This story aired in the June 17, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
With graduation season wrapping up, many teenagers around the Bay Area are celebrating the end of high school and are making plans to begin college. But in Washington DC, policymakers are fighting over college access.
In the past year, the Trump Administration has worked quickly to dismantle the Department of Education. And one of the major programs they want to eliminate is called TRIO, a federally-funded initiative that helps low-income students and those who would be the first in their families to go to college.
Thousands of those students in the Bay Area get support from TRIO programs to get into college and graduate. Today, we visit two programs in San Francisco to understand what this political fight means for students.
Click the button above to listen.
Story Transcript:
COMMENCEMENT: A day of transition and a day of transformation on this 124th commencement of Stanford University. Today, we celebrate the accomplishments of those who graduate…
REPORTER: This is from a video my dad recorded of my college graduation back in 2015. More than a decade later, I can clearly remember the look on my dad’s face. He was so proud of me.
COMMENCEMENT: Anna Gabriella Casalme…
REPORTER: And I was, and still am, so grateful to my dad. He immigrated to the US from the Philippines when he was twelve. He worked as a parking lot attendant then a grocery clerk, to put himself through college, graduating after seven years. I didn’t have to do that.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the “American Dream,” this ideal that anyone can attain a better life with hard work and determination. I’ve been thinking about this more lately because of what’s happening with the US Department of Education.
CNN: The Trump Administration is stepping up its push to break up the Department of Education…
REPORTER: In the past year, the department fired half its staff, cut billions of dollars in grants, and moved major programs to other agencies. And I wondered, what does this mean for students in the Bay Area, and their dreams for the future?
JCYC ADVISOR: Listen up! We’re going to get started…
REPORTER: Which is why I find myself in a conference room at the University of San Francisco with about 30 high school students. They’re here on a Saturday morning for a career workshop. And they’re part of a college access program that’s run by local non-profit JCYC.
The students are learning about different career options, what they’d have to study, and how much school they’d need to get that job.
STUDENT 1: I got dentist, bro! Oooh, and orthodontist!
STUDENT 2: Ortho seems really cool…
REPORTER: One of the students is 17-year-old Kourtney Pounders. She lives in the city with her mom, her younger siblings, her nephew, and her dog. Kourtney loves thrifting and playing the online game Roblox. She’s president of the Black Student Union, and she prides herself on being very involved.
KOURTNEY POUNDERS: I can't just be sit at my house, just sitting down. I love always doing something.
REPORTER: She hopes to be the first person in her family to go to college.
POUNDERS: I feel like I really wanna go to college so I can have something going on with my life in the future, and like, so I could do better than my mom. In a good way, y'all, in a good way, to do better than my mom.
REPORTER: Kourtney’s grateful to her mom, Kristina. She braids hair full-time, and moved the family back to San Francisco from Richmond, so Kourtney and her siblings could access programs like this. Kourtney joined this one when she was a freshman.
But the Trump Administration is trying to get rid of TRIO, the federal college access initiative that includes this program I’m observing today, calling it a “relic of the past.”
TRIO was created under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON: My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican American school...
REPORTER: This is from a speech he gave to Congress in 1965 called “The American Promise.”
JOHNSON: My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry…
REPORTER: His time teaching on the US-Mexico border shaped his view on the “American Dream” and his belief that the federal government must make good on that promise.
JOHNSON: Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child...
REPORTER: President Johnson drummed up support for his political agenda like with the Higher Education Act of 1965. It was designed to ensure that every student could access higher education. It created financial aid programs. And it created support programs like TRIO to help low-income and first-generation students get into college and graduate.
JOHNSON: It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students, and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance, and I'll let you in on a secret. I mean to use it.
REPORTER: More than 60 years later, TRIO programs in the Bay Area like Talent Search and Upward Bound support thousands of students every year.
Upward Bound organized a college trip to Southern California, where Kourtney saw UCLA for the first time.
POUNDERS: It really opened my eyes 'cause, once I seen it, I was like, “I think I wanna go to this college. I think this is the college I wanna go to.”
REPORTER: …and during a careers workshop, Kourtney met an OBGYN.
POUNDERS: The OBGYN was like, "Yes, there's different ways how you could deliver a baby, and this and that." And then she was telling her career path, and I'm like, "Oh, that sounds fun. I wanna do that."
REPORTER: And Kourtney’s worked with an advisor, Maekayla Abalos, for three years.
POUNDERS: She just really encouraged me, and she just makes me wanna go push myself out there.
REPORTER: Kourtney goes to Maekayla for everything.
POUNDERS: Scholarships, FAFSA–
REPORTER: That’s the application for federal student aid.
POUNDERS: Grants... I might actually go for, like, help on, like, when I turn 18, like, how do I file taxes and stuff like that, like, my insurance.
REPORTER: Last year, the Trump Administration started cancelling grants for college access programs like the one Kourtney’s in.
I wanted to know why, so I went straight to the top: the US Department of Education. And I actually got a statement back from Ellen Keast, their press secretary. It’s long, but it has two main points.
The first point? The Department of Education says it’s making TRIO more “impactful” by supporting other pathways after high school – like apprenticeships, not just college.
And the statement says TRIO doesn’t increase college enrollment. It argues that most high school students already enroll in college without federal help, and that TRIO programs barely match national averages.
KIMBERLY JONES: It’s disingenuous and untrue.
