Daniel Lim reads through the resumes of prospective college students with the excited patter of a color commentator at an NFL game. On his popular TikTok channel, the Duke University senior highlights the seemingly endless number of ultra-achieving students who fail to land acceptances at selective colleges, or, more often, who win some bids and lose others.

“This valedictorian with a near-perfect SAT score got rejected by every single Ivy League school he applied to,” he says in one recent video, in a tone of disbelief. “Let’s look at his application and see what happened.”

It turns out that this anonymous student Lim’s describing — with an SAT score of 1570, trophies in state and regional championships for gymnastics, experience in concert band since fourth grade and membership in honor societies — says that he was rejected from Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Michigan. The student says he got into Penn State University and the University of Maryland.

Lim, who has more than 200,000 followers, says that nearly 2,000 high school students have sent him their college applications — along with the list of institutions they applied to and the results of their attempts — for him to share and riff on in his videos.

He’s part of a genre of social media trying to make sense of who gets into which selective college — and why — at a time when landing a ‘Yes’ from a selective college is harder than ever.

Statistics show it really is harder to get into college these days, if you’re trying to get into a selective one. If you look at the top 100 universities and the top 50 top liberal arts colleges, the median SAT score it takes to get in has risen significantly since about 35 years ago, according to an analysis a couple years ago in Education Next.

College counselors work to emphasize that finding the right college should be about discovering the right fit — and the fact is that most U.S. colleges, especially community colleges, admit most of the students who apply. But regardless, many students and families perceive selective colleges as the ticket to more opportunity. And at a time of rising college costs, students strive to get into state flagship universities that offer high-quality offerings at a fraction of the cost of private colleges, or to land at Ivy League schools with big endowments that can afford to offer more-generous financial aid than other institutions.

So the process has high stakes. And yet it can seem like a game.

And the rules of that game keep changing.

The pandemic led more colleges to make SAT scores optional, putting more emphasis on so-called “holistic” reviews of candidates. And admissions officials say there’s widespread misperceptions about how that process works.

“A lot of people think if a school has a 5 percent admit rate, they have a one in 20 chance of getting in, which is not what it is,” says Nathan Mathabane, associate director of college counseling at Woodside Priory School, in California, and a former admissions officer at Princeton University. “Some students will have an 80 or 90 percent chance of getting in and many students will have a 0 percent chance of getting in.”

And a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling this summer striking down the consideration of race in college admissions has thrown even more uncertainty into the process, as even colleges themselves seek to quickly change their processes to comply with the law.

So students are turning to TikTok and other social media platforms to fill the information void about whether, why and how they’ve got a shot at landing a spot at a selective college.

Another example that Mathabane points to is a Reddit channel called “chance me,” where applicants post their credentials and ask the internet to predict what their chances are of getting into the college that they think works best for them. And some of the comments end up being unkind, or come filled with misinformation about the process.

“I think it’s super toxic,” Mathabane says of the site. “I don't think there's anything that you're going to get from these sites that is going to improve your college search, full stop, and it probably will only stress you out more.”

But Lim argues that his videos, which he also posts on YouTube and Instagram, can help students feel less alone in a stressful process. And he says he can relate, from the stress of his own college search.

For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we talk with Lim about what he’s learned from seeing so many college applications and from the reactions to his videos, and we hear from Mathabane about how admissions is changing.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page.

Back in March of this year, EdSurge published my article outlining the nearly 400-year history of higher education in America, how that past shapes the way the country views colleges today, and why microcredentials, while critical to the future of the U.S. economy, are causing a dilemma for the academy. Since then, I have enjoyed serving on various panels like those with the Colorado Business Roundtable discussing the future of higher education and its intersection with economic and workforce needs.

Several critical themes have emerged from these conversations that create burdens for workforce partners and higher education institutions. For one, agreement around the purpose of higher education is fragmented. In 2019, Brandon Busteed penned an article for Forbes that beautifully describes what I have witnessed in these discussions. Busteed described a "decidedly false dichotomy" where some argue that higher education is about preparing a person for work versus, more broadly, preparing a person for success. While I have enjoyed the dialogue, the fact remains that this intellectual discourse is being held amongst some of the most privileged and well-credentialed persons in society.

