Weekly Update

_{Roanoke College players participate in a practice drill on the Salem, Va., campus. This is Roanoke's first season playing varsity football since 1942. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report}

Football fantasy

On a hot and humid August morning in this southwestern Virginia town, football training camp is in full swing at Roanoke College. Players cheer as a receiver makes a leaping one-handed catch, and linemen sweat through blocking drills. Practice hums along like a well-oiled machine — yet this is the first day this team has practiced, ever.

In fact, it’s the first day of practice for a Roanoke College varsity football team since 1942, when the college dropped football in the midst of World War II.

Roanoke is one of about a dozen schools that have added football programs in the last two years, with several more set to do so in 2026. They hope that having a team will increase enrollment, especially of men, whose ranks in college have been falling. Yet research consistently finds that while enrollment may spike initially, adding football does not produce long-term enrollment gains, or if it does, it is only for a few years.

Roanoke’s president, Frank Shushok Jr., nonetheless believes that bringing back football – and the various spirit-raising activities that go with it — will attract more students, especially men. The small liberal arts college lost nearly 300 students between 2019 and 2022, and things were likely to get worse; the country’s population of 18-year-olds is about to decline and colleges everywhere are competing for students from a smaller pool.

“Do I think adding sports strategically is helping the college maintain its enrollment base? It absolutely has for us,” said Shushok.  “And it has in a time when men in particular aren’t going to college.”  

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Students, schools race to save clean energy projects in face of Trump deadline

Tanish Doshi was in high school when he pushed the Tucson Unified School District to take on an ambitious plan to reduce its climate footprint. In Oct. 2024, the availability of federal tax credits encouraged the district to adopt the $900 million plan, which involves goals of achieving net-zero emissions and zero waste by 2040, along with adding a climate curriculum to schools.

Now, access to those funds is disappearing, leaving Tucson and other school systems across the country scrambling to find ways to cover the costs of clean energy projects.

The Arizona school district, which did not want to impose an economic burden on its low-income population by increasing bonds or taxes, had expected to rely in part on federal dollars provided by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, Doshi said.

But under HR1, or the “one big, beautiful bill,” passed on July 4, Tucson schools will not be able to receive all of the expected federal funding in time for their upcoming clean energy projects. The law discontinues many clean energy tax credits, including those used by schools for solar power and electric vehicles, created under the IRA.

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