With just a few hours remaining until the midnight deposit deadline, West Virginia high school senior Sam Dodson thought he knew which university he’d commit to for the fall but second thoughts were bubbling up. Accepted to a number of prestigious institutions, he had narrowed his final choice down to two: Columbia University and Dartmouth College.

There were multiple considerations at play: academic opportunities; social life; Manhattan’s Upper West Side vs. bucolic Hanover, New Hampshire. And over the past few weeks a new one had emerged: the quickly spreading pro-Palestinian campus protests and subsequent arrests for which Columbia was ground zero.

Dodson was one of these students, watching closely as protesters occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall were cleared from the building Tuesday by the New York Police Department.. 

“All of that made me wait until kind of the last minute to officially decide,” the track runner told ����Ӱ��.

The class of 2024 has had a high school experience bookended by jarring national news, their freshman year coinciding with school shutdowns and COVID-era virtual learning and their senior year ending amid a volatile movement protesting Israel’s assault in Gaza that has swept up dozens of colleges and brought over 2,000 arrests, according to a tally. As seniors weigh options for their future universities, some are looking to the actions of college student activists and the responses of their respective administrations before making final decisions.

“I do think that all of the turmoil and things that are going on definitely had me reconsidering. It had me having second thoughts about different things and had me, I guess, take second looks at different schools,” Dodson said. “But ultimately I guess I tried to look past anything with that and understand that this is a choice I’m making for the next four years and what I think would be the best experience for me — academically, personally, in terms of just student life. All of those things.”

Dodson’s experiences are reflective of as well. Safa Al-Omari, a senior at NYC’s The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology told she is still deciding between City College and Hunter College. The Yemeni student said she wants to do more research about City College’s response to the protests before she commits.

“Being Middle Eastern, I have a lot of feelings about what’s going on,” Al-Omari said. “I would not want to go to a college that is arresting students based on them speaking for people who are suffering.”

For Sam Dodson’s mom, Sarah, there were also conflicting emotions. “It’s very hard to put the ‘yes’ when you have a lot of … chaos,” she said. While she said her son was drawn to the diversity of perspectives on Columbia’s campus, the more heated elements of the past few weeks have given him pause. At the same time, she emphasized the importance of being in a higher education space where free speech is strongly respected and encouraged. 

“You never want your kid to go to a school that is on the national news because of police involvement, right? It just doesn’t sit really well,” she said. “However, I guess I am under the assumption that there’s going to be resolution … I’m guessing because this is a college platform that they are going to hopefully have more engaging, open conversations so that there can be some sort of — I don’t know — persistence of everyday campus life that is not so inflamed.”

For now, all academic activities on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus — including finals — have been moved fully remote for the remainder of the semester. On May 6, the school to cancel the university-wide commencement scheduled for May 15 and instead focus on school-level graduation ceremonies. The NYPD had been asked to maintain a police presence until two days after the main commencement; it was not immediately clear how the cancellation might impact that.

Sam Dodson, who began his freshman year of high school in hybrid learning, said it would be frustrating if his first year of college classes also goes remote because of campus unrest. On the other hand, “there’s something interesting about being in the center of the news or the center of exactly what’s happening.” 

Students reconsider and recommit

It was about two week after pro-Palestinian students and activists on Columbia’s campus first erected the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that a group occupied Hamilton Hall, a building with a long history of . Hours later, the cops moved in, arresting, 112 people, including 32 who were not affiliated with the university. 

By this point, the movement had spread across the country, including to Dodson’s other contender, Dartmouth, where nearly were arrested this week. About a week and half before that escalation, Columbia hosted its accepted students weekend and Dodson was there. 

He took some time, he said, to wander around campus and speak with protesting students near the encampment. “They were like, ‘Hey, new Columbia students. Come talk to us!’ You know, I guess, they were very like welcoming. They were very much wanting to talk with the admitted students, which I thought was a nice thing.”

While he was disappointed that many of the accepted student weekend activities had been canceled or modified, he was grateful he got to experience the events on campus firsthand and form his own views.   

Around the same time, another high school senior Lila Ellis, who uses they/ them pronouns, was also closely observing the activities on Columbia’s campus. A Jewish student from Massachusetts, they had committed months before to the dual-degree joint program between Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Ellis said that because of their religion, they’re concerned there are certain places on campus they won’t be welcomed. “I think that to just stay away from all secular extracurriculars entirely, is a disservice to myself and to the community as a whole,” they said. “And I’m just thinking about, like, how am I going to balance that while also, you know, recognizing that some spaces don’t want me in them?”