In these conversations, another critical theme emerges: the need for more decision-makers to understand that U.S. population growth has nearly flatlined. It is vital to note that this trend is NOT a blip but the result of a steady decline, and that higher education as a whole must address it. One implication is a recent prediction by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the labor force participation rate may fall from 62.2 percent in 2022 to 60.4 percent in 2032. A second implication is the absence of sufficient numbers of workers in professions such as health services, trade, and hospitality. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as of June 2023, the national labor force participation rate was 0.7 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels. That equates to 1.9 million workers who have left the workforce since the pandemic’s start in early spring 2020.

The lack of an available and prepared workforce in America adds unnecessary fuel to the fire of poverty that burns uncontrollably throughout our communities, and that leaders don’t seem to feel an urgency to extinguish. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Poverty in the United States: 2022 report, the supplemental poverty measure (SPM) rate in 2022 was 12.4 percent. This increase of 4.6 percentage points from 2021 represents the first increase in the overall SPM poverty rate since 2010. Furthermore, the SPM child poverty rate more than doubled, from 5.2 percent in 2021 to 12.4 percent in 2022.

To address our children’s hunger and our communities’ poverty, our educational system must be redesigned to remove the boundaries between high school, college and careers so that more Americans can train for and secure employment that will sustain them.

In 2021, Jobs for the Future outlined a pathway toward realizing such a revolution in The Big Blur report, which argues for a radical restructuring of education for grades 11 through 14 by erasing the arbitrary dividing line between high school and college. Ideas for accomplishing this include courses and work experiences for students designed for career preparation. Joel Vargas, contributing author to this report and JFF executive, spoke at length about his personal life story and reason for serving as an ambassador for educational redesign on my Discovering Your Mission podcast earlier this year. He said that, “We have to change the [educational] systems that students experience, because it is pretty obvious, our systems are designed to work against students as a whole.”

As a Policy Leadership Trust member of JFF, the Community College of Aurora (where I serve as president) has served as a national leader in the work to apply higher education to drive social and economic mobility in today’s society by aligning student learning outcomes directly with workforce needs. Such goals are achieved when the institution understands its responsibility in the fight to eliminate poverty and support equitable educational attainment by providing our students with key skills that are relevant and transferable throughout industries.

This commitment to student success is what students look for most, according to the Strada Education Foundation. In its most recent nationally representative study of more than 3,200 people who completed bachelor’s degrees since 2002, Strada found that graduates who reported they developed key skills during college earned $8,700 more in their first year after graduation than their peers who reported lower levels of skill development through college. As Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen, and its students have amassed more than $1.7 trillion in student debt, institutions must focus on providing the tools critical to thrive in a skills-based economy.

This year, the Community College of Aurora hosted U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, the Departments of Transportation, Energy, Commerce, and Labor, along with several national, state, and local officials for the Biden-Harris Administration’s nationwide Unlocking Pathways Summit series, which focused on helping young Americans access good-paying jobs. One component, Unlocking Career Success, is an interagency initiative that reimagines how our nation’s high schools prepare all students to thrive in their future careers. Guided by the four keys of dual enrollment, work-based learning, workforce credentials, and career advising and navigation, this initiative, in collaboration with JFF, aims to evangelize the need to revolutionize the American education and higher education systems.

The future of America depends on our ability as a community of educators, workforce partners, governmental agencies, and legislators to work together to develop seamless academic and career pathways for more students. Together, we can unlock upward social and economic mobility for our youth and for working adults. Failure is not an option; America is depending on us.

© Berit Kessler / Shutterstock

The college students who give campus tours for the admissions office may sound like confident ambassadors, but they sometimes have their own doubts about whether they’ve made the right college choice or are on the right life path.

That dramatic tension drives an independent mockumentary called “Admitted,” created by a group of undergraduates at Boston University.

The five-episode web series, whose final episode is scheduled to appear later this month, involved the work of more than 20 students, some crowdfunding and the use of free studio space on the campus. And it ends up making some timely observations about college admissions, and about student life after the pandemic — when students sometimes struggle to make social connections after high school experiences spent on lockdown. It’s set at the fictional Beacon Hill University — not to be confused with a nearby rival college in the world of the series, The University of Beacon Hill.

