Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

Kentucky Rep. James Comer (left), chair of the House Oversight Committee, greets Inspector General Michael Horowitz, chair of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, and David Smith, assistant director of the U.S. Secret Service’s Office of Investigations, during a hearing on pandemic relief fraud, Feb. 1, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

A New Jersey man donning a curly orange wig defrauded California and the federal government of more than $1.67 million in pandemic relief funds. They finally caught up with him nearly three years after opening the floodgates of cash.

Next Monday, Eric Michael Jaklitsch is scheduled to be sentenced in two related cases, according to the Department of Justice.

Nearly as extraordinary as the scale of the fraud Mr. Jaklitsch attempted is the degree to which he succeeded. Of the at least $1,280,680 he sought in loans from the Small Business Administration, he was approved for all but $140. And California apparently failed to notice that the same man had filed at least 78 different claims, authorizing Bank of America to mail out dozens of debit cards loaded with unemployment benefits to addresses under his control. 

With estimates indicating that as much as $560 billion, or nearly 20%, was stolen out of more than $3 trillion distributed through the three main pandemic aid programs, Mr. Jaklitsch’s case illustrates the twin challenges now facing states and the federal government as they grapple with what is likely the biggest fraud in U.S. history.

First, they are racing to catch those who committed fraud, particularly the sophisticated criminals and syndicates who saw outsize opportunity in the rapid, massive flows of pandemic relief funds. And second, they are seeking to address long-standing vulnerabilities in government benefit systems that such cases have brought into stark relief.  

A range of individuals and groups, from Chinese, Nigerian, and Russian criminal syndicates, to federal prisoners applying under fake names like “Poopy Pants,” to U.S. citizens posing as other people – including someone pretending to be California Sen. Dianne Feinstein – partook in the illicit pandemic gold rush. Many did so using identity theft, buying individuals’ personal data for pennies in dark corners of the internet and circumventing traditional identity verification techniques.

Now Congress is investigating in earnest. And the White House is asking lawmakers to allocate $1.6 billion to bolster investigation and prosecution of pandemic fraud, as well as improving identity verification and other tools to prevent such theft going forward. 

“We owe it to the American people to get to the bottom of the greatest theft of American taxpayer dollars in history,” said House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, as he opened what he said would be the first of many hearings on pandemic fraud on Feb. 1. “We must identify where this money went, how much ended up in the hands of fraudsters or ineligible participants, and what should be done to ensure it never happens again.”

The scope of fraud and how it happened 

Benefit fraud has been a persistent problem, but the growth in large-scale identity theft – together with the massive flows of money during the pandemic – has made the problem much worse.

Over the past 18 years, the improper payment rate for unemployment insurance claims ranged from 9% to 13%. During the pandemic, that rate jumped to 21%, according to a report from the Department of Labor’s Inspector General Office. Many outside experts see that estimate as conservative.

Evan Vucci/AP/File

President Joe Biden signs the PPP Extension Act of 2021 in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, March 30, 2021. Estimates now indicate that as much as $560 billion was stolen out of more than $3 trillion distributed through the three main pandemic aid programs.

Indeed, one of the major challenges at this stage is accurately estimating the total amount of fraud in the expanded unemployment insurance (UI) as well as the two main programs for businesses: the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL). 

A year ago, the Department of Labor’s inspector general estimated UI fraud at $163 billion, and told Congress it would likely turn out to be higher. Cybersecurity and identity verification company ID.me, which more than two dozen state workforce agencies have hired to help weed out fraudsters, estimates it at $400 billion. 

PPP fraud has been estimated at $80 billion of $800 billion distributed, NBC reported. And the Small Business Administration’s inspector general estimated that $78 billion of the $378 billion distributed through EIDL may have been fraudulent, although that was two years ago, while the agency was still plowing through a huge backlog of complaints about potential fraud. 

California, which ranks among the world’s top five economies by gross domestic product, was the hardest hit by UI fraud.

At the end of the day, both the federal government and states share responsibility for the scope of fraud, says McGregor Scott, special counsel for California’s fraud investigation.

He says Congress passed legislation “in a panic” in the spring of 2020 that was well intentioned but essentially created whole new categories of people eligible for UI overnight – and significantly increased the amount of benefits available per individual.

“It created wide lanes for fraudsters to drive down,” says Mr. Scott. 