Ellis pointed to the example of a protester outside the gates of campus , “Go back to Poland,” at Jewish students. Recently, a January video of one of the student protest leaders, Khymani James, began circulating in which he said, “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” He has since been barred from campus and released a of apology. 

Notably, as reported by , protests within the encampment were on the whole peaceful and included Jewish students, though others on campus agreed with Ellis that anti-Zionist rhetoric made them feel unwelcomed. 

While Ellis is sticking with their decision to attend Columbia, they did briefly toy with the idea of a gap year or of moving core curriculum requirements around to stay away from the main campus for a while. 

“I really do want to be in this program,” they said, “And it’s just a matter of thinking about ‘How do we make that work with what’s happening at Columbia?’ rather than ‘Can it work?’ Because I think it can work.” 

As Ellis prepares to enroll for classes — especially literature overview courses on Columbia’s campus — they’re considering a number of factors including whether or not the professors taught from the encampment. 

“Hopefully,” they said, “it’s not an issue in the fall, but just thinking about who were the professors who were willing to do that? And is that an environment that I want to be in for learning and for having an open discussion?”

Their father, Andy Ellis, added his own apprehension. All parents, he said, are nervous to send their first child off to college. But the protests on campus, he said, add an extra dimension, especially for a Jewish student. 

Ellis, a graduate of MIT, has spent significant time in higher education. He said he was on a Harvard visiting committee and in an academic center there for the last decade but resigned from both positions in October, “when it became clear that people were ripping off their mask around anti-semitism.” 

He said that if he were a current student on Columbia’s campus, he would be on the front lines of the counter-protests, displaying footage from Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel.

“I think I would be that person,” the consultant said, “But I know that Lila is not that person. But I also know that Lila is not going to just duck [their]head and stay completely quiet, but I think find a balanced view. Listening to what Lila said about, you know, ‘find the humanity’ is an amazing, generous take. I’m really proud that I think we’ve created somebody who has a better moral compass than I do because I’m a lot more angry.”

Back in West Virginia and with time to spare before Wednesday’s midnight deadline, Dodson had finalized his decision: He committed to be a member of the class of 2028 at Columbia where he plans to study political science and government. 

“I think it’ll just be interesting,” he said, ”to go from — to take my perspective from this kind of small town area where like, I mean, I’ve met people from other places. I try to read, I try to keep myself exposed to those things, but it’d be cool to actually meet people from all sorts of perspectives and all sorts of backgrounds.”

In fact, . In addition to making it more likely that students will face exclusionary discipline, such as suspension and expulsion, students are chronically absent more when campuses are staffed by cops, with researchers identifying a marked spike in missed school days among youth with disabilities. 

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The results, researchers note, suggest that school-based police could hinder students’ academic outcomes, increase their long-term involvement with the criminal justice system and appear to “seriously exacerbate existing opportunity gaps in education.” The effects of school police on discipline and arrests were “consistently over two times larger for Black students” than their white classmates, the study found. 

“There might be these benefits in terms of reduced violence, but there are also these really large costs, and costs that unequally affect students,” said report co-author Lucy Sorensen, an assistant public administration and policy professor at the University of Albany, SUNY.

“At the end of the day, I have a hard time, as an education researcher, thinking this is what we should invest money in,” Sorensen added. 

The report, a working paper released by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University that has not yet been peer reviewed, is the first school-level examination of campus officers across every public school in the U.S. It is also one of the first pieces of in-depth research on the effects of school police to follow a nationwide movement to remove cops from schools that was prompted by the death of George Floyd and argued their presence was especially harmful to students of color.

School security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland, maintained that campus police can be a positive force so long as they’re including a clearly defined selection process for officers who receive specialized training. 

“If you have a properly designed and implemented, supervised and evaluated [school resource officer] program, there are many positive things about that,” he said. “That said, if you have an SRO on your campus, chances are you’re going to see some increase in arrests by the mere fact that the officers are going to identify crimes that school administrators may previously have not recognized and reported.” 