One student leading and acting in the production’s ensemble cast, Maggie Borgen, has spent plenty of time thinking through issues of college choice. When she was a high school senior in New Jersey during the pandemic, she made a podcast designed to give advice to other students going through the college admissions process during the health crisis, which limited campus tours and many of the usual rituals of high school. (EdSurge talked to her about that project at the time.)

Since starting as a student at BU, she ended up working at the admissions office there leading information sessions. And she thought it would make a great setting for a sitcom in the style of her favorite comedies, including “Parks and Recreation” and “Abbott Elementary.”

“A college admissions office seemed like a really good way to explore coming of age in college through a workplace setting, but also in a way that is relatable to a general audience, because most Americans are thinking about college in some sense because it's just such a big part of the zeitgeist,” Borgen says.

She was excited to try to examine that setting from the perspective of students today, during this unusual time.The high cost of college these days provides plenty of material for satire. In one scene, Borgen’s character, MC, is giving a campus tour and describing the new 10-story engineering building with a food court and gleaming library. She tells the students, “I figure if you’re going to go into student debt, you might as well go bankrupt for Beacon.”

The students started production last fall, meeting two or three times a week to write and film the series. It’s starting to get some recognition — it was recently named as a finalist in the Houston Comedy Film Festival.

EdSurge recently connected with Borgen to ask what insights she’s gleaned in making the show, and how students continue to struggle with the lingering impact of COVID-19.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or use the player on this page.

© Image courtesy of "Admitted"

Twice a week, Rofiat Olasunkanmi, 22, heads back to Brooklyn to her alma mater, Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School. Now a senior at New York University, Olasunkanmi helps high school seniors navigate applying to college, a process she personally recalls being dominated by concern about finances and a general sense of anxiety because no one in her family did it in the United States before her.

Her older siblings received degrees in Nigeria, where her parents still live, so she’d had to figure out a lot on her own, a burden she now tries to alleviate for the students she works with. She aims to support them from start to finish, beginning with applications for the City University of New York at minimum and then moving on to the Common Application.

“But I’m not there every day, and Common App is very lengthy,” she said, “so they need to ensure that they’re doing the parts that they need to get done while I'm not there.”

Rofiat Olasunkanmi helps high school seniors apply to college. Photo courtesy of Olasunkanmi.

The Common Application was first created with the goal to simplify the college admissions process by allowing students to submit one application to multiple institutions. However, as Olasunkanmi mentioned, it takes significant time to complete, an estimated six to eight weeks, according to admissions counselors.

The COVID-19 pandemic complicated the application process further with disruptions to in-person advising, testing and extracurricular activities. But barriers to completion predate the pandemic.

During the last pre-pandemic college application cycle, 2018-19, nearly 1.2 million students accessed the Common App, created a profile and began working on at least one application. But a quarter of those students, almost 300,000, did not end up submitting any application through Common App, according to a working paper published this August.

Researchers characterized this subset of students as “non-submitters.”

“Non-submitters” were more likely than students who submitted applications to have lower educational-occupational aspirations, be racial minorities, have parents who completed lower levels of education and live in communities with lower socioeconomic status — but they were not less academically qualified.

Colleges across the country have doubled down on trying to attract students as enrollment numbers decline. Direct admission has proven to be an effective method of appealing to students who hadn’t already been planning to attend college. But the students who start applications without hitting the “send” button, the “non-submitters,” largely fall into a different category. They are presumably already interested in college.

So, why aren’t they completing applications?

Identifying ‘Non-Submitters’

During World War II, the U.S. military noticed that certain parts of the airplanes that returned from battle had more bullet holes than others. As a result, leaders decided to reinforce those areas, expecting that would help the planes better withstand enemy fire.

But this strategy had a fundamental error. It’s one relevant to past research about barriers preventing students from enrolling in college, said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the “non-submitters” study.

The error, known as survival bias, directs focus on those entities that passed a selection process but overlooks others that didn’t make it through. The military focused on holes in the planes that survived enemy fire. But really, leaders should have considered the holes in the planes that did not make it home.

Likewise, higher education institutions have tried various strategies to boost student enrollment but haven’t stepped back to ask, “Who is not completing applications?” Odle said.