SOURCE:

U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Government Accountability Office

|

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Prior to the pandemic, employers vouched for claimants’ identity and employment. When the federal government expanded unemployment coverage to include self-employed workers, they were able to self-assert that information without any additional verification. Similarly, applicants seeking loans for their businesses under the $800 billion PPP self-certified their applications. 

“No one can walk into a bank today and get a loan and say, ‘No, no, really, I’m this person, give me the money’ – but that’s what was going on,” said DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who chairs the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, at the Feb. 1 Oversight hearing. 

In the early months of the pandemic, there was an understandable urgency to getting relief funds to individuals and businesses. But some protections that could have easily been utilized were bypassed. For example, PPP loans were not cross-checked with “do not pay” databases, which would have flagged 57,000 loans worth $3.6 billion by August 2020, according to the White House. In addition, the legislation passed by Congress in the spring of 2020 was interpreted by many to discourage using businesses’ tax records to verify their loan applications, a practice that the Biden administration reinstated in 2021. 

“I will be the first to say all three of those programs did enormous good for tens of millions of people,” says Gene Sperling, the Biden administration’s coordinator of the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package enacted in spring 2021. “But I would hope that when people look back, they realize that there were guardrails that were taken down at the onset of the pandemic, where the differential in speed was not worth this degree of massive fraud it led to,” he adds, referring to decisions taken by the Trump administration in 2020.  

“Strike force teams” to catch criminals

Mr. Jaklitsch was apprehended thanks to the work of one of three “strike force teams” set up by the Department of Justice in September 2022. The teams, based in California, Florida, and Maryland, combine the firepower of multiple agencies to investigate and prosecute large-scale pandemic relief fraud, including multistate and transnational schemes. 

The California strike team, supported by U.S. attorney offices in both Sacramento and Los Angeles, also led to the sentencing of Daryol Richmond, a former gang member who got five years in jail after pleading guilty to his role in a scheme to submit up to $25 million in fraudulent claims, $5.5 million of which were paid out. 

“I’m hopeful that we see the strike team concept expand to other districts,” says Phillip Talbert, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, whose office is part of the California team.

Indeed, the White House has recommended tripling the number of strike teams as part of its $1.6 billion pandemic anti-fraud proposal, pending funding approval from Congress.

Mr. Sperling says the proposal would better allocate government resources, allowing inspectors general to seek civil remedies in cases of up to $1 million – up from the current cap of $150,000 under the Fraud Civil Remedies Act – while boosting the Justice Department’s ability to tackle more sophisticated cases.  

The proposal would not only increase the number of strike force teams but also make them more robust. 

When Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the strike force teams in September, he said the Department of Justice had seized more than $1.2 billion and charged over 1,500 defendants across the country. Since then, the strike force teams have led to arrests, charges, and/or sentences in at least half a dozen other major cases in addition to Mr. Jaklitsch’s and Mr. Richmond’s, with many more underway.

“The Justice Department’s COVID Fraud Strike Forces continue to build on the outstanding work being done around the country by our prosecutors and law enforcement partners,” said Michael C. Galdo, the Justice Department’s acting director of COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement, in a statement to the Monitor. “Fraudsters hiding overseas will not stop our prosecutors from working with our law enforcement partners around the globe to bring those to justice who stole from the American people.”

Large-scale identity theft

In May 2022, Yvette Mayfield, city clerk in the oil town of Taft, California, was alerted by her employer that someone posing as her had claimed to have been laid off and was seeking unemployment benefits. She also got a notification from Bank of America that her benefits card was ready – but it went to someone else with another address. 

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

City Clerk Yvette Mayfield of Taft, California, pop. 7,100, says she feels fortunate that her government employer is small enough that it realized someone was fraudulently applying for unemployment benefits in her name and let her know.

She says the city called California’s Employment Development Department but never heard back, and all she could do was report “her” benefits card as stolen, and Bank of America canceled it. Then the fraudulent applicant managed to order a replacement card. Again, she was able to get Bank of America to intervene, but it left her feeling as if there was widespread fraud – and little that victims of identity theft could do about it.  

“Nobody ever told me, ‘We can stop this; we can fix this,’” says Mrs. Mayfield, who now monitors her credit closely. 

California initially estimated the state’s UI fraud at $11 billion in early 2021, but revised that estimate to $20 billion before the end of the year. As of June 2022, it had recovered $1.1 billion. 

