 25 percent poor preparation for the workforce (jones, 2026). Only 23 percent of republicans expressed confidence. Distrust shapes enrollment decisions, state budgets, and federal policy, all of which feed back into what a degree is worth.
the view from abroad
outside the united states, the data do not show a single global trend. The oecd’s education at a glance 2026, released september 29, found that across member countries 87 percent of tertiary-educated adults were employed in 2025, against 78 percent of those whose highest credential was upper secondary school. The report noted that tertiary-educated young adults had “lower unemployment rates than their peers with lower educational attainment during economic booms and crises” (oecd, 2026). By that measure, a degree still pays across most of the developed world.
the pressure points are in large economies with fast graduate growth. In china, youth unemployment for 16- to 24-year-olds not in school rose to 17.9 percent in july, the highest july reading in three years, as a new wave of graduates entered the market (cheng, 2026). In india, the azim premji university state of working india 2026 report found that nearly 40 percent of graduates under 25 were unemployed and only about 7 percent of young graduates landed permanent salaried work within a year (the wire, 2026). In britain, the job site indeed reported in august that graduate vacancies were 7 percent lower than a year earlier and at their weakest since 2020 (cabrera, 2026). The international labour organization reported a global youth unemployment rate of 12.4 percent for 2025 and, in north america, a rise from 8.3 percent in 2023 to 9.8 percent (international labour organization, 2026). “Technological progress must work for young people, not against them,” said ilo director sukti dasgupta (international labour organization, 2026).
demand for degrees abroad has not dried up. Ucas, which runs british university admissions, reported a record 695,740 applicants for 2026 entry, up 4.6 percent (ucas, 2026). Young people are still applying. They are applying into a weaker graduate job market.
the next five years
no one can forecast the premium in 2031 with precision, and the range of public predictions is wide. In march, servicenow chief executive bill mcdermott said unemployment among new graduates “could easily go into the mid-30s in the next couple of years” as ai agents take over routine work (burleigh, 2026). The fairlie and wu data suggest nothing close to that so far. A more grounded projection starts from what is already scheduled.
the first scheduled event is federal accountability. Under the 2025 budget law, the education department will release earnings data for every college program in 2027. Undergraduate programs whose graduates do not out-earn high school graduates four years after finishing, and graduate programs that do not beat bachelor’s holders, face loss of federal loan access, with penalties starting in 2028 for programs that fail two of three years (blake, 2026). For the first time, a weak premium at the program level will carry a federal consequence.
the second is demographics. The number of u.S. High school graduates peaked in 2025 at roughly 3.8 to 3.9 million and is projected to fall about 10 percent by 2041 (unglesbee, 2024). Fitch ratings gave higher education a “deteriorating” outlook for 2026, citing “a vulnerable international student pipeline, a shrinking domestic student base and rising scrutiny on the value proposition of a higher education degree,” and expected mergers and closures to continue at elevated rates (spitalniak, 2025).
the third is the spread of ai tools into entry-level white-collar work, which the census and dallas fed studies show is already under way in the most exposed fields.
taken together, the most likely five-year path is continued modest compression of the average premium, with a much wider spread underneath it. Degrees in nursing, engineering, and other licensed or hands-on fields are likely to hold their value. Degrees in fields where ai handles much of the junior work, and degrees from low-completion, high-cost institutions, are likely to keep losing ground, and some of those programs will lose federal loan eligibility after 2028. The average degree will very likely still pay more than a high school diploma in 2031. The question for a given student will increasingly be which degree, from which institution, at what price.
the challengers
several alternatives are drawing students and employers. None has displaced the degree at scale, but each is winning in a specific niche.
the skilled trades and apprenticeships are the most visible. The number of registered u.S. Apprentices has risen about 80 percent over the past decade, according to figures compiled by minding the campus, which also reported an estimated three skilled-trade openings for every qualified worker (harrington, 2026). “Ai can’t build data centers, upgrade power grids, or maintain its own infrastructure,” said greg dyers of the staffing firm randstad north america (harrington, 2026). In britain, the energy company e.On said applications for its degree apprenticeships trebled in three years, to 165 applicants per role in 2026. In a survey it commissioned of 2,004 british teenagers, 67 percent cited student debt as a deciding factor and 36 percent said ai had pushed them toward automation-resistant careers (e.On uk, 2026). Some of the headline enthusiasm needs discounting. Quartz reported in july that a widely shared figure of a 1,421 percent jump in gen z trade-school enrollment mostly reflects that generation aging into the eligible years (lopopolo, 2026).
short-term credentials now have federal money behind them. Workforce pell, which opened july 1, 2026, lets students use pell grants for programs of 8 to 15 weeks in high-demand occupations. As of early october, 40 u.S. Jurisdictions had an approval process running and a dozen programs in iowa, indiana, nebraska, and texas had won federal approval, covering fields such as emt training, phlebotomy, hvac, and machining (capstone workforce, 2026). Community colleges, the main providers, grew enrollment 3 percent in fall 2025, outpacing private four-year institutions, which declined (alonso, 2026).
employer-run pathways are the most talked about and the least proven. Palantir’s meritocracy fellowship recruited 22 high school graduates from more than 500 applicants in 2025, under the slogan “skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination.” Chief executive alex karp told prospective fellows, “if you come to palantir, your career is set” (burleigh, 2025). Skills-based hiring is now official policy at about 70 percent of employers, but research from the burning glass institute and harvard business school found that dropping degree requirements produced new opportunities for “fewer than 1 in 700 hires,” and about 45 percent of firms changed nothing in practice (ein presswire, 2026). Employers have rewritten their job ads faster than their hiring.
the alternatives are succeeding for concrete reasons. They are cheaper and shorter, they pay during training, and they lead to jobs that ai cannot easily do, such as wiring a data center or drawing blood. Their limits are equally concrete. Apprenticeship slots are scarce, workforce pell programs are only now being approved, and the most prestigious employer pathways admit a few dozen people a year.
how colleges are responding
colleges have begun to move on price, time, and content. The early evidence is strongest on price.
on october 5, bloomberg reported a new wave of tuition resets among private colleges. Emory & henry university in virginia cut tuition in half, to $19,990, and enrolled 100 more new students this fall. The university of tulsa is cutting its price from $54,000 to $25,000, and carroll college in montana by 40 percent, to $26,800. “We just knew that we couldn’t be a school with a price tag of $40,000 and attract students,” said emory & henry president lou fincher. Robert bielby of the consulting firm huron was more cautious: “at some point, we’re probably going to see a full-scale reset in the industry. We’re just not there yet” (albright, 2026). Most of these cuts replace discounting that already happened behind the sticker price, since private nonprofits discount tuition for first-time students by an average of 57 percent. The gain is transparency, which matters to families who never apply because of the listed price.
on time, the three-year bachelor’s degree is spreading. In september, oklahoma approved 90- to 103-credit degrees at three public universities, including an artificial intelligence degree at oklahoma state, and at least 70 institutions nationwide are offering or considering the format (nietzel, 2026). A three-year degree cuts a year of tuition and a year of lost wages. Faculty groups, including the american association of university professors, argue the degrees “prioritize speed over essential intellectual development” (nietzel, 2026). There are no labor market outcome data yet.
on content, purdue university this fall became the first major university to make ai competency a graduation requirement in every undergraduate program, revising more than 300 degree plans. “We want purdue graduates to develop the skills to be the leaders of ai systems rather than letting ai lead them,” said senior vice provost haley oliver-jischke (purdue university, 2026). Miami dade college built a tiered applied ai program, from certificates to associate degrees, that grew from struggling to fill 30 seats to more than 2,000 students (flaherty, 2026).
other campuses are moving work experience into the degree itself. James devaney of the university of michigan argued in september that “career readiness cannot wait until graduation, and it doesn’t have to,” and that universities add value by providing “the context, community, expert guidance, feedback and authentic experiences through which information becomes judgment” (devaney, 2026). Saint leo university now requires every student to produce a business plan before graduating, and wake forest’s career chief argues that career offices belong in senior leadership. “If i’m not at that table, there’s no one really in the room sharing what’s happening,” said wake forest’s andy chan (flaherty, 2026).
whether these moves are promising depends on which problem they address. Price resets and three-year degrees attack the cost side of the premium, and price has early enrollment results to show. Ai requirements and applied ai programs attack the skills side, but nothing yet shows that a required ai course raises graduate earnings, and the dallas fed’s finding of weak returns to graduate study in exposed fields is a caution. Work-integrated learning has the best long-run evidence behind it, but it is hard to scale. An inside higher ed survey found 69 percent of provosts named staff capacity as the main barrier, career centers average 3,343 students per full-time staff member, and only 20 percent of provosts said their institution had a clear vision for teaching for an ai-era workplace (flaherty, 2026). Stanford’s susan young summed up the planning risk: “if they underreact, they may miss shifts; if they overreact, they risk chasing temporary trends” (flaherty, 2026).
conclusion
the economic value of the average american bachelor’s degree is falling, measurably, after four decades of growth, and the public has turned more skeptical faster than the wage data alone would justify. The decline remains partial. A degree holder still earns far more than a high school graduate, still faces lower unemployment across the oecd, and in most surveys still believes the investment paid off. Ai explains part of the shift, roughly a quarter to a third so far, with graduate oversupply, rising wages at the other end of the labor market, cost, and distrust explaining the rest.
over the next five years, the federal earnings test, a shrinking pool of 18-year-olds, and the spread of ai into junior office work will push colleges to prove their value program by program. The alternatives are pulling in students where training is short, paid, and tied to physical work. Colleges that cut prices, shorten degrees, and build work experience into the curriculum have a reasonable case to make to students. Those that keep high prices and low completion rates in fields where ai does the entry-level work will have a harder one, and after 2028 the federal government will publish the numbers.