He and Preston Magouirk, chief data officer at the nonprofit DC College Access Program, took that step back. They outlined key factors that can predict non-submission, using data students put into their Common App profiles coupled with community indicators from the American Community Survey administered by the U.S. Census Bureau and school features from the Common Core of Data maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. (Magouirk was a senior manager of research and analytics at Common App while conducting the study.)

Overall, they found that 24 percent of students who started the Common App in 2018-19 did not complete it. The highest rates of non-submission were among American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students (as well as students who did not report their race or ethnicity on Common App), and the lowest rates were among white and Asian students. While students who identified as Black or African American and Latino represented a small fraction of all Common App users during the study year, both groups were overrepresented in the non-submitter population, with non-submission rates of 27 and 26 percent, respectively.

Submission rates also varied by community. The higher the unemployment rate in a ZIP code, the higher the likelihood of non-submission among students who lived there, the researchers found. Further, rates varied by school type. Students attending public high schools were more likely to not submit applications they’d started than students attending independent or private high schools. Students at Title I schools, which serve high numbers of low-income students, were more likely to not submit applications they’d started (28 percent) compared to students at non-Title I schools (22 percent). Compared to applicants, non-submitters were also less likely to report having a parent with a college degree.

Students who ultimately submitted the Common App visited the platform more frequently. The essay, in particular, appeared to be key in distinguishing between students who finished and didn’t finish their applications. Out of the students who eventually applied, 94 percent wrote at least 100 characters for their essay; whereas just 43 percent of students who did not write at least that much ended up applying.

What is most distinct about these findings, the researchers said, are the academic similarities between submitters and non-submitters.

“It would be so easy for people to just say, ‘well, they're probably not college material,’” Odle said, referring to non-submitters. This study shows otherwise. Students who submitted and students who did not submit applications had very similar GPAs and SAT/ACT scores.

Of course, there are other ways to apply to college beyond the Common App. While the platform connects students with more than 1,000 four-year colleges and universities, its data alone does not provide a comprehensive look at all pathways to higher ed.

Separate from the research by Odle and Magouirk, Common App conducted an internal analysis using National Student Clearinghouse records to track what happened to non-submitters beyond its own platform, said Mark Freeman, vice president of data analytics and research at Common App. The analysis found that the average Common App non-submitter is still likely to enroll in college after high school — but using another platform, such as applying directly to an institution.

This underscores the fact that people who access the Common App at all have a high baseline enrollment rate. For the 2017-18 academic season, for example, 71 percent of Common App users who did not submit an application through the platform still attended college within the next academic year, according to the analysis. More than half (56 percent) attended an institution that does not accept the Common App, but some students attended institutions that do (14.5 percent).

While this analysis looked at the year prior to Odle and Magouirk’s study, the results should look very similar, Freeman said.

However, Common App non-submission still seems to be related to college-going outcomes, Odle said. After all, the enrollment rate of students who completed the Common App — 88.4 percent — was higher than the enrollment rate of students who started but never finished it — 71 percent.

Counseling Students to Submit Applications

Dorma Lozada, a senior at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, recalls going through the college application process herself a few years ago. “I understood the language of the applications,” she said, which she attributed to her mother’s experience attending college in Puerto Rico. When filling out financial aid forms, her mother had the needed documents prepared, for example.

Lozada, 21, now assists students preparing for college at her high school alma mater, the Facing History School several blocks away from John Jay. Her work is supported through the same program that Olasunkanmi participates in, which trains college students to provide individualized support to high school seniors.

The high school students Lozada works with often do not receive the same insight from their parents that she did from her mother, she said. And many of her students’ parents do not speak English. She translates what she can, but it’s a challenge to alleviate families’ uncertainty about college, and specifically fears about affordability.

While Odle and Magouirk’s study focused on predictors of non-submission rather than strategies to support application completion, its findings point to possible solutions. Because submitters typically came to the Common App platform more times and completed the essay portion, for example, maybe more involved and sustained college counseling could help more students finish their applications.

The work that Olasunkanmi and Lozada do is an example of that counseling, which varies in quality and quantity across the country and in individual school districts. While the ratio of students to school counselors in the U.S. has narrowed over time, it remains well above what the American School Counselor Association recommends. These counselors assist with postsecondary planning but also boosting academic achievement and interpersonal skills. ASCA recommends a ratio of 250 students for every one school counselor. During the 2021-2022 school year, the latest year for which data is available, the nationwide average was 408-to-1.