The number of officers stationed in K-12 schools has grown exponentially in the last several decades, largely in response to school shootings, and the federal government has to facilitate that increase. In the 1970s, just 1 percent of schools had police stationed on campus. Today, that figure has jumped to roughly half. 

School shootings remain statistically rare and campuses have grown markedly safer in the last several decades. But the new report throws cold water on a common argument in favor of school policing: Officers failed to prevent school-shootings and other gun-related incidents. In fact, having an officer on campus “marginally increases the likelihood of a school shooting,” according to the report.

Future research should explore the factors that drive that increase, Sorensen said. Though shootings have long motivated police presence in schools, preventing such tragedies is “not what the job entails on a day-to-day basis,” she said, and instead officers “are getting involved in minor disciplinary matters.”

George Floyd’s murder in 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer ignited a heated national debate over the broader role of police in the U.S., and several districts ended their ties with the police or slashed their policing budgets. In Minneapolis, for example, the district terminated its police contract and replaced officers with non-sworn safety agents who lack arrest authority. Several dozen districts nationally made similar decisions as advocates highlighted racial disparities in school-based arrests that fed the school-to-prison pipeline and called on educators to replace cops with counselors and other student support services.

On Wednesday, the City Council in Alexandria, Virginia, its school resource officer program five months after it pulled police from hallways. The reversal followed parent outrage in the wake of . 

The latest research, however, further bolsters a body of evidence on the negative effects of placing police in schools. To reach their findings, researchers analyzed federal education data between 2014 and 2018 and data on law enforcement agencies that applied for federal grants between 2015 and 2017 for school-based policing. In a given year, officers led to a reduction of six non-firearm violent incidents per 100 students, according to the report. They also increased the out-of-school suspension rate by 10.9 students per 100. The increase in student punishments was starkest in middle and high schools where, per 100 students, 17.8 more received out-of-school suspensions, 1.7 more were expelled and 4.8 more were referred to police or arrested. Additionally, results suggest that school police increase chronic absenteeism by 12.2 students for every 100 kids enrolled, and an increase of 13.4 students per 100 among those with disabilities. Across disciplinary outcomes, the results were starker for Black students than their white classmates. 

Overall, the results suggest that stationing police in schools “intensifies the levels of punishment unevenly across different groups of students, and that Black students, male students and students with disabilities generally bear the brunt of this punishment,” according to the report. 

The new report follows a recent study on , which reached similar conclusions. In by the Center for Public Integrity, the nonprofit news outlet found that schools disproportionately referred Black students and those with disabilities to the police at a rate nearly double their share of the overall student population. 

“If you’re going to throw out your SRO program, then you should also throw your administrators out with it because they have been partners in those programs all along,” Trump, the security consultant, said. “It’s not just the police who must be screwing up.”

Ben Fisher, an assistant professor at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, noted the consistency of  the latest research with the North Carolina study, which found a “trade-off between some marginal decreases in school crime and some pretty serious increases in the exclusion of students through suspensions and arrests.” Fisher said it adds to a growing body of research highlighting that school resource officers have a detrimental effect on youth outcomes, while pointing out that other people could view the evidence through a different lens.

“I don’t think it’s good to exclude students from school or arrest them,” said Fisher, who has researched the efficacy of campus police for years but wasn’t involved in the latest report. “Other folks could read that same research and say, ‘There’s more arrests — good. They ought to be removed from schools if they’re doing bad things.’” 

When interacting with students, most school-based officers seek to avoid arrests, according to by the National Association of School Resource Officers, a trade group. About a third of campus arrests are based on observations from officers, according to the survey, and a similar share began with a referral from school staff. 

Ultimately, policymakers should weigh the decreases in campus violence against the other effects of school policing and decide whether other interventions could be more effective, the researchers concluded. 

“Interventions should not just be judged on a single outcome, but comprehensively on many outcomes,” the report states. “It also suggests that the comprehensive impact of using resources for school police should be compared with the comprehensive impact of using resources in other ways to improve school safety and climate,” including in schools, which researchers described as “a single intervention to both reduce suspensions and improve school climate.” 

As school-based police continue to generate passionate debate and additional research emerges about their efficacy, Sorensen said she expects education leaders to increasingly explore alternatives like investing additional money in social workers and mental health services for students.

“I think we’ll see a lot of different experimentation in the coming years,” she said, “and I hope we can learn from that.”