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lopopolo, a. (2026, july 15). Trade school enrollment is booming. It’s mostly a demographic mirage. Quartz. Https://qz.Com/trade-school-enrollment-1421-percent-gen-z-explained-071026
nietzel, m. T. (2026, september 6). Oklahoma becomes latest state to approve 3-year bachelor’s degrees. Forbes. Https://www.Forbes.Com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/09/06/oklahoma-becomes-latest-state-to-approve-three-year-bachelors-degrees/
oecd. (2026). How does educational attainment affect participation in the labour market? In education at a glance 2026: oecd indicators. Oecd publishing. Https://www.Oecd.Org/en/publications/2026/09/education-at-a-glance-2026_3bce4131/full-report/how-does-educational-attainment-affect-participation-in-the-labour-market_b0fe0937.Html
panganiban, m. (2026, september 29). Ai has yet to cause a spike in unemployment among young graduates. University herald. Https://www.Universityherald.Com/articles/80457/20260929/ai-has-yet-cause-spike-unemployment-among-young-graduates.Htm
purdue university. (2026, august 19). Purdue’s ai competency graduation requirement begins in every undergraduate degree program. Https://www.Purdue.Edu/newsroom/2026/q3/purdues-ai-competency-graduation-requirement-begins-in-every-undergraduate-degree-program/
spitalniak, l. (2025, december 5). Higher education faces “deteriorating” 2026 outlook, fitch says. Higher ed dive. Https://www.Highereddive.Com/news/higher-education-faces-deteriorating-2026-outlook-fitch-says/807222/
staffing industry analysts. (2026, september 15). Graduating in ai era is like “large recession” for starting pay. Https://www.Staffingindustry.Com/news/global-daily-news/graduating-in-ai-era-is-like-large-recession-for-starting-pay
ucas. (2026, july 16). Record number of uk school leavers head into the results period with an offer of a university or college place this year. Https://www.Ucas.Com/corporate/news-and-key-documents/news/record-number-of-uk-school-leavers-head-into-the-results-period-with-an-offer-of-a-university-or
unglesbee, b. (2024, december 11). High school graduates to peak in 2025, with slightly deeper-than-expected declines ahead. K-12 dive. Https://www.K12dive.Com/news/high-school-graduates-to-peak-in-2025-with-slightly-deeper-than-expected-d/735221/
verbruggen, r. (2026, september 7). The college wage premium falls. City journal (substack). Https://cityjournal.Substack.Com/p/the-college-wage-premium-falls
the wire. (2026, march 18). Nearly 40% of indian graduates under the age of 25 are unemployed: azim premji report. Https://thewire.In/labour/nearly-40-of-indian-graduates-under-the-age-of-25-are-unemployed-azim-premji-report
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| Smith announces Lee County ISave 529 winner | Daily Democrat, Fort Madison, Iowa |
| Posted on Wednesday, October 07 @ 00:02:20 PDT (8 reads) | |
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Des moines (readmedia)—state treasurer roby smith is celebrating alaina m. As the lee county winner of a $529 contribution to an isave 529 account through the statewide summer giveaway.
with another giveaway now underway, smith is encouraging families to enter for their own chance to jump-start their education savings.
“this summer, we set out to give a child in every one of iowa’s 99 counties a boost toward their future,” said smith. “I’m excited to congratulate alaina and their family on representing lee county. Whether these funds are someday used for college, an apprenticeship or another eligible education expense, that $529 will be useful for alaina’s future.”
the summer giveaway awarded a $529 isave 529 contribution to one child in each of iowa’s 99 counties. An additional statewide winner received a $1,000 contribution.
“we love contributing to our daughter’s future education needs and realizing the tax benefits of it. Seeing the quarterly statements of how much we are growing modest contributions to meaningful amounts after high school is great. We also take birthday and holiday card money received from family members and invest it into their 529 plans and put it to good use. Having the ability to reduce some of the financial burden associated with future various post-secondary education options gives us relief that we can help lower the need for crippling student loan debt as a young person,” said bryor mcmillen, who entered alaina in the summer giveaway.
the summer giveaway may be over, but iowans have another opportunity to win. In celebration of college savings month, state treasurer smith is giving away one $1,000 isave 529 contribution in september.
“seeing families like alaina’s get excited about saving is exactly why we keep these giveaways going,” smith said. “If you entered this summer and didn’t win, enter again. If you’ve never thought about saving for education before, now is a great time to start. Another $1,000 is up for grabs, and it could be going toward a child in lee county.” Visit iowa529contest.Com/giveaways to register and learn more about saving for future education expenses. See official rules for complete details and eligibility requirements.
connect with isave 529 on facebook, instagram and linkedin to stay informed of updates and news.
more about isave 529: isave 529 is iowa’s direct-sold 529 plan administered by state treasurer roby smith. With the plan, people can save for future educational expenses for themselves, children, grandchildren or others, and iowa taxpayers can deduct up to $6,100 in contributions per beneficiary account from their state income taxes in 2026. An isave 529 account can be opened with as little as $25, and anyone – parents, grandparents, even friends – can contribute. The plan offers a variety of investment options and is easy to manage online at isave529.Com or through the readysave 529 app.
to learn how you can open an isave 529 account, visit isave529.Com. |
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| Why A Democratic Socialist Is Surging In Florida |
| Posted on Wednesday, October 07 @ 00:02:19 PDT (10 reads) | |
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To get from miami to the august fundraiser for angie nixon’s primary campaign for u.S. Senate at a palestinian restaurant in fort lauderdale, the fastest route was i-95 to the florida turnpike. This is a route along which, during a hazy, 90+ degree mid-afternoon on a friday at the end of summer, it was possible to see from the car window broad signs of what florida is becoming. These signs explain state rep. Nixon’s unprecedented success running as a democratic socialist in what has become ground zero of republican politics. And they are a warning of what the republican model of political economy—cited as the successful alternative to blue state, progressive statism—amounts to: an unholy convergence of oligarchic expansion and military growth. This convergence has created an artificial boom powered on the wealth of government contractors; the kind of illiberal arrangement that makes a mockery of the free market, and that generates human collateral which eventually becomes political.
since angie nixon effectively trounced her opponent, alexander vindman, in the democratic primary, republicans have responded to nixon’s rise with glee: as proof positive of the democratic party’s “radicalism.” Radicalism or no, nixon is in two polls running dead even with her republican opponent, incumbent senator ashley moody, in a state where registered republicans outnumber registered democrats by more than 1.5 million, amid what are reported to be widespread “cracks” in the gop coalition. The reason is straightforward: though democratic socialists may have some wrong solutions, they’re at least addressing the problem in florida that republicans and many democrats refuse to see.
having lived in south florida, which is the heart but not the limit of the state’s military oligarchic boom, for the last several years, i see this problem as a quiet humanitarian crisis. In its security implications for basic liberties, it is, in my view, a potentially dystopic one. The route to the fundraiser i took in august gives some clues as to the factors that have converged to create or reinforce this problem of military oligarchy, and shows why angie nixon may ride the problem to a november victory.
on this route there is a billboard for barry university, the private catholic college, inviting prospective applicants to “break through.” The billboard stands next to a citadel-type university building which looks grand from a distance until the surroundings come into view: a rusted rail-link fence and unmowed grass on a mean stretch of land just off the highway, and a metaphor for the gap between collegiate aspirations and working reality. Barry university is where upwardly aspirant locals spend $36,600 a year to send their children; its graduates include laura loomer, possibly one of the few to see a real return for the investment in a region where more and more work is dominated by white collar arrivals brought in by the relocation of billionaires. What barry’s graduates are actually “breaking through” to is a market where the jobs have been vacuumed up by higher-skilled corporate arrivals. “We have never witnessed this kind of relocation of wealth,” urbanist richard florida, a miami resident, recently told the wall street journal: “it’s getting harder and harder for the young professional [from miami] to enter [the workforce].”
on this route there is also the giant billboard for the law firm of steinger, greene and feiner, one of a few that dot the highways around miami, announcing in giant green letters a recent “1 million recent payout” and in smaller letters that “results are based on the unique facts of each case.” And there are billboards for the behemoth tort firm morgan & morgan (“size matters”): the firm helmed by john morgan, a major democratic donor whose firm has been the subject of repeated complaints of unethical behavior. This is the sleaze factor of south florida, and not just when it comes to morgan’s double entendres.
famously for many years a given of the place, sleaze has been inflated by greed thanks to the same growth driving out the locals: the impulse to squeeze every possible cent of profit out of a boom. According to an analysis of ftc data by the miami-based capital analytics, florida ranked first in the nation in 2024 in fraud reports, with 1,682 fraud reports per 100,000 people in the state and 2,142 per 100,000 in the miami-fort lauderdale-west palm beach metro. Florida “also led in identity theft,” at 395 per 100,000 people, and “the miami metro had particularly high rates of credit card fraud and loan/lease fraud.” Other common florida fraud categories were imposter scams, particularly “business/government imposter and romance scams,” the latter of which “drained about $89 million from floridians in one year,” as well as medicare/medicaid scams. Among the top reasons cited for this surge in scams are the “high volume” of new residents, their “transient lifestyles,” and the presence of “new money.”
this “new money” spends it first and foremost on housing, and new developments are as fixed a part of the local scene as the heat, or the anti-communism, or the cuban coffee sold in styrofoam cups with plastic thimbles at the marathon stations. White or grey buildings with matching balconies sprout along i-95 and the florida turnpike, as, in the words of an article in bloomberg, “new york developers look north of miami for new florida boom.” Few of these developments, however drab, however close to the highway, however cheaply built, are ones that most native floridians can comfortably afford. According to the wall street journal, reporting this year, “half of all households in miami-dade county are cost-burdened—meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing,” and the median sale price for a home in miami dade is more than $550,000.