High school seniors in 21 states shared how a lack of counseling affected their college application process in surveys conducted by the national nonprofit YouthTruth.

“I am almost done with my senior year and not once been talked to or notified about end of year requirements for graduation let alone college,” a male student reported. “Because of this I have decided that college is out of the picture and that I guess I'm just not good enough.”

Sometimes we have students that are very enthusiastic at the beginning of the application, but by the end, they're not.

— Rofiat Olasunkanmi

Others reported not knowing about application deadlines, and when they learned of them late in the application season, they assumed college was just off the table, said Jen de Forest, director of organizational learning and communications at YouthTruth.

“There were a lot of kids, particularly Latinx kids, who described not having social capital in the process, unless they had a sibling to guide them through,” de Forest said. “If they had a sibling, the sibling was a really crucial bridge.”

Olasunkanmi has found this to be the case with her students in New York, too.

While her older siblings did not go through the college application process in the U.S., they attended and completed college, so she had that example set for her. For her students at Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School, many lack personal connections who chose the college pathway themselves. While these students may want to attend college and eagerly begin applications, they do not always follow through as they commonly see siblings and peers going straight to the workforce.

“Sometimes we have students that are very enthusiastic at the beginning of the application,” Olasunkanmi said, “but by the end, they're not.”

Like Lozada has seen, Olasunkanmi said this decreased buy-in from students is often contingent on the support they receive — or don’t receive — outside of the Bridge Coach program. Olasunkanmi knows from her own experience that a lack of parental input is not always an intentional choice. Some students’ parents are not familiar with the U.S. college admissions process, while others are busy juggling work or other responsibilities.

Setting Different Expectations

Yet Olasunkanmi’s parents did expect her to attend college. “African parents, they don't play with education,” she said. That meant her own college aspirations aligned with her family’s expectations.

Across the country, however, large aspiration-expectation mismatches have been found. YouthTruth's most recent survey of over 25,000 high school seniors in the class of 2023 found that 74 percent aspired to go to college but only 66 percent expected to go to college.

Olasunkanmi thinks this mismatch is at least in part due to a lack of diverse representation on college campuses. Overall, white students are the largest racial demographic in the U.S. college population, regardless of whether the institution is public or private, or a two- or four- year school (although public two-year institutions comparably have more minority students). Meanwhile, Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School is composed of mostly Black students (81 percent), with 14 percent Latino and 3 percent white students.

Career expectations likely also contribute to the mismatch. In the Common App study, submission rates varied widely by students’ reported educational plans, with higher rates of non-submission found for those who aspired to attain an associate degree compared to higher degree levels. The non-submission rate essentially doubled for students who never selected any degree goals.

Rates also varied based on students’ intended career field, with students who reported aspiring to work in occupations that generally require advanced levels of education (engineers, policymakers, physicians, etc.) having high application submission rates, while students who reported aspiring to occupations that don’t typically require a postsecondary credential (homemaker, farmer, etc.) had low application submission rates.

While college may not be a match for everyone’s career goals, ruling out college as an option because of expected job plans at such a young age is limiting, given that research shows those aspirations often change over time, Odle cautioned.

This was true for both Olasunkanmi and Lozada. After graduating high school, Olasunkanmi started at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, before transferring to NYU. She thought she wanted to be a nurse before she had the chance to work closely with a counselor, who spoke with her about the multitude of career options there are in health care. Now, she plans to work as a health care manager in a hospital or medical center. Lozada, who is majoring in political science and minoring in economics, initially thought she’d be a lawyer, but she is now set on becoming an elected official.

Cost is easily the biggest barrier to enrollment for both the never-enrolled and the previously enrolled, according to the latest Gallup and Lumina Foundation State of Higher Education report for 2023. YouthTruth reports seeing students become more concerned about the return on investment for a college education.

Transparency in what students can expect from the college experience, particularly overall cost, is key to helping them feel more confident to enroll, according to Bryce McKibben, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University. “It is so opaque,” McKibben said of the college price tag. “You don't necessarily know how much it's going to [cost] even in the next year, let alone over the length of your degree. As a result, it's very easy to make the conclusion that it may not be possible or that you're going to end up in loads of debt.”