REPORTER: That’s Kimberly Jones. She runs a national membership organization for TRIO programs and says the Trump Administration is intentionally misreading the data. She says, they’re comparing TRIO students with all high school graduates, instead of students who come from similar backgrounds. In her organization’s analysis of the data, students like Kourtney…
JONES: They outperform low-income students as a whole when it comes to high school graduation, college enrollment, college retention, and college graduation.
REPORTER: And in terms of supporting other paths besides college, Kimberly says the federal government already spends 6 times more on workforce development than on college access. TRIO, she says...
JONES: That's the only national federal investment in higher education access for low-income first-generation students. And to say you even wanna take that away is beyond upsetting because again, it's about exposure. It's about giving students a chance.
REPORTER: So, this intense DC fight has a lot of the usual: congressional hearings, lawsuits, court orders. But there are some dramatic steps being taken – ED Department employees whose jobs got shuttled to the Labor Department filed complaints about their workplaces having no heat, and having leaky ceilings, mold, and mice.
The administration also froze a chunk of the ED department budget that had already been appropriated – that’s called “impoundment.” It’s usually illegal. And that money did eventually get released. Kimberly Jones says: this is “disruptive” and “deliberate” on the part of the Trump administration.
JONES: The law still stands. Until Congress unlegislates the existence of these programs, the federal government is still required to implement them. And so because the administration does not have the wholesale authority to unilaterally stop these programs, they are being disruptive.
REPORTER: For now, the TRIO program Kourtney’s in still has its funding. But others in the Bay Area have already shut down – including one at UC Berkeley. That one was one of the largest in the country with around 1,500 middle and high school students.
Omar Franco oversees college access programs run out of the University of San Francisco. He remembers finding out last summer that one of them was no longer funded.
OMAR FRANCO: We got an email basically letting us know that our grant was cancelled, and we had about maybe a month to close everything down.
REPORTER: He says their funding was cancelled because the Department of Education flagged a part of their grant application that addressed diversity, equity, and inclusion. They’d written two sentences about working with local community organizations supporting Asian and African American communities.
Omar says he appealed the decision but was denied.
FRANCO: It was really heartbreaking for our community and our students just because we had just had our summer program, and you see the big impact that we had on them, and how much they grew, how much they love the program, and then all of a sudden we say, "It's over," and that's it.
REPORTER: Remember Ms. Maekayla, the advisor our student Kourtney depends on? Well, within weeks, the students in Omar’s program lost their version of Ms. Maekayla.
And how do you measure the impact of a loss like that?
Kourtney tells me about a time she was really struggling with a math assignment and she went to Ms. Maekayla.
POUNDERS: I was like, "I don't have any other person that I know is not going to help me with this," so I just went to Ms. Maekayla. I'm like, "Ms. Maekayla, I'm really having a hard time." And plus, it's like, when I went to Ms. Maekayla, I was crying. She's, like, one of the main adults I could just cry to 'cause, like, I don't want other teachers to see me cry. I just feel like I'm able to be vulnerable around Ms. Maekayla.
REPORTER: Maekayla tells me how they addressed the issue together.
MAEKAYLA ABALOS: I said, "Okay, we're gonna talk to your teacher together." And, like, I talked to her teacher, like, "Hey, like, Kourtney needs support on this. Like, would you be able to spend time and help her with it?" And then that's what he did. Like, he helped her. And then I feel like ever since then, I've noticed Kourtney's ability to just be able to advocate for herself and what she needs.
REPORTER: Watching Kourtney talk to her advisor, Ms. Maekayla, I’m reminded of the adults who went out of their way to ask me about my dreams and take them seriously.
Like my 5th grade teacher, Mr. C, who was the first person who told me I was a good writer and asked to read my stories, or my high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Charles, who didn’t laugh when I said I wanted to go to Stanford and told me she thought I could do it.
JCYC ADVISOR: In your groups, you guys can go ahead and talk to each other, like what career did you match with or what career are you interested in?
REPORTER: Today’s career workshop wraps up with the students sharing what they dream of doing in the future.
STUDENT 3: I want to be a veterinarian, so I can be able to help sick animals feel better.
STUDENT 4: I would like to pursue a career in being an immigration lawyer because my community has been impacted by this issue a lot.
STUDENT 5: I would like to be an English teacher for a personal experience because I know this is so hard learning a new language, stay in a new country.
REPORTER: Kourtney remembers the OBGYN she met at a past workshop.
POUNDERS: I want to be an OBGYN so I can help women during the most vulnerable times of their lives.
REPORTER: After the workshop, I sit with Kourtney on a bench by the campus lawn. It’s a sunny day – college students are relaxing on the grass with their friends. It’s a hopeful window into Kourtney’s future, as she reflects with me on the past.
POUNDERS: Honestly, programs like these have given me so much specifically confidence 'cause when, like, a smidget of my ninth grade year, I was at different school, I had no programs like this, and I was just small, and I was scared to talk to people and all that.
REPORTER: She’s confident going into her senior year, but she still has worries.
POUNDERS: That I'm not gonna make it, I'm not gonna accomplish all my dreams that I aspire to have. Like, that I'm not gonna be able to finish college, go explore the world.
REPORTER: The political fight over TRIO is ongoing, with more than 120 programs shut down so far across the country. As of now, Ms. Maekayla will still be there for Kourtney in the fall as she works on her college applications.
POUNDERS: I have so many big plans, and I just don't know what's gonna happen. I'm just scared, but I'm just excited to just know where I'm gonna be.