at one of the other of several events i attended for angie nixon in the second half of august (this one was at ball and chain, a bar and political gathering spot that is a mainstay of miami nightlife), i talked to a volunteer, a young cuban american who taught at a nearby university:
“they’re trying to force me out with an exit package because i use real world examples in my class for the students. They come out of my class knowing they won’t be able to afford their own home anywhere in south florida. Parents have complained.”
complaints or no, twenty and thirty somethings have gotten the general memo. Recently the wall street journal reported that miami-dade was losing population even as its billionaire residents climbed. This was a fact i experienced anecdotally, in conversation after conversation with people my age leaving the area for central florida, or atlanta, or kentucky.
for those without the means or mobility to leave, there is the option of multigenerational living. This is another quiet scourge everyone talks about (ten people to a two bedroom house after grandma and grandpa are evicted from their trailer) which only recently made it into the news. But the option is not available to everyone, and on the route out of miami to i-95 and then on the turnoff to fort lauderdale off the florida turnpike, there were growing numbers of homeless. Here and everywhere in south florida there is also a corresponding rise of surveillance equipment and of police, who have long been willing to flex their capacities at the slightest provocation.
since the second trump administration began, ice and palantir have arrived in the area in force, as trump’s deportation machine has begun targeting not only people here illegally but those working their way through the citizenship process. According to ada ferrer and miriam pensack, writing in the new york review of books under the headline “broken promises in cuban miami,” “since the beginning of trump’s second term an estimated 45,000 cubans have received deportation orders”; “many more cubans have joined countless other migrants in legal limbo as authorities institute travel bans and pause green card applications”; and “the trump administration’s policies since january 2025 have left at least half a million cubans vulnerable to detention and deportation.” Young cuban americans who are seeing these turns and trends were among the nixon supporters i met, after i made it off the expressway to the palestinian restaurant and, later, to the “chomp the oligarchy” party at its third relocation.
a palestinian restaurant is in every way an appropriate place for an event for the angie nixon campaign. Nixon, who is 42, has a long history in florida politics. She is a lifelong resident of jacksonville, a historically black city in the northeast corner of the state five hours from miami by car, where she lives with her husband and five children. She has been employed by the service employees international union and the florida public services union, as well as serving as a state representative since 2020; and in 2024 she opened a café-bookshop selling black literature that still operates today.
but she broke on the national scene in 2023 speaking on behalf of a ceasefire of israel’s war on gaza after 10,000 palestinians had been killed. This speech occurred in november, when pro-israel sentiment was riding high. What nixon said was that “millions of lives are at imminent risk if a cease-fire is not achieved and humanitarian aid is not delivered without delay.” What she got in response were democrats and republicans in the chamber turning their backs on her as she spoke, accusations of anti-semitism, and a cry from one florida lawmaker to kill every palestinian. Karma, as they say, is a funny thing, and nixon’s belated reward for a principled stand was support in 2026 from prominent national progressives like rep. Rashida tlaib (d-mi), the first palestinian american in congress, who headlined the restaurant fundraiser.
palestine is also extremely appropriate as a launching issue for an insurgent florida campaign, because pro-israel intimidation has become a flash point of republican politics in the state. On the road up to fort lauderdale, my phone pinged with notifications from the nixon campaign about the threatened cancellation of an event scheduled for after the restaurant fundraiser. This event, a “chomp the oligarchy” rally, was to be held at the venue, a popular event space in fort lauderdale, until the invite was rescinded after laura loomer publicized the presence of congresswoman tlaib, whom loomer accused of anti-semitism. Loomer’s pressure campaign had drawn the attention of florida zionists, both republicans and democrats, with the result that yet another venue that first agreed to host the rally then cancelled and a third space wasn’t found until late that friday.
this was not an isolated instance of censorship.
jewish floridians, until recently known for their contribution to arts and culture and the vibe of miami beach, have been overwhelmed by an influx of zionists from new york, to the point that the jewish zionist magazine tablet now calls miami “the new jerusalem” and palm beach county recently invested $1 billion in israel bonds. Miami beach’s jewish zionist mayor recently sicced police on a resident over anti-zionist remarks made online, and last year tried to prevent a venue from showing an academy award winning documentary about palestine. Legislation has been passed by the florida legislature censoring certain speech against israel as anti-semitic, and targeting attempts to boycott israel. These actions often come at the expense of younger jews. The movie the miami beach mayor tried to ban was co-directed by israeli jews; one of the headliner participants in the nixon “chomp the oligarchy” rally, elijah manley, is jewish; and i was told several times that jewish voice for peace, an anti-zionist group, cannot find synagogues in south florida to host its events.
and the palestine-israel question is itself an appropriate central issue for a florida campaign, because, in the connected politics of the state, a politicians’ stand for israel is one in a set of stands that link an assortment of groups and positions. This is what happens in an area where interests have replaced issues: to believe in one issue links a politician to groups which dictate his or her stances on a series of other issues, no matter how seemingly far afield from each other they may be.
stephen m. Ross, probably the most powerful philanthropist in palm beach and a prodigious political donor, is professionally a real estate developer and ideologically a zionist. Ken griffin, the hedge fund manager who moved his operations to miami and is remaking brickell, miami’s financial center, with the aid of stephen m. Ross, is a pro-ai, pro-israel donor to miami-dade democratic mayor daniella levine cava and to florida republican governor ron desantis. Rosie cordero-stutz, the sheriff of miami-dade county, came into office off the support of president donald trump via an intervention from carlos gimenez: the former mayor of miami-dade turned republican u.S. Representative who is staunchly anti-communist, anti-iran, and pro-police, sometimes at the expense of his own constituents. Thirteen of the top sixteen donors to miami-dade’s board of commissioners, which along with levine cava govern the county, are tied into big real estate interests which have a lock on big development contracts; and most of the commissioners owe their election to support from the cuban exile community, the majority of whom support the city’s development.
the rhetorical architecture that supports these interests is equally sprawling. In the months after october 7, 2023, around the time angie nixon made her speech for a ceasefire, hialeah, a city just northwest of miami which has the largest population of hispanics in america, hung a giant israeli flag against the city entrance to express its unequivocal support. Almost three years later, in the wake of angie nixon’s primary victory, ron desantis referenced hialeah’s population, many of whom came to the united states from cuba, to indirectly accuse nixon of communism. This is the tenuously connected propaganda scaffolding that angie nixon has set out to dismantle. Her campaign agenda is a mix of traditional leftwing priorities (medicare for all, free childcare for all, anti-militarist, anti-zionist) and laser-targeted emphases on the issues most floridians face each day: rising home and medical insurance premiums as well as rising rents and gas prices. In any imaginatively symbolic sense, her two opponents, first alexander vindman and now u.S. Senator ashley moody, are ideal foils for her project.
vindman, a ukrainian-born jewish zionist, made his career in military intelligence. He first served on the white house national security council and then, famously, “whistleblowing” on the white house in what erupted into the first impeachment of donald trump. What vindman received from this stand was not, as with nixon’s stand for the palestinians, ostracism and accusations. It was positive coverage in mainstream media and from democrats, followed by appearances on an hbo series and the election of his brother eugene, who also functioned as an anti-trump whistleblower, to the u.S. House of representatives from virginia.
he also made money. A ukrainian-american who had played the role of national security council gatekeeper for ukrainian-american relations to the point where he was offered the position of ukrainian minister of defense three times, alexander vindman effectively cashed in on his relationships once he was out of government by setting up a security contracting business focused on ukraine. Eugene vindman, who is a partner in the business, is also a member of the house committees and subcommittees which allot funding for the weapons the vindmans’ security business is paid by ukrainians to maintain. Alexander vindman moved to florida in 2023 and ran a campaign for a senate seat from which he could exercise still more influence over foreign policy, representing a pipeline of illicit military oligarchic influence of exactly the kind that is distorting florida in the first place.
ashley moody, formerly florida’s attorney general, made her career in the era of the governorships of rick scott and ron desantis, which meant supporting corporate growth using subsidies from tallahassee. Interestingly, scott, desantis and moody have all been hoisted on the same political petard: accusations of healthcare fraud or misallocation of health insurance money via nonprofits and corporations tied to political power in tallahassee. But what moody represents more broadly is an exhausted form of republican politics propagated by the desantis administration.
this began in 2020 over blue state overreach on climate and tax regulations, covid lockdowns and forced vaccinations, and lgbtq+ issues. Florida, which under desantis took the opposite stand, seemed a mecca for conservatives and business interests, and growth proceeded accordingly. Moms for liberty, the pro-parent group which worked against progressive indoctrination of their children in schools, got its start in florida. Donald trump relocated there and set up his power base at mar-a-lago in palm beach, from which he ran for a second term. Most of all, billionaires relocated their businesses and homes there en masse. This relocation built on movement since the 2010s, when cities like miami deliberately positioned themselves as destinations for capital by, among other tactics, changing zoning and permit laws to make development easier.
this growth off corporatism is the defining force of contemporary florida, what republicans like moody and democrats like vindman have benefited from together. It has been justified with references to the “free market,” and to some extent this is correct: the state is being deregulated. But on even cursory examination the label doesn’t fully hold, because deregulation is not all that is occurring. Popular politics of the kind that has existed in this country since its inception is also being curtailed. The miami 21 project, the 2009 zoning code overhaul passed by miami’s government to make it a “global city,” encouraged measures “intended to sensitively guide large-scale development…through negotiations between developers and city planners.” In practice it allowed for development without feedback and oversight by giving developers and administrators carte blanche. This was to the benefit of big real estate players who today disproportionally dominate political donations in miami-dade. The 2023 live local act, desantis’s and the florida legislature’s much-hyped effort to encourage affordable home building, was nonetheless stuffed with giveaways to these big developers that allowed them even more routes to bypass communal input like public meetings for new construction.
