2019 Finalist of the EGF Accelerator’s Eddie Prize: The Chronicle of Higher Education Staff

“How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated”

About the Entry

The Chronicle of Higher Education stitched together three different and incompatible databases to do groundbreaking work uncovering the previously unreported impact of college closures. They combined careful data analysis with comprehensive reporting to show the human reality of the roughly half a million students – most of whom come from low-income backgrounds – who were displaced by college closures during the past five years.

Comments from the Judges

“OMG. That video is heartbreaking. What an excellent article on a topic that hasn’t received much attention since the Obama-era for-profit college regulations took effect. The tables on the colleges that have closed were also great resources.”

“This is a fantastic connect-the-dots piece that makes a complex and underreported topic accessible and visible. The plight of these students becomes real, tragic and urgent for the reader. The piece makes clear the ways in which corporate malfeasance and poor regulatory decisions have failed low-income families and upended their lives.”