The Hope Center regularly conducts surveys assessing students’ basic needs. The latest 2020 results from more than 195,000 students showed rates of basic needs insecurity increased among the general population, and intention to enroll in college dropped.

“We don't necessarily have data on the level of which those folks who never entered may have struggled with those challenges,” McKibben said, “but the fact that there are three-in-five students experiencing basic needs insecurity obviously presents huge warning signs of folks who are sort of at the margin.”

Odle and Magouirk hope that their research leads to changes that help more students successfully complete college applications. As for how the Common App plans to build on this work, Freeman said the organization will conduct a survey of non-submitters.

As Olasunkanmi and Lozada both begin their senior year of college, they’re thinking about how they can leverage their knowledge to beat back inequity in who makes it to college, and who succeeds beyond higher education, too.

Their advocacy work has already begun, one high school senior at a time.

“At the end of the year, they turn around and they're like, ‘thank you so much for helping me,’” Lozada said. “‘If it weren't for you, I would have not been able to complete these applications.’”

© Studio623 / Shutterstock

This story was originally published by The 19th.

When a teacher called in sick one Thursday in July, administrator Holly Denman realized she’d have to close her center for the day. Then it was two days. Giggles & Wiggles Daycare Center was as short staffed as it could be: six teachers, including Denman, for 34 students with absolutely no reserves or substitutes to tap into. One teacher out meant automatic closure.

By the next Sunday, two more teachers called out sick with a stomach bug and another with a migraine. They’d have to close Monday, too.

Monday morning, owner Kristin Holman-Steffel received eight calls in one hour from parents concerned something was amiss at Giggles & Wiggles. The center, which Holman-Steffel started from her converted home, is one of only three in Lancaster, Wisconsin, a three-square-mile town of just under 4,000 people in the southwestern tip of the state.

Holman-Steffel called Denman, who was in tears.

The administrator had been working to hire more staff with $4,000 Giggles & Wiggles had been receiving monthly since 2022. That money came through a federal program that pumped $24 billion in grants to child care centers across the country to keep them running during the pandemic — part of the single largest investment in child care in American history.

In two months, Denman spent seven times her advertising budget to run sponsored ads on Indeed to try to attract candidates, but of the few prospects who applied, even fewer answered a follow-up call. She scheduled interviews for people who never showed. She even offered positions to three candidates, but only one ever came to the job. All of that amounted to one hire in almost two months of nonstop recruiting.

The pandemic child care money helped keep Giggles & Wiggles going. Combined with a tuition increase, the funds helped raise wages by $2 to about $14 an hour on average in the fall of 2022, but it still wasn’t nearly enough to attract job candidates to the center. Child care workers in Wisconsin and everywhere in the United States are in the bottom 2 percent of jobs in terms of pay, along with fast food cooks and theme park workers. The local McDonalds advertises $13 an hour — $12 at the Piggly Wiggly.

By June, the federal child care money that Giggles & Wiggles and all those other centers have been relying on started to run out. In Wisconsin, monthly payments were cut in half. Nationally, the entire $24 billion pot of money is set to expire September 30. The money was always meant to be temporary, but in an industry that has existed almost only in crisis mode, centers did whatever they could to keep their staff, keep their families and keep their doors open. Most used the money to raise wages and keep tuition flat, but now without the funding, that business model is about to blow up.

And so when Holman-Steffel called that Monday in late July, Denman already knew their options had been exhausted. Another staffer also called in that day to say she’d be leaving for another job with more pay. She was a single mom whose rent was rising.

It was Holman-Steffel who said the words first.

“I don’t want to close,” Denman replied. She could work every day, take no days off, no breaks, cover classrooms. But she was one person, Holman-Steffel pointed out, and they were short almost an entire staff.

“How is there any other way out of this?” Holman-Steffel asked her. “What more can we do?”

That afternoon, on July 24, they notified the 27 families they served that after 26 years in operation, Giggles & Wiggles would close permanently on August 31. “We have cared for generations of children and families,” the note to parents read.

In the weeks since, the impact of that decision has reverberated across Lancaster.