and it is not just an erosion of representative government that is creating this new normal in florida. The state has spent $573 million on immigration enforcement, “including millions to equip agencies with radios and high-tech cameras,” since 2023 when desantis declared a “state of emergency”: a militarization operation that expands government power and spending at the expense of ordinary citizens. And then there are the state’s variety of cut-outs and incentives for defense operators, the wealthy and corporations passed under republican leadership. These are living examples of thomas eddlem’s critique of republican economic orthodoxy in the libertarian institute last year. “Whenever a subsidy or a tax break for a particular politically-connected company or sector is proposed,” eddlem wrote, “the predictable response from reason, the cato institute, the american enterprise institute, and the heritage foundation is always, essentially, ‘if it lowers taxes, i’m for it.’” Eddlem’s description of what this leads to is also a description of florida:
“this billionaire-funded ideological complex favors the tax breaks even if it only lowers taxes for one politically-favored company and does nothing to lower government spending (implying that taxes, debt or inflation on everyone else must rise). That’s why america and the west are in the situation they’re in, where the billionaires always have the roulette wheel of finance magnetized to favor the house.”
for anyone familiar with florida’s current government, the words “billionaire-funded ideological complex” strike a chord. Politics, already the game of the wealthy and connected in the state, has been locked down in recent years by oligarchs linked to defense, technology, and finance networks in washington, silicon valley, and new york. New south florida arrivals who either bring their residences or their businesses or both include google co-founders larry page and sergey brin; facebook co-founder mark zuckerberg; amazon founder jeff bezos; palantir co-founder peter thiel; jared kushner and ivanka trump; oracle founder larry ellison; and, thanks to lobbying from donald trump, the saudi public investment fund. All of these operators have relied for much of their initial and expanded wealth on government contracts, particularly defense contracts with the united states and israel. Many are intimately tied, as i have reported in the past, to american commercial and military ventures in latin america and the middle east. And, as they have arrived in florida and reshaped it in their image, populist conservative forces have retreated from the state.
the result of the new arrivals in south florida, according to the wall street journal, “is a glittering urban center that is richer, smaller and built to cater to upscale living” where “new establishments catering to a rich clientele crop up regularly” even as “property taxes levied by miami-dade county rose 66% to $3.43 billion in the 2025-26 fiscal year.” On the street in south florida, especially miami, the signs of this change are everywhere. Helicopters have become common sights as helipads have become the new “amenity” for the ultra-wealthy to avoid traffic. In brickell, the city’s financial center, and in coral gables, a city southwest of downtown miami which has been a heart of wealthy cuban exile life, it is increasingly hard to find a small business and increasingly easy to find a high-end steakhouse chain or boutique four-star restaurant: fleming’s, capital grille, morton’s, baires, perry’s, ruth’s chris, nsur-et, claudie, salty flame. Targets and chases have replaced cuban grocers and community banks. The few bars and restaurants in coral gables that have survived the area’s chain-ificiation play jazz music and show old movies as couples mingle outside bathed in blue or yellow lights from the closed offices of chase bank or the saudi-backed fifa. This is not a booming free market. It is a market skewed by government-backed oligarchs and corporations riding a pool of mounting public debt off war and domestic spending.
the ultimate result has been that florida republicans have, in essence, begun to kill their own values: stability, family, the house with the white picket fence. I cannot count the number of times that i have heard miami republicans my age bemoan the fact that they would perhaps never be able to afford a home. Here is a comment i heard more than once: “the only way this will stop is destruction like hurricane andrew, or if we close down the city.”
this mutilation of the republican base by elected republicans has lately accelerated, sometimes in almost absurdly symbolic ways. This summer, news broke that calle ocho, the heart of cuban miami which houses the memorial to the bay of pigs, has come under developers’ thumbs despite outcry from residents; and that the oldest church in miami, in brickell, may share its land with a high rise. News also broke this summer that the craze for luxury building by oligarchs may cost the city the existence of the fuel yard which supplies its port: a gateway to latin america which ensures the existence of businesses across the city.
destruction of local communities, organized religion, and commercial lifelines by oligarchy is not many florida conservatives signed up for when they voted “r.” The same night that angie nixon beat alexander vindman 56.1-43.9% in the democratic primary, james fishback, an upstart candidate in florida’s republican gubernatorial primary, lost with just 10.5% but overperformed with under-30 voters. Fishback, like nixon, ran against investment in israel. He also ran against data centers, and for a one-time $10,000 home ownership loan to young couples looking to buy.
on the one hand, fishback’s successes and angie nixon’s are not comparable. Nixon won her primary decisively because she harnessed the issues that florida voters care about to her own unique political practice and persona. She showed up at any event, no matter how big or small. She courted young voters via the democratic socialists, becoming a dsa member in june 2026. And she mobilized the black community and unions using ties built from a lifetime of advocacy on their behalf. She is, win or lose in november, a political phenomenon. But part of nixon’s success does translate to other candidates. Fishback, nixon, and the cohort of allied democratic socialists or progressives running against u.S. House democrats who support foreign wars and are funded by oligarchs all appealed successfully to young voters de facto disenfranchised by florida’s current regime.
but the nixon campaign, a project of unions, black democrats, young people, and democratic socialists, is not only pitching itself as addressing glaring “bread-and-butter” problems which no other campaign will. It is also attracting people of the class that is benefiting from the boom. These are the prosperous small businesspeople and highly skilled professionals and even corporate denizens who were once the bedrocks of classical liberal societies, who are seeing a rise in demand for their services and the value of their houses thanks to the influx of monied outsiders into florida. By supporting nixon, they are putting their and their society’s long-term interest in front of immediate personal gain. They are also functioning as walking rebuttals to karl marx’s view that serving monopolist capital is the imperative of the upper levels of the petite bourgeoisie.
at the fundraiser in the palestinian restaurant that friday late afternoon in mid-august there were a number of these people in evidence. They included a quartet of white consultants and financial planners; a pakistani real estate agent whose son works at one of the big five defense contractors; and an older, well-dressed man named khalid mirza, the founder and president of a community care clinic now also investing in a startup nonprofit media organization, on-point media & outreach.
after angie nixon and rashida tlaib took the floor, mirza, the fundraiser’s cohost, stood up to speak. He talked about driving through fort lauderdale the past few years as homeless people began appearing and congregating under bridges. He talked about the unholy trinity of outsourcing, rising medical costs, and rising prices he saw as driving the trend. He talked about what it meant about us as a society that we’d allow this to happen. Here was a language of practical responsibility articulated in a state where the raw power of military oligarchy is masked with hollow paeans to “personal responsibility” and “traditional values.” Here were words from a person in a position to benefit from the military oligarchic boom who was instead reckoning with its cost. Here was a perspective that makes it seem like several recent polls in the nixon-moody race are not necessarily outliers—that, for better or worse and thanks to the perversion of corporatism in florida at republican hands, a democratic socialist may channel the concerns of those people to a november victory. |
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| Early Decision and the Limits of Competition |
| Posted on Wednesday, October 07 @ 00:02:19 PDT (9 reads) | |
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Opinion
early decision and the limits of competition
managing opinion editor lucas silva ‘28 dissects the antitrust lawsuit challenging early decision admissions at amherst and peer institutions, arguing that a decades-old system may also suppress competition for students by limiting their ability to negotiate financial aid.
for many high school seniors, the grueling college search ends in december. That is because over the past few years, a stable number of these students, roughly 201 per year, have been accepted to amherst college through the early decision (ed) process. The baseline represents a give-or-take 40% of each enrolled class. Across similar prestigious institutions, the number is even larger. Middlebury college, brown university, dartmouth college, and bowdoin college all regularly fill more than 50% of their class with ed students, sometimes reaching 60% (middlebury employs two rounds of ed, appropriately named ed i and ed ii). Our sibling institutions, williams college, smith college, and mount holyoke college, admit a similar number of their enrolled classes as amherst.
colleges admit students in the ed process for many reasons, including fielding varsity teams (of which we have 27), protecting the college’s yield rate, building a predictable class roster, and, as the united states district court of massachusetts recently chose to adjudicate, financial aid.
in august 2025, four students sued 32 of the country’s most selective private colleges, including amherst, along with the common application inc. And scoir inc. Their case, d’amico v. Consortium on financing higher education, claims that the current affairs of ed among these schools create an antitrust market in which, if admitted to a school, a student is not only bound to attend it but also cannot be sought after by other colleges. D’amico asserts that the tactic prevents families from bargaining for financial aid allocations by playing one college’s offer against another’s. On aug. 7, 2026, judge angel kelley rejected the defendant’s motion to dismiss and let the case go forward.
this piece is solely an attempt to break down the arguments from both sides as fairly as i can, and not to determine wrongdoing by amherst or any of the colleges sued.
the plaintiff, the defendant, and the class action
there are four plaintiffs who initiated the civil lawsuit: alayna d’amico (wesleyan university), max miller (washington university in st. Louis), bella robinson (vassar college), and bram silbert (wesleyan). D’amico, silbert, and robinson all enrolled through ed, wherein the first two paid full tuition throughout their time at college, and the latter paid part of the full cost of attendance. Miller enrolled through washu’s regular decision (rd) process, paying the full cost of attendance. According to the formal complaint, all plaintiffs enrolled through ed “received an offer of admission that was presented as binding.”
the complaint, the legal document a plaintiff files to officially start a civil lawsuit and demand a response from the defendant, requests a “class action.” The class definition exists because the plaintiffs are suing on behalf of a group. The size of the group determines whether the judge proceeds with the motion because, realistically, no courthouse can run trials involving thousands of people. It is the plaintiff’s responsibility, however, to define the scope of who is considered a member of the class. This occurs through four tenets. (1) numerosity: too many plaintiffs to sue individually. They allege “at least tens of thousands of members.” (2) commonality: shared questions of law or fact. They list five, including whether the conspiracy existed and “[t]he appropriate measure of class-wide damages.” (3) & (4) typicality and adequacy: the plaintiffs’ claims resemble other people’s, and they and their lawyers will appropriately represent the class.
