Elissa Nadworny
Elissa Nadworny reports on all things college for NPR, following big stories like unprecedented enrollment declines, college affordability, the student debt crisis and workforce training. During the 2020-2021 academic year, she traveled to dozens of campuses to document what it was like to reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. Her work has won several awards including a 2020 Gracie Award for a story about student parents in college, a 2018 James Beard Award for a story about the Chinese-American population in the Mississippi Delta and a 2017 Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in innovation.
Nadworny uses multiplatform storytelling – incorporating radio, print, comics, photojournalism, and video — to put students at the center of her coverage. Some favorite story adventures include crawling in the sewers below campus to test wastewater for the coronavirus, yearly deep-dives into the most popular high school plays and musicals and an epic search for the history behind her classroom skeleton.
Before joining NPR in 2014, Nadworny worked at Bloomberg News, reporting from the White House. A recipient of the McCormick National Security Journalism Scholarship, she spent four months reporting on U.S. international food aid for USA Today, traveling to Jordan to talk with Syrian refugees about food programs there.
Originally from Erie, Pa., Nadworny has a bachelor's degree in documentary film from Skidmore College and a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
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Noah Kahan went from writing a pandemic album on his parents' farm in rural Vermont to selling out an arena tour and being nominated for best new artist at the Grammys. -
"It's easy, it's fast," Biden said in a press conference announcing the launch, noting applications take less than 5 minutes and can be done on desktop or phone. -
The administration has published its student loan relief application after testing a beta version of the form over the weekend. -
Requirements to test and mask and be vaccinated are becoming less common as colleges shift away from treating COVID-19 as an emergency. -
People are sitting out college in droves. During the pandemic, undergraduate enrollment has dropped nearly 7%. The long-term effects of this decline could have a dramatic impact on the economy. -
Undergraduate college enrollment fell again this spring, down nearly 5% from a year ago. "It's really the end of a truly frightening year for higher education," one researcher says. -
Most of the class of 2020 experienced canceled or online-only graduation ceremonies, but this year many colleges are finding creative ways to celebrate their graduates in person. -
More campuses are expected to add the requirement, with potential legal challenges ahead. One key point: Requiring vaccines for infectious diseases is nothing new for many residential colleges. -
We've talked with hundreds of people since the pandemic shut down schools and colleges a year ago. We checked back back in with three of them about how their lives have changed. -
The president said he doesn't want to forgive the loans of people who went to "Harvard and Yale and Penn." The real picture of student debt in the U.S. is much more complicated.