One of the two other day care centers in town, even smaller than Giggles & Wiggles, is already fully booked. The other is having to leave its building for an even tinier location and will have to downsize. A third is expected to open in January with initial capacity for 75 kids, and demand is already high.

Parents are putting their kids on waiting lists for care in neighboring cities. They’re considering reducing their work hours or asking grandparents to watch their kids. One family is going to try to care for their child indefinitely while they work from home. A mom told Holman-Steffel she was putting her plans for another child on hold. She had expected Giggles & Wiggles could care for them.

Giggles & Wiggles is a preview of what could happen to other centers in other towns after September 30. The day has been referred to as a “child care cliff,” but that’s something of a misnomer. The impact will play out over time, in parts. Classrooms will close first; day care hours will be cut to save on staff. States that have tried to add bits of additional child care funding might hold on longer. A 30 percent increase in the federal subsidy program for low-income children in child care, the Child Care and Development Block Grant, will help somewhat. So too will a second, much smaller pot of $15 billion in federal pandemic money that will run out at the end of September 2024.

But providers will close, said Lauren Hogan, the managing director of policy and professional advancement at the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

It’ll just be more like quicksand than a sudden drop-off.

“It is going to suck people under,” Hogan said. “The pervasive sense is one of fear and foreboding in the field.”

By one projection, there could be as many as 70,000 closures. 70,000 Giggles & Wiggles.

When a child care center closes, especially in a small town, it frays the ties that keep a community together. Children become scattered, separated from the only caregivers most had ever known. Families are left scrambling to find alternate care in a system known for years-long waiting lists. And working parents are stymied, making impossible decisions around leaving their jobs or cutting back hours.

For parents whose kids are in child care, there is little disagreement about the importance of funding the industry and paying teachers well. But at the state and federal level, child care has been treated like a political afterthought, cast aside as a nice-to-have in a country that has long viewed child care as a “family problem,” not a government one.

When Wisconsin’s Republican-led Joint Finance Committee decided not to permanently fund an extension of the federal funds earlier this year — what would’ve been a $340 million investment — its justification was that the COVID child care funds were just one-time funds, and the budget had to prioritize funding existing programs like K-12 education, even if Wisconsin has a projected $4 billion budget surplus in its general fund this year. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has since called for a special session to address the child care issue — one of his top priorities — proposing adding that $340 million back into the budget to continue monthly payments for two more years. Ultimately, that is money that will also run out. Evers visited Giggles & Wiggles in August after news of the closure spread. But advocates hold little hope that the session will result in anything at all.

“It’s a political hot potato right now. I think part of it is a disbelief that things aren’t gonna get as bad as we anticipate they’ll get,’” said Ruth Schmidt, the executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, an advocacy organization. “This industry is made up of, in Wisconsin, close to 98 percent women. Plain and simple: We take advantage of it.”

It’s a similar story across the country: As the federal funds dry up, long-term funding proposals are unlikely to pass at the federal level to fill that billion-dollar-sized gap, and only eight states have passed additional child care funding using their own funds. The child care workforce, largely women of color, is one of the most precarious in the country. While almost every industry has recovered to pre-pandemic numbers, child care is still short 5 percent of its early 2020 workforce.

The stabilization funds helped keep centers that were on the edge of closure open, but only just barely. More than half of workers reported getting pay bumps, money that kept them in industry instead of jumping ship to work at Walmart or Target or the local school district. The rest of the money went to help pay for rent and supplies, which also rose as inflation ballooned.

All of those problems remain, but soon the money will be gone. For centers that have staved off closure, most of the costs will get passed on to parents in the form of tuition hikes in the fall that could push the most vulnerable kids out of care. More than a third of programs serving infants and toddlers expect to raise rates after the funding runs out, according to a May survey of providers. Already, the annual cost of child care exceeds the cost of in-state public university tuition in 34 states, and that cost has been rising at a faster rate than inflation for three decades.

But before widespread closures, services will contract and costs to parents will increase. It’s already happening.