to be considered a member of the class, you must have paid some tuition out of pocket, and you must fall into one of two groups: students admitted early who received partial grant aid, or students admitted through any round who received no grant aid at all.
the complaint
the introduction of the complaint situates the defendant schools as arbiters of a “critical role in the american higher education landscape,” having presently or in the past perpetuated “practices that entrench patterns of inequality of access while inflating the price of attendance.” The selection of 32 names to be sued comes due to their participation in the consortium on financing higher education (cofhe), whose purpose was to encourage info-sharing among members regarding, with respect to this case, admissions of students. The consortium shut down on dec. 31, 2025, after 50 years. Its website did not say why. The complaint also included the common app and scoir because they would be committed to the manufacturing and policing of the conspiracy, an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act or achieve a legal goal through illegal means.
we should start by clarifying that ed is not legally enforceable in any way. “While the early decision agreement is presented in a form that resembles a contract, an applicant’s commitment is not actually legally binding.” Admission administrators, of course, are aware of this. A former official at the national admissions counseling association called it an “honor-bound agreement” that “doesn’t have any legal standing.” No college has ever sued a student for backing out. After all, many applicants sign these agreements at 17, an age at which you cannot enter a binding contract anyway.
it certainly looks binding, though. Allegedly, the defendants intentionally portray ed as such. As argued by the plaintiffs, the common app and coalition websites frame your decision to apply to a school through ed as a binding plan, requiring your legal name, exactly as it appears on official documents. Further stating on the common app: “‘if the student is accepted under an early decision plan, the student must [emphasis added] promptly withdraw the applications submitted to other colleges and universities and make no additional applications to any other university in any country.’” Any country! Despite the different jurisdictions in these countries. A similarly worded requirement is present on coalition. A court’s authority stops at its own borders, and a university in canada or the u.K. Never signed the agreement in the first place. To hold a student to this promise abroad, an american college would need comity, the courtesy by which one country’s courts choose to honor another’s legal obligations, for a pledge that is not a legal obligation at home.
there is, however, an exception: financial aid. Students are allowed to withdraw their application if their financial plan is too much of a burden. For any other reason, per the director of admissions at williams, richard nesbitt, “[i]t would be a big ethical issue.” They were precise with the phrasing, as the nacac’s “guide to ethical practice in college admission” advises its members to “educate students and families of their ethical responsibilities in the admission process.” Industry insiders go as far as saying that students go through with their decision because the consequences of backing out are just too great.
the question then is, if nobody can sue you, what makes students agree to conditions they are unhappy with?
their answer is that the other colleges do. The complaint alleges that schools “regularly share lists of students admitted in the [ed] cycle in order to coordinate their allocation of applicants.” When a school receives such a list, it “routinely remove[s] those students from their own application processes.” Vanderbilt’s current general counsel, ruby shellaway, described the mechanism in her 2006 yale law journal article, when she was a law student: “once a school admits a student under ed, it notifies the student, and also sends a list of the students it has admitted ed to all of its competitor schools.” In her words, too, the agreement is “an illegal customer allocation and horizontal restraint of trade,” as the admitted student “cannot make a credible threat to go elsewhere, because his name has already been removed from other schools’ applicant pools.” She continued: “just as it is illegal to act in combination with competitors to set different prices for different customers, it is also illegal for competitors to grant each other exclusive access to certain customers.”
our own dean said it too. In 2016, amherst’s then-dean of admissions and financial aid, katharine fretwell, told the u.S. News that the college and about 30 others shared lists of students admitted through early decision.
so, from there, the student has no competing aid offer and no prospect of one. Georgetown university’s admissions dean, whose school does not use ed, describes what this does to a budget: early decision is “a programmatic way of rationing your financial aid,” because the early pool is wealthier and because “there is absolutely no need to compete on financial packages”. This raises tuition and lessens aid for those students.
the argument against
the colleges did not answer the complaint, but tried to bury it. The defendant made four arguments: this court cannot hear the case, these students cannot bring it, two of them waited too long, and there is no conspiracy.
first, twenty out-of-state colleges and scoir argued that a boston court does not have jurisdiction over them because they do not do enough business in massachusetts. Pomona college, for example, only has 2.3% of its students from massachusetts. Amherst, of course, sat this one out.
second, standing. To sue under antitrust law, a plaintiff must have “suffered an injury of the kind antitrust laws were intended to prevent,” and the colleges argued these four students haven’t.
third, antitrust claims generally expire after four years after the injury, and d’amico and silbert applied to wesleyan in 2018. For this, the defendant relied on a case against brown where a student’s claim over a denied scholarship was thrown out as the plaintiff sued too late.
lastly, the defense argued that the plaintiffs had described an agreement between the student and the school, not an agreement among colleges. At an oral argument in may, doug litvack (representing dartmouth college and rice university) told the court there was “no factual agreement among any schools not to compete for students after they are admitted early decision.” It is “totally voluntary” and “just a promise to attend.”
students withdraw their application; no college does it for them. Aid applicants don’t have to withdraw anything until their package arrives; and the coalition and common app agreement explicitly states that, if the financial aid offered is too much of a burden for the family, you “may decline the offer of admission and be released from the early decision commitment”). Ed here is just a plain old option among several. Want flexibility? Apply rd or early action (ea).
it is important to say that the plaintiffs anticipated this and argued that these are “vague and subjective standards that imply it would be invoked only rarely.” It is still, however, the plaintiff’s responsibility to produce evidence that rules out this explanation.
finally, there is also a more straightforward story: admitting a student who has already been admitted elsewhere is usually a wasted offer and drags your yield. The student’s counselor signed the same ed agreement, and they send you students every year. Poach one committed student, and you damage a relationship worth far more than the one you have with the student. Each college, reasoning alone and independently, arrives at the same policy. Antitrust law calls this conscious parallelism, and it is not illegal.
what the judge thinks
on aug. 7, 2026, judge angel kelley issued two rulings. She denied the college’s motion to dismiss but granted the platforms’ and the consortium’s. In the second, she kept the out-of-state colleges in boston.
this means that, at this point, the court accepts everything in the complaint as true and asks whether there is enough evidence to substantiate the claim: “the question at the pleading stage is not whether there is a plausible alternative to the plaintiffs theory; the question is whether there are sufficient factual allegations to make the complaints claim plausible.” No one has found that amherst has done anything wrong. At this stage, the school is just required to hand over internal documents for investigation.
judge kelley reached six conclusions:
- on jurisdiction, what matters, she wrote, is “the total volume of business in a forum, rather than the proportion.” Thus, a family paying a fortune for tuition is as substantial as any other business.
- the plaintiffs lost bargaining power. Once admitted ed, a student “cannot make a credible threat to go elsewhere.” Whether the damages are speculative and whether they can be divided among the class is another story.
- on timing, she sides with d’amico and silbert. The brown case did not apply because the injury comes from paying tuition over and over, not a scholarship provided once. “[E]ach semester where the school defendants collect tuition and fees at inflated prices, a new antitrust injury occurs.”
- there is no conscious pluralism. For such a concept to be in place, there must be motive, action against self-interest, and evidence of an agreement. There is direct evidence of an agreement in the ivy league joint statement. Only five defendants are ivies, but that didn’t matter because “[d]irect evidence that some defendants entered into the agreement, combined with the fact that the remaining defendants engaged in conduct closely conforming to that of those who had joined, supports the inference that all defendants were parties to the agreement.” The colleges plausibly acted against their interests, which hints at coordination: “it is reasonable to infer that a school acting in its own interest has no rational, self-contained reason to walk away from highly qualified students who happen to be admitted to another school.”
- she declined to opine whether ed is a good practice.
aftermath
i believe there are two claims on the table with differing strengths. The first one states that colleges coordinate with each other. With publicly available documents and admissions and a defense that has not yet explained why the exchange is necessary, i anticipate that this stands.
their second claim is that this coordination inflates tuition. The complaints’ correlation is too weak. There must be an expert model separating one admissions practice from everything else, driving costs across 32 schools with different aid policies.
how much do these claims apply to us? In some cases, the claims apply to us directly because the 2016 statement is in the complaint and the judge’s ruling. We were also among the colleges that received letters from the justice department in april 2018, when the antitrust division asked schools to preserve communications about sharing the identities of early admits. Amherst confirmed it received the letter and said it was cooperating fully. However, amherst is need-blind, meets full demonstrated need, awards no merit aid, and includes no loans. If we do not offer aid through a table-sat negotiation, wrongdoing will be harder to locate.
ultimately, it would be irresponsible not to consider who this lawsuit is helping. At a college like ours and the ones involved, which, by definition, are only included because of their elite status, have come to rely on ed to secure full-paying students, and they will have to find another way.
it is important to reflect on the demographics behind ed. Amherst’s own former dean of admissions and financial aid, tom parker, said in 2001 that “[t]he whole early-decision thing is so preposterous, transparent, and demeaning to the profession that it is bound to go bust.” The plaintiff’s reply is deserved: “though dean parker was right about early decision’s merits, he was wrong about its staying power.” Under parker, the college held ed admits to roughly 30%. We are now well above that. |
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| Ohio launches $18 million scholarship push to grow behavioral health workforce |
| Posted on Wednesday, October 07 @ 00:02:19 PDT (8 reads) | |
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Ohio is preparing to pour $18 million into one of the most ambitious workforce experiments in its history of mental health care, and the university of cincinnati sits at the center of it. The ohio department of behavioral health and the ohio department of higher education have jointly launched the ohio behavioral health scholarship program, a statewide initiative designed to flood high-need communities with newly trained clinicians by removing the single greatest barrier standing between graduate students and careers in public service: educational debt. The program will distribute scholarships to graduate students pursuing behavioral health degrees at the university of cincinnati and 17 other ohio colleges and universities, with the explicit goal of keeping those graduates in the state after they earn their licenses.