While the losses in California are the most of any state, Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, credits the state for responding early to fraudulent claims and working to tighten its systems, and for being more transparent than other states. 

Mr. Hall says policymakers should have foreseen the potential for such massive fraud, which states – in charge of dispersing UI benefits – were unprepared to deal with. 

“It’s very naive for a policymaker to look at that program and to say there’s not going to be rampant fraud when you have billions of dollars that are literally protected by the honor system,” says Mr. Hall. “States did not have adequate funding for just basic protections.”

Next steps

The White House is trying to fix that now. Its proposal would allocate $600 million toward fraud prevention, including tools that would prevent identity theft. It would also put $400 million toward helping victims of identity theft, and $600 million toward investigating and prosecuting major or systemic pandemic fraud. 

Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, which works with the government to prevent identity fraud, says zero fraud would be impossible to achieve. But he says a handful of measures – including improved front-end identity verification, comparing names of applicants across states to prevent duplicate payments, and boosting staffing for program integrity – could get the rate of fraud as low as 3%, which he calls a “world-class number.”

Meanwhile, the strike force teams are benefiting from President Joe Biden’s extension of the statute of limitations from five to 10 years for PPP and EIDL fraud, so they can bring to justice the most sophisticated criminals. The White House has proposed likewise giving them a decade to prosecute UI fraud. However, recovering stolen funds is still a race against the clock.

In a case investigated by the Maryland strike force team, Alexander Barabash pleaded guilty last month to wire fraud, after repeatedly lying on PPP loan applications, and will have to pay a money judgment of $1,295,000 and forfeit $504,869.54 in his business bank account, as well as his interest in a Maryland property. But it’s not always possible to recover the funds stolen, or recoup the original value of assets purchased with them.

“We claw back as much as we can,” says Mr. Talbert, the U.S. attorney in Sacramento. “But the longer it takes to identify the fraudster and bring them to justice, the less likely it is that there are assets that we can claw back.” 

* Editor's note: A name spelling and a job title in this story were corrected.

A yellow brick building in a residential neighborhood of Kyiv operates much like a retail warehouse. Orders arrive via forms filled out online. Volunteers neatly pack the day’s deliveries into cardboard boxes affixed with large white labels announcing their contents and intended destinations.

The recipients are primarily Ukrainian soldiers and volunteer fighters locked in battle with Russian forces in the east of the country. The items being packed, from drones to rifle scopes to satellite telephones, have been bought for them by members of the public. So have armored personnel carriers, but they do not fit in the boxes.

Call it combat crowdfunding.

“This is about Ukrainian unity,” says Serhiy Prytula, coffee mug in hand. He heads the foundation that runs this depot, keeping the front lines supplied. It has raised over $100 million from the public to help supply the Ukrainian army and intelligence services with military equipment. “We are talking about total war.”

A cursory glance around the front room reveals the variety of supplies that are sent out free of charge: two drones destined for one brigade, a Starlink internet module for another; two generators and thermal vision gear for a Special Forces regiment; and countless Lenovo tablets loaded with software used to coordinate artillery fire.

Tank antennas, power banks, and rifle scopes fill a back room. The group makes anywhere from three to 15 deliveries daily to different parts of Ukraine.

Mr. Prytula, a former TV host and actor whose epic military fundraising efforts have turned him into a household name, is both tired and upbeat. He has just returned from a trip to Lviv, near the Polish border, where he had collected a batch of 24 armored personnel vehicles.

Dominique Soguel

Serhiy Prytula sits in a conference room at the charity he runs in Kyiv, Ukraine, March 6, 2023. Mr. Prytula's organization has raised over $100 million from the public to help supply the Ukrainian army and intelligence services with military equipment.

It had taken less than two days to raise the $6.5 million needed to pay for them, which Mr. Prytula calls “another example of there is no such thing as impossible in the Ukrainian language.”

Crowdfunding has become a way of life in wartime Ukraine. Those fighting in the front may be far away, but they are not forgotten in Kyiv. Billboard campaigns urge citizens to fund the war effort. Opening any social media app, such as Instagram; the messaging app Telegram; or ride-sharing platforms, such as BlaBlaCar, prompts a request to donate to the troops.

And in a country where the ease and sophistication of digital financial transactions eclipse the rest of Europe, it takes just a click or a swipe to give.