Deanne Patten, the owner of Firehouse Friends Childcare Center in Stanley, Wisconsin, has implemented a rate hike more than six times higher than her usual increase — the highest ever in the center’s nine years — because starting hourly wages for staff went up from as low as $9 to as high as $16 with the federal funds. The hike, $180 to $260 a month per child, went into effect this week. She waited to see if Wisconsin would implement additional funds for child care, but when it became clear it wasn’t happening, she had to raise tuition. The day she told parents about the changes, she watched the stress wash over their faces. Patten said she was so overwhelmed she stopped eating, lost weight. “It was probably the worst thing I have done in my life,” she said.

Rates at TLC for Tots in Nampa, Idaho, are rising by nearly $200 a month for infant care, and already families are leaving. Other parents have declined promotions to avoid earning too much money to disqualify them from their child care subsidies, said director Krystal McFarlane.

She had no choice in the tuition hikes, she said. Even the cost of a box of rubber gloves that providers use for diaper changes has tripled, shooting from $33 to $99. She already had to cut six positions over the summer, and staff bonuses ended in June along with the federal funding. McFarlane’s parents have owned the business for 17 years, taking no pay for themselves for two years during the pandemic. TLC for Tots was supposed to be her business one day — the future for the single mom and her two kids. Instead, in the next three months, she’ll have to decide if they have to close.

When Giggles & Wiggles’ owner and administrator made their decision in July, Heidi Nelson remembers the panic that she felt instantly. Two years ago, when she was looking for a day care that could take her now 3-year-old son, Alex, she “called everywhere and [Giggles & Wiggles] were really the only ones who were even willing to listen to us.” Alex has autism, and many of the centers would not accommodate him. If another didn’t take him, would she have to ask her husband, who just started a full-time job, to quit his? Would she have to consider changing her own work hours or asking her dad, who is 69, to take on more of Alex’s care?

When Denman took on Alex, she converted the day care for his safety. They put food labels on everything to ensure he did not eat anything that would trigger his dairy, soy and wheat allergies. Giggles & Wiggles changed its policy so kids could no longer bring their own breakfast — they would all wait to eat together so that Alex was safe. The families rallied. “We are a small town,” Nelson explained.

Alex is nonverbal, and the staff learned to pick up on his cues. They knew when he needed a break if the other kids were being too loud and set him up in a corner with a couple of toys away from the chaos.

After Nelson learned of the closure, it took three weeks of calling around before she finally found another private preschool in town that will take Alex in the afternoons after he has school — the director has a grandson with autism, but doesn’t normally serve children with autism.

“The first question was, ‘What are his behaviors?’” Nelson said. “It’s just a gut-wrenching question because 99 percent of the time he is a great kid. His behaviors stem from not being able to communicate his wants and needs.”

The week before Giggles & Wiggles closed, Alex had bitten a few kids and the staff had called right away to see if Nelson had some insight on what was causing it. She did. As the center prepared to close, parents had already pulled out their kids and the staff had consolidated everyone into one classroom. Alex was struggling to handle that change.

Nelson fully expects he may only last a couple of weeks in the new preschool before he’s kicked out.

“I just keep thinking about, ‘Are they going to give up on him too soon because they don’t know him and they aren’t going to take the time to get to know him?’” Nelson said.

It’s the top thing on Denman’s mind, too.

“I just think people are just going to see he’s high maintenance, but they are not going to enjoy that he is also super sweet and loves to snuggle and loves hugs and is just super goofy,” Denman said. “He’s been my boy for so long, now I worry somebody else isn’t going to love him the way he deserves,” she said.

Giggles & Wiggles hasn’t just been a job for Denman and Holman-Steffels. It’s been a community. It’s been about the back-to-school potlucks for all the parents and the Halloween open house, the library art show. It was about when a storm knocked down a tree and a dad offered to saw off the broken limb. Or the time parents chipped in to rent out an ice cream truck to deliver cones for all the kids.

“When you care for their children for 10 hours a day, you really get to be part of that family’s life,” Holman-Steffels said. Now that the center is closing, “you just feel like you’re letting everybody down.”

As the staff got ready for the final day, Denman said she couldn’t bring herself to throw a party. Instead she’d continue to let the kids do what they liked, pulling toys out of storage and rearranging the play area at the gray home that has housed more than enough giggles and wiggles to earn its name.

Denman has no plan for what’s next.

“I’m so heartbroken over losing my kids,” she said, “I don’t feel like I can walk in somewhere else and love other kids.”

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