the scale of ohio’s shortage of licensed behavioral health providers is difficult to overstate, particularly in rural and low-income communities. Residents in these areas may wait months for an appointment, travel long distances to reach a clinician, or go without care entirely during a crisis. The scholarship program is engineered to close that gap not simply by training more clinicians, but by training and retaining clinicians who are committed to working where the need is greatest. Every student who accepts a scholarship must sign a binding service agreement committing to work in an eligible underserved ohio community for a period equal to the number of years they receive scholarship support. It is a model borrowed, in spirit, from loan-forgiveness frameworks in medicine, but applied here at the graduate level and targeted specifically at mental health and substance use treatment.
the qualifying employment settings read like a map of ohio’s safety net. Scholars may fulfill their commitment at community behavioral health centers, federally qualified health centers, school-based health clinics, and child advocacy centers. They may also serve at behavioral health providers participating in ohiorise, a specialized managed care program for youth with complex behavioral health and multisystem needs, or at nonprofit providers where medicaid is the primary payer. By anchoring the service requirement to these settings, the state is directing its investment toward children, youth, and underserved populations — the groups most likely to fall through the cracks when the clinical workforce thins out.
at the university of cincinnati, the program is a deliberate collaboration across three disciplines: social work, mental health counseling, and clinical psychology. The university will receive approximately $1.2 million in scholarship funding, and eligible graduate students may receive full in-state tuition coverage for fall 2026. Notably, tuition may be reimbursed retroactively after a student is accepted into the scholarship program, a provision that could deliver immediate financial relief to students who have already paid for the current term. Scholarships may also be eligible for renewal in spring 2027, fall 2027, and spring 2028, giving students a multi-year funding runway through the completion of their degrees.
the tuition scholarships are only part of the financial architecture. An additional $2.5 million is available through an independent agreement with health impact ohio to fund $4,000 internship stipends paid directly to students during their field placements. Field placements — the supervised clinical practicums that graduate trainees must complete before licensure — are typically unpaid or minimally paid, forcing many students to work outside jobs while accumulating clinical hours. Direct stipends during placements remove one more economic obstacle between students and clinical training, and they signal that the state views the practicum year as work of genuine public value rather than a rite of passage to be endured.
for program leadership at uc, the timing is not incidental. Dana harley, phd, project director for the obhs program at uc, professor and master of social work program director, pointed to the changing federal landscape of graduate financing. Providing these scholarships will reduce the educational debt of students, she said, which is extremely important at a time when federal graduate student loans have been limited due to legislative changes. The remark underscores a structural tension in the behavioral health pipeline: clinical careers in community settings rarely pay enough to service heavy graduate debt, and when federal borrowing becomes less available, students from modest backgrounds may be priced out of the professions entirely. Scholarships that erase tuition, paired with placement stipends, are a direct countermeasure. We are delighted to train these future clinicians to provide services to some of the most vulnerable populations in ohio, harley said.
eligibility is defined tightly. Accelerated, full-time, and part-time graduate students who are currently enrolled qualify, but incoming students do not — a design choice that channels the first wave of funding to students already embedded in ohio’s training programs and closest to entering the workforce. Three uc programs are included. The master of social work in the college of allied health sciences integrates classroom learning with a field practicum, building clinical skills in assessment, intervention, and case management, and prepares graduates to pursue licensure as licensed social workers and licensed independent social workers in ohio. The master of arts in mental health counseling, housed in the college of education, criminal justice, human services and information technology, trains students to provide individual, group, and family counseling across a range of mental health and substance use concerns, grounded in culturally responsive, evidence-based practice, with supervised clinical practica that lead toward licensure as licensed professional counselors.
the third uc pathway is the doctorate in clinical psychology in the college of arts & sciences, which offers rigorous training in psychological assessment, evidence-based intervention, and applied research. Doctoral students complete supervised clinical hours across a range of populations and settings, culminating in an american psychological association-accredited internship before graduation, and emerge prepared for licensure as psychologists and for careers spanning clinical practice and academic research. Amanda la guardia, phd, professor and counseling program coordinator, noted that the clinical counseling program in the school of human services has a consistent record of interprofessional collaboration across campus, resulting in supportive grant funding for students as they study to become professional counselors throughout ohio. That cross-campus coordination — social work, counseling, and psychology drawing on a single pool of state scholarship dollars — is itself a technical achievement, requiring aligned eligibility criteria, coordinated advising, and shared reporting to state agencies.
the application process is deliberately simple in structure. Current graduate students interested in the scholarship apply through their respective programs, and the application includes a personal statement explaining why the student is interested in working with ohio populations from disadvantaged backgrounds. That requirement does more than filter for commitment; it frames the entire program around a question of vocation. The state is not merely buying clinical labor with tuition dollars — it is identifying students whose professional identities are already oriented toward underserved communities and removing the financial friction that might otherwise push them toward higher-paying private practice. If the model works, the returns compound: each scholarship year purchased is a service year delivered in a community behavioral health center, a school-based clinic, or a child advocacy center, precisely where ohio’s shortage is sharpest. For a state confronting a behavioral health crisis with a thinning clinical workforce, the $18 million wager is that the fastest route to more care is not more buildings or more programs, but more people — trained, licensed, and rooted in the communities that need them most.
subject of research: a statewide ohio scholarship program to expand and retain the behavioral health clinical workforce
article title: university of cincinnati part of $18 million statewide initiative to expand behavioral health workforce
article references: university of cincinnati part of $18 million statewide initiative to expand behavioral health workforce. (N.D.). Original publication
image credits: ai generated
doi: not provided
keywords: behavioral health, workforce development, ohio behavioral health scholarship, university of cincinnati, mental health workforce shortage, social work, mental health counseling, clinical psychology, graduate scholarships, underserved communities, substance use treatment, ohiorise
cite scienmag news
glenn wilkins. (October 7, 2026). Ohio launches $18 million scholarship push to grow behavioral health workforce. Scienmag. Https://scienmag.Com/ohio-launches-18-million-scholarship-push-to-grow-behavioral-health-workforce/
glenn wilkins. Ohio launches $18 million scholarship push to grow behavioral health workforce. Scienmag, 7 october 2026, https://scienmag.Com/ohio-launches-18-million-scholarship-push-to-grow-behavioral-health-workforce/. Accessed 7 october 2026.
glenn wilkins. Ohio launches $18 million scholarship push to grow behavioral health workforce. Scienmag. October 7, 2026. Https://scienmag.Com/ohio-launches-18-million-scholarship-push-to-grow-behavioral-health-workforce/ |
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| Suffolk students reflect on the affordability of higher education - The Suffolk |
| Posted on Wednesday, October 07 @ 00:02:19 PDT (10 reads) | |
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College students from all socioeconomic backgrounds are struggling to afford college and additional expenses that come with it. With changes in the amounts of loans students are able to take out and more families struggling to keep up with rising costs, an increasing number of college students are struggling to afford things of all sorts.
suffolk university students shared these concerns, with many expressing their struggles to understand why things are so expensive and saying that representation both at the university and state level don’t understand the things college students need.
“it’s not necessarily about affording college for me,” said a student from the college of arts and sciences. “I value my education and i will always figure out a way. It’s more about the everyday experiences that make up the lives of college students. The fun things and also the basic things, like buying shampoo, or laundry detergent. A huge part of living in this city is all the things to do, but it feels like the opportunities to do so are limited by my need to pay for so many other things. I wish the city was more accessible to struggling students.”
other students said they believed the university could do more to make students aware of services they offer to help with this. Some said that suffolk is taking great steps with resources like the suffolk cares pantry, which is located on the sixth floor of 73 tremont, which helps provide food and other essential products to students who are struggling to afford them.
“suffolk is doing a great job with the things they’re already providing, but i believe they could always do more,” said caycee mathis, a freshman political science major.
mathis and other students, including jay parshay, a freshmen business economics major, also expressed that they believe representatives both at the university and the state level don’t understand what affordability means to college students now.
“a lot of older board members experienced a different college experience than a lot of the students now when it comes to affordability and when it comes to the inflation that we’ve seen over the past 40 years,” said parshay. “I think younger representation is required for us to start making real progress.”
a student from the college of arts and sciences described affordability as being able to afford college, as well as the other, more ordinary everyday things that come with being a college student.
“i want to be able to have fun, and enjoy my free time, since i have to work to be able to afford school, and it feels a little bit like i’m just scraping by,” said the student from the cas.
however, suffolk students aren’t the only ones that have expressed concerns about affordability.
according to survey results from trellis strategies fall 2025 student financial wellness survey, many respondents said they had experienced some kind of needs-based insecurity. These insecurities disproportionately affected students of color, first generation students and students who came from foster care.
fifty-four percent of respondents said that they would struggle to access $500 for an unanticipated expense and 65% of respondents said they had run out of money at least once since the start of the year.
this directly ties in with what students at suffolk have said about their feelings around affordability. Many students expressed that one small expense such as a small medical bill or a flat tire could greatly impact their financial abilities.
students expressed concerns about the new federal loan limits enacted by the trump administration via the one big beautiful bill act.
obbba limits the parent plus loans to $20,000 per year per dependent student, with an overall aggregate rate of $65,000 limit for dependent students. The graduate plus loan will also be limited, with the aggregate cap being $100,000 for graduate students and $200,000 for students who pursue what are now considered professional degrees.
an article by the national association of student financial aid administers delved into why the federal government chose to limit student loans. Scholars mentioned in the article claim it is meant to protect students and taxpayers. The law also creates a lifetime loan limit of $257,000 on all federal loans, excluding parent plus loan amounts.
for students that don’t receive help to pay for college, these loan limits can feel crushing.