“It’s not a ‘should’”

Normally, the Ukrainian military would provide its soldiers with all the arms and supplies they need in the field. But with the unexpectedness of Russia’s invasion last year, combined with the desperation of Ukraine’s defense, the number – and corresponding needs for materiel – of Ukraine’s soldiers quickly ballooned beyond the state’s ability to equip them.

Enter the crowdfunders. Fundraising campaigns to support the war effort have come in all shapes and sizes. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s United24, the official fundraising platform, has raised over $302 million from private and corporate donors at home and abroad, an effort audited by Deloitte. The Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation, one of the country’s largest, has raised $114 million, with Ukrainians accounting for the bulk of contributions. And then there are individual collections, which range from the regular to sporadic.

Dominique Soguel

Kateryna Smirnova stands below the Golden Gate fortification in Kyiv, Ukraine, March 10, 2023. The freelance theater actress budgets $40 a month for donations, but emotional appeals by her friends mean she often goes over.

The practice for some is as regular as a morning coffee or a monthly paycheck (for those who still get one). The seemingly endless giving is rooted in an unprecedented national unity as much as a shared sense of responsibility. Not everyone is fighting or willing to do so, but everyone is invested in a decisive military victory over Russia. The consistency of the generosity helps lift the spirits of soldiers who are not just risking life and limb but also constantly needing to repair and replace their equipment.

“When I get paid, I donate 10% of my salary,” says Sasha Yatzivo, a software front-end developer, wrapped against the evening chill in a black coat and floral scarf. Her money typically goes to finance the efforts of a friend who puts together packs of medical supplies for soldiers. “It is the right thing to do. Our armed forces need our support to deliver victory as soon as possible. It’s not a ‘should.’ ... I have to do it.”

“It’s more than crowdfunding,” says Dmytro Sidelnyk, a motion graphics designer dragging his dog on an uphill night walk in the capital. “We are fighting for our lives and our values. We don’t want to live in tyranny and in fear.”

He used to live in New Zealand, but love of country brought him back to Ukraine during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now he participates in fundraising neighborhood runs for the army and donated 50% of his earnings from summer online classes to support the war effort. “Our society works like a hive, like bees,” he reflects. “We have small groups that can do things independently, make decisions independently.”

“It means we don’t feel abandoned”

The willingness to chip in cuts across generations and budgets. Kateryna Smirnova, a young freelance theater actress and traditional singer, says her social circles might not be flush with cash, but everyone chips in small amounts regularly.

“I really appreciate the campaigns that say that 15 hryvnia [41 cents] per day is still a lot,” she says. “If thousands do it, it matters. We have to survive ourselves, but we all have to contribute somehow.” She herself budgets $40 per month for donations, but emotional appeals by her friends – such as one trying to get night vision goggles for her dad serving on the front – mean she often goes over.

Having a personal connection is crucial for smaller campaigns. Tamila Selina, a middle-aged music teacher, wants to know exactly to whom her money is going. During the last crowdfunding campaign, she donated $50 to help repair the drone of her colleague’s son serving in the army. “They gathered all the money in just one day,” she says with a sense of marvel.

Dominique Soguel

Artist Dmytro Onga Kornilov, who has raised thousands of dollars to purchase tactical gear, stresses the importance of developing expertise to be a good supplier. “To do your job properly as a volunteer you need to dive into the details of what you are procuring,” he says.

Dmytro Onga Kornilov, an Odesa native who has tapped into the global NFT digital art community to raise thousands of dollars to purchase tactical gear, says that it’s important to do the research to make sure you’re supplying the right gear to the right troops. Otherwise, the civilian-to-soldier supply lines can miss the mark. “You need to check military requests. Does the unit exist and actually need what is being requested? Only then you start making arrangements,” he says. “Your main resource is your reputation. You can only get it wrong once. It is all about trust.”

Crowdfunding campaigns by civil society help relieve pressure on the government. It’s less effective for the state to spend time buying 150,000 helmets when it needs to focus on securing tanks and high-grade military equipment, argues Mr. Kornilov. That means that civilians like him need to develop expertise. “To do your job properly as a volunteer you need to dive into the details of what you are procuring,” he says.

That kind of care is highly appreciated by men on the front. “The most important aspect about this crowdfunding help is the consistency,” says Oleksiy Bilkovskiy, who is part of a nationalist paramilitary group that was absorbed into the Armed Forces of Ukraine. “It is not a one-off. The flow doesn’t stop and that is key because there are so many expendables. It means we don’t feel abandoned. We feel that this whole engine of resiliency is working around us.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.