“it feels like it’s hard to get ahead, with everything getting so expensive and feeling so limited, i am struggling to keep up,” said a sophomore from the sawyer business school.
another student expressed having to pay out of pocket, since they did not have anyone with the ability to co-sign on private loans.
“it’s hard to focus all of my attention on school when i’m so worried about how i am even affording it,” said a freshman in the cas.
as prices continue to rise, americans have felt the crushing weight of everyday expenses. Cbs reported the consumer price index hit a 40 year high of 9.1%. The affordability crisis in america spans across generations, as people from all walks of life struggle to afford everyday expenses like healthy food or hygiene products.
suffolk students and people across the country expressed the growing prices of everyday items makes it even harder to get ahead. Students aren’t alone in the belief that the government could be doing more to make sure that people can afford to pay for what they need. |
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| Block leads Foulkes in campaign cash for RI gov race; Guckian down to $7,000 |
| Posted on Wednesday, October 07 @ 00:02:19 PDT (8 reads) | |
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Providence, r.I. (Wpri) -- independent ken block has the most money of rhode islands three major gubernatorial candidates heading into the final month of the campaign, with democrat helena foulkes close behind and republican aaron guckian almost out of cash.
r.I. Board of elections reports due tuesday night showed block with $263,000 in his account as of monday, partly due to $190,000 in personal loans he made to his campaign during september. Block also raised $63,000 and spent $80,000 from july 1 to oct. 5.
foulkes had $214,000 in her account as of monday, as she works to replenish her campaign coffers after spending over $5 million this year to defeat incumbent gov. Dan mckee. Foulkes raised $381,000 and spent $545,000 during the shorter window covered by her report, from sept. 2 to oct. 5.
advertisement advertisement advertisement advertisement guckian reported a bit more than $7,000 in his account as of monday, after raising about that much and spending roughly $12,000 from sept. 2 to oct. 5. No gop nominee this century has reported so little money with four weeks left before the general election; the previous low was don carcieri in 2002, but he had far more -- $241,000 -- even before adjusting for inflation.
the financial gap between the democratic and republican tickets looks even wider when their party finances are taken into account.
the r.I. Democratic party reported $314,000 in its state account as of monday, after taking in over $200,000 during the prior month. The partys donations included $10,000 checks from prominent figures such as former cvs ceo tom ryan and former citizens financial ceo terry murray.
the r.I. Republican party reported only $22,000 in its account, taking in less than $6,000 over the same period. The democrats also had a 9-to-1 cash advantage over the republicans in their respective federal accounts as of their latest reports.
advertisement advertisement the new finance filings arrive amid signs that democratic party insiders have quickly consolidated support behind foulkes in the wake of her bitter primary fight against mckee. She defeated the governor by a margin of 62% to 38% on sept. 9, winning all 39 cities and towns.
liz beretta-perik, the state democratic party chair, organized a unity event on tuesday evening that was attended by all of the nominees for major offices. Earlier in the day, a long list of democratic members of the general assembly issued a joint statement in support of foulkes that expressed concern about blocks comments regarding abortion rights during a candidate forum last week.
labor unions, which split between mckee and foulkes in the primary, are also falling in line behind the former cvs executive.
the rhode island afl-cio, which stayed neutral in the primary, announced its endorsement of foulkes at a meeting on tuesday evening after hearing from all three major gubernatorial candidates.
advertisement advertisement rhode island is a labor state, and we look forward to working with helena and her team to ensure the goals and values of organized labor are heard loud and clear, afl-cio president patrick crowley said in a statement.
michael sabitoni, president of the rhode island building and construction trades council, separately announced tuesday that his member unions were throwing their support behind foulkes in the general election after backing mckee in the primary.
so far, foulkes is also the only gubernatorial candidate who is receiving outside support. The democratic governors association last week deposited $500,000 with an affiliated group in rhode island to support her campaign, according to a board of elections filing.
block and his supporters have been upping the pressure on guckian to end his campaign, arguing that foulkes is only vulnerable in a one-on-one matchup. The independent candidate recently commissioned a poll that showed foulkes ahead by double-digits in a split field, but block leading if guckian is out of the race.
advertisement advertisement all three candidates have agreed to participate in a live televised debate hosted by 12 news that will air tuesday, oct. 20, at 7 p.M. On wpri 12 from rhode island college. The three candidates are slated to take part in their first televised debate on wednesday.
democrats led in fundraising in all three contested races for rhode islands other general offices. The closest contest is lieutenant governor, where incumbent democrat sabina matos reported $43,000 on hand as of monday, while republican challenger john loughlin reported $22,000.
early voting begins next wednesday, oct. 14. The general election is nov. 3.
ted nesi ( tnesi@wpri.Com ) is a target 12 investigative reporter and 12 news politics/business editor. He co-hosts newsmakers and writes nesis notes on saturdays. Connect with him on facebook , instagram , x/twitter , bluesky and linkedin .
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copyright 2026 nexstar media, inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to wpri.Com. |
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| This Game-Changing Bill Could Completely Transform Your Kids Financial Future - |
| Posted on Wednesday, October 07 @ 00:02:19 PDT (9 reads) | |
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This game-changing bill could completely transform your kids’ financial future
for years, parents have wrestled with the ‘what if’ question surrounding 529 college savings plans: what if my child doesn’t go to college? Or what if they get a scholarship and there’s money left over? Until recently, those leftover funds often presented a thorny problem, potentially leading to taxes and penalties. Then came the secure 2.0 act, a true lifeline that introduced the ability to roll unused 529 funds into a roth ira for the beneficiary. It was a groundbreaking shift, offering much-needed flexibility, but it came with a significant caveat: a $35,000 lifetime cap. Now, imagine if that cap disappeared entirely. That’s precisely what a new bipartisan bill, the 529 retirement enhancement act of 2026 (s. 5550), aims to do, and it could be a complete game-changer for how families approach both education and retirement planning.
this proposed legislation, introduced by senators ted cruz (r-tx) and lisa blunt rochester (d-de), is generating considerable buzz among financial advisors and parents alike. If enacted, it promises to remove the current $35,000 lifetime limit on a 529 plan rollover to a roth ira, opening up a world of new possibilities for families who’ve diligently saved for college. This isn’t just about avoiding penalties; it’s about leveraging a powerful tax-advantaged savings vehicle for a child’s long-term financial security, transforming potential ‘excess’ into a significant head start on retirement. Let’s dig into what this bill means, how it fits into the broader landscape of 529 plan evolution, and why it’s such a crucial development for anyone thinking about their children’s financial future.
the current landscape: understanding the $35,000 529-to-roth ira rollover cap
before we look ahead, it’s essential to understand where we stand right now. The ability to roll over unused 529 funds into a roth ira is a relatively new development, born from the secure 2.0 act. Prior to this legislation, if you had money left in a 529 plan after your child completed their education – or decided not to pursue higher education – your options were fairly limited and often less than ideal. You could change the beneficiary to another qualified family member, save it for future generations, or withdraw the money, which would typically subject the earnings portion to income tax and a 10% penalty if not used for qualified educational expenses. It was a real source of anxiety for many parents, who often worried about over-contributing.
the secure 2.0 act, which became law in late 2022, provided a much-welcomed solution. It introduced the provision allowing a 529 plan rollover directly into a roth ira for the beneficiary, tax and penalty-free. This was a monumental shift, offering a clear path to repurpose those funds for a child’s retirement, rather than facing punitive withdrawals. However, this new flexibility came with specific rules. First, the 529 account must have been open for at least 15 years. Second, the rollover is subject to the annual roth ira contribution limits, which means you can’t just move all the money at once. For instance, in 2026, the annual roth ira contribution limit is projected to be around $7,500 (this number adjusts annually). Third, the beneficiary must have earned income at least equal to the amount being rolled over in that calendar year. And finally, there’s the lifetime limit: a maximum of $35,000 can be rolled over during the beneficiary’s lifetime. While a significant improvement, that cap still leaves many families with substantial balances wondering what to do with the rest.
the proposed change: eliminating the lifetime cap
enter the 529 retirement enhancement act of 2026 (s. 5550). This bill directly addresses that $35,000 lifetime cap, proposing its complete elimination. If this legislation passes and becomes effective in 2026, as intended, it would allow for rollovers beyond the current limit starting in 2027. This isn’t just a minor tweak; it’s a fundamental change that could drastically alter the strategic thinking around 529 plans. Imagine having $50,000, $75,000, or even more, in leftover 529 funds. Under the current rules, much of that would still be trapped or subject to taxes and penalties. With the cap removed, that entire amount, assuming all other conditions are met (15-year account age, annual roth ira limits, and earned income), could eventually make its way into a roth ira, growing tax-free for decades.
this move would effectively supercharge the ‘backup plan’ for 529 accounts. It would give parents and beneficiaries unprecedented peace of mind, knowing that every dollar saved, even if not used for education, can contribute to a robust retirement nest egg. It aligns with a broader philosophy of encouraging long-term savings and providing flexible pathways for financial growth. For many families, particularly those who have been aggressive savers or whose children receive substantial scholarships, this change transforms a potential headache into a powerful financial advantage. It also simplifies decision-making, removing the pressure to perfectly predict future educational costs or risk leaving a large portion of funds stranded. (See: 529 retirement enhancement act of 2026.)
why this bipartisan bill matters so much to parents
the bipartisan nature of the 529 retirement enhancement act, spearheaded by senators ted cruz (r-tx) and lisa blunt rochester (d-de), signals a broad recognition of the need for this flexibility. It’s not a niche issue; it addresses a common concern for millions of families across the country. For parents, this bill offers several profound benefits. First and foremost, it reduces the anxiety associated with over-saving in a 529 plan. Historically, the fear of having ‘too much’ money in a 529 was real, because unused funds could be a burden. This bill alleviates that fear, encouraging more aggressive saving for education, knowing there’s a valuable, tax-advantaged escape hatch for any surplus. For more context, see this one bill could drastically reshape custody battles for millions of parents.
secondly, it provides an incredible head start on retirement savings for children. A roth ira, with its tax-free growth and tax-free withdrawals in retirement, is one of the most powerful wealth-building tools available. By allowing a more substantial 529 plan rollover, parents can essentially gift their children a significant, early boost to their retirement accounts, leveraging years, even decades, of compound growth. Imagine a 22-year-old starting their career with a roth ira already containing a substantial balance from their unused college savings. That’s a financial leg-up that could literally mean hundreds of thousands of dollars more in retirement compared to someone starting from scratch later in life.
finally, it enhances the overall attractiveness and utility of 529 plans. These plans are already excellent for education savings, but this proposed change makes them even more versatile and appealing. It cements their position as a premier savings vehicle, not just for college, but for a broader range of future financial goals, including retirement. This added flexibility simplifies financial planning and offers a more robust solution for families navigating the complex landscape of education costs and long-term financial security.
understanding the mechanics: how a 529 plan rollover works (and will work)
while the proposed bill aims to remove the lifetime cap, it’s crucial to remember that other core requirements for a 529 plan rollover to a roth ira are expected to remain in place. Understanding these mechanics is key to effectively utilizing this powerful option. Firstly, the 529 account must have been established for at least 15 years. This rule is designed to prevent individuals from funneling large sums into a 529 plan specifically to bypass roth ira contribution limits shortly before retirement. It ensures the funds were genuinely intended for educational purposes over a significant period.
secondly, the rollover is still subject to the annual roth ira contribution limits. This means you can’t transfer a $50,000 surplus all at once. For example, if the annual limit is $7,500 in 2027, you could only roll over up to that amount in that year, even if the lifetime cap is gone. This process would need to be repeated over several years until the desired amount is transferred. This staggered approach is important for planning purposes. Finally, and critically, the beneficiary must have earned income at least equal to the amount being rolled over in that tax year. If your child earns $10,000 in a year, they could roll over up to $7,500 (the annual limit) into their roth ira, provided the 529 account meets the 15-year rule. If they only earn $5,000, they could only roll over $5,000 for that year, even if they have more available and the annual limit is higher.
these remaining rules ensure that the 529 plan rollover retains its integrity as a legitimate savings mechanism while preventing potential abuses. Even with the cap removed, careful planning and attention to these details will be essential for families looking to maximize this opportunity. It’s a fantastic option, but it still requires strategic execution.
the broader context: 529 plan expansions in 2026
it’s important to view the proposed elimination of the 529 plan rollover cap within the larger context of ongoing enhancements to 529 plans. The year 2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for these accounts, with several other significant changes also slated to take effect. For instance, the annual withdrawal limit for k-12 expenses is set to double to $20,000. This is a huge win for families who utilize 529 funds for private elementary or secondary school tuition, offering even greater tax advantages for those choices. Previously, this limit was $10,000 per year, per beneficiary, so doubling it significantly broadens the utility of 529 plans for k-12 education. (See: irs faqs on 529 plans.)
furthermore, qualified expenses for career credentialing programs are also being expanded. In an economy that increasingly values skilled trades and vocational training, this expansion recognizes that a four-year university degree isn’t the only path to a successful career. It allows 529 funds to be used for a wider array of educational pursuits, making these plans more relevant and accessible to a diverse range of students and career paths. This evolution demonstrates a clear legislative trend towards making 529 plans more flexible, more comprehensive, and more responsive to the changing educational and economic landscape. The proposed cap removal for 529-to-roth ira rollovers perfectly complements these other enhancements, painting a picture of a more versatile and robust savings tool for the modern family. For more context, see 880,000+ student loan forgiveness applications stuck in limbo.
comparing savings strategies: 529 vs. Roth ira (and the synergy)
for parents, the decision of where to save for a child’s future has always involved a complex weighing of options. Should you prioritize a 529 plan, a roth ira, a custodial account, or something else entirely? The proposed changes to the 529 plan rollover rules create an even more compelling synergy between 529 plans and roth iras, making them less of an ‘either/or’ and more of a ‘both/and’ scenario.
a 529 plan offers tax-free growth and tax-free withdrawals for qualified educational expenses. Many states also offer a tax deduction for contributions. It’s undeniably the king of education savings. A roth ira, on the other hand, provides tax-free growth and tax-free withdrawals in retirement, with the added benefit of being able to withdraw contributions tax- and penalty-free at any time for any reason. For a child, starting a roth ira early can be incredibly powerful due to the long runway for tax-free compounding.
the beauty of an uncapped 529 plan rollover is that it allows you to maximize the benefits of both. You can aggressively save in a 529, knowing that any surplus can seamlessly transition into a roth ira for your child, preserving the tax-advantaged growth. This strategy essentially creates a ‘dual-purpose’ savings vehicle. You’re primarily saving for education, but you have a robust, tax-efficient backup plan for retirement. This flexibility is particularly valuable given the unpredictable nature of college costs, scholarships, and career choices. It mitigates the risk of ‘stranded’ assets and maximizes the long-term financial benefit for your child.
the viral potential: why this is huge for parents and financial planners
this development has strong viral potential because it directly addresses a persistent pain point for parents and offers a clear, positive solution. The fear of over-saving in a 529 plan has been a constant source of discussion and concern in parenting forums, financial planning communities, and online education groups. The ability to perform a 529 plan rollover to a roth ira was already a significant relief, but the $35,000 cap left many feeling like the problem was only partially solved. For more context, see the game-changing legislation that could erase your student debt as a teacher.
removing that cap would be seen as a massive win. It’s a compelling story because it simplifies complex financial planning, reduces anxiety, and offers a tangible path to greater financial security for the next generation. For financial planners, this provides a powerful new talking point and a valuable tool to offer clients. It strengthens the argument for maximizing 529 contributions and allows for more holistic financial planning that integrates education and retirement goals seamlessly. Expect to see a flurry of content comparing savings strategies, reviewing 529 plans, discussing roth ira benefits, and promoting financial advisory services that can help families navigate these new opportunities. It’s a topic that resonates deeply with the desire to provide the best possible financial foundation for one’s children.
actionable advice for savvy parents: preparing for the change
while the 529 retirement enhancement act of 2026 is still proposed legislation, its bipartisan support suggests a good chance of passage. Savvy parents should start preparing now to take advantage of these potential changes. Here’s some actionable advice:
- continue to maximize 529 contributions: don’t hold back on saving for college out of fear of over-contributing. The more you save now, the more you potentially have to roll over into a roth ira later.
- understand the 15-year rule: remember that the 529 account needs to be open for at least 15 years before a rollover can occur. If your child is young, start that 529 now to get the clock ticking.
- encourage earned income: remind your college-aged or post-college children about the importance of earned income. They’ll need it to make annual roth ira contributions and to facilitate the 529 plan rollover. Summer jobs, part-time work during school, or early career employment will all count.
- consult a financial advisor: the rules surrounding 529 plans and roth iras can be complex. A qualified financial advisor can help you understand your specific situation, optimize your savings strategy, and ensure you meet all the requirements for a successful 529 plan rollover. They can also help you project potential roth ira balances for your children.
- stay informed: keep an eye on the legislative progress of s. 5550. Financial news outlets and reputable personal finance blogs will be tracking its status. Being aware of its passage and effective date will be crucial for timely planning.
the long-term impact: a legacy of financial security
the potential elimination of the $35,000 cap on a 529 plan rollover to a roth ira isn’t just a technical change; it represents a profound shift in how families can build a legacy of financial security for their children. It empowers parents to save more aggressively for education without the lingering fear of ‘what if’ scenarios. It provides a robust, tax-advantaged pathway for any surplus funds to contribute to a child’s retirement, potentially setting them up for a significantly more comfortable financial future.
imagine the ripple effect: children starting their careers with a roth ira already holding tens of thousands of dollars, growing tax-free for decades. This could mean earlier retirement, greater financial freedom, or simply a much larger safety net. It’s an opportunity to leverage today’s savings for tomorrow’s prosperity, turning what might have been a tax burden into a powerful engine for long-term wealth creation. This bill, if passed, will undoubtedly be celebrated as a victory for parents, financial planners, and anyone committed to fostering a financially secure future for the next generation.
frequently asked questions
what is the 529 retirement enhancement act of 2026?
the 529 retirement enhancement act of 2026 (s. 5550) is a proposed bipartisan bill that aims to eliminate the current $35,000 lifetime cap on rolling over unused 529 college savings plan funds into a roth ira. This legislation, introduced by senators ted cruz and lisa blunt rochester, seeks to enhance financial flexibility for families saving for education.
how does the secure 2.0 act affect 529 plans?
the secure 2.0 act introduced the option to roll over unused 529 plan funds into a roth ira for the beneficiary, providing more flexibility for parents concerned about leftover college savings. However, this rollover is limited by a $35,000 lifetime cap, which the new 529 retirement enhancement act seeks to remove.
what are the benefits of rolling over 529 funds into a roth ira?
rolling over 529 funds into a roth ira allows families to avoid penalties and taxes on leftover college savings. It leverages a tax-advantaged retirement account, providing a head start on retirement for the child, thereby enhancing their long-term financial security.
what happens to unused 529 funds if my child doesnt go to college?
previously, unused 529 funds could incur taxes and penalties if not used for qualified educational expenses. However, recent legislation allows for the rollover of these funds into a roth ira, offering an alternative that protects the savings for future retirement needs.
why is the 529 retirement enhancement act important for families?
the 529 retirement enhancement act is crucial for families as it removes the cap on 529-to-roth ira rollovers, allowing for greater flexibility in managing educational savings. This change can significantly impact how families plan for both education and long-term financial security for their children.
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