Lindsey Wasson/AP

Santos Enrique Camara, who dropped out of community college when he was 19 after two semesters, stands for a portrait near his home March 24, 2023, in Marysville, Washington. Mr. Camara had difficulty paying tuition and finding time for schoolwork while caring for his younger sister.

When Santos Enrique Camara arrived at Shoreline Community College in Washington State to study audio engineering, he quickly felt lost.

“It’s like a weird maze,” recalls Mr. Camara, who was 19 at the time and had finished high school with a 4.0 grade-point average. “You need help with your classes and financial aid? Well, here, take a number and run from office to office and see if you can figure it out.”

Advocates for community colleges defend them as the underdogs of America’s higher education system, left to serve the students who need the most support but without the money required to provide it. Critics contend that this has become an excuse for poor success rates that are getting worse and for the kind of faceless bureaucracies that ultimately prompted Mr. Camara to drop out after two semesters; he now works in a restaurant and plays in two bands.

“I gave it my all,” Mr. Camara says. “But you’re sort of screwed from the get-go.”

With scant advising, many community college students spend time and money on courses that won’t transfer or that they don’t need. Though most intend to move on to get bachelor’s degrees, only a small fraction succeed; fewer than half earn any kind of a credential. Even if they do, a new survey finds that many employers don’t believe they’re ready for the workforce.

Now these failures are coming home to roost. 

Even though community colleges are far cheaper than four-year schools – published tuition and fees last year averaged $3,860, versus $39,400 at private and $10,940 at public four-year universities, with many states making community college free and President Joe Biden proposing free community college nationwide – consumers are abandoning them in droves. 

“The reckoning is here,” says Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center, or CCRC, at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

The number of students at community colleges has fallen 37% since 2010, or by nearly 2.6 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC).

Lindsey Wasson/AP

Santos Enrique Camara prepares food at Capers + Olives in March in Everett, Washington. Mr. Camara finished high school with a 4.0 grade-point average, but says trying to get questions answered about classes and financial aid in community college was a challenge. “It’s like a weird maze,” he says.

Those numbers would be even more grim if they didn’t include high school students taking dual-enrollment courses, who the colleges count in their enrollment but on whom they’re losing money, according to the CCRC. High school students now make up nearly a fifth of community college enrollment.

Yet even as these colleges serve fewer students, their already low success rates have by at least one measure gotten worse.

Two-year community colleges have the worst completion rates of any kind of universities and colleges. Like Mr. Camara, nearly half of students drop out, within a year, of the community college where they started. Only slightly more than 40% finish within six years. That was up by just under 1 percentage point last year from the year before.

While 4 out of 5 students who begin at a community college say they plan to go on to get a bachelor’s degree, only about 1 in 6 of them actually manages to do it. That’s down by nearly 15% since 2020, according to the NSCRC.

“When we talk about transfer students, I just want to cry. And the sad thing is, they blame themselves,” says Dr. Jenkins.

These frustrated wanderers include a disproportionate share of Black and Hispanic students. Half of all Hispanic students and 40% of all Black students in higher education are enrolled at community colleges, the American Association of Community Colleges, or AACC, says. 

The spurning of community colleges has important implications for the national economy, which relies on graduates of those schools to fill many of the jobs in which there are already shortages, including as nurses, dental hygienists, emergency medical technicians, vehicle mechanics, and in fields including information technology, construction, and law enforcement.

Competitive market

Other factors are also contributing to the huge enrollment decline at community colleges. Strong demand in the job market for people without college educations has made it more attractive for many to go to work than to school. Thanks to so-called degree inflation, many jobs that do require a higher education now call for bachelor’s degrees where associate degrees or certificates were once sufficient. And private, regional public and for-profit universities, facing enrollment crises of their own, are competing to steal away high school graduates who might be considering community college.

Ross D. Franklin/AP/File

People walk on the campus of Phoenix College, part of the Maricopa County Community College system, on May 4, 2021, in Phoenix. In November 2022, Arizona voters approved an initiative that allows some non-citizen students to pay cheaper, in-state tuition at state universities and community colleges.

Many high school graduates are increasingly questioning the value of going to college at all. The proportion who enroll in the fall after they finish high school is down from a high of 70% in 2016 to 63% in 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s the most recent period for which the figure is available.

But they are particularly rejecting community college. In Michigan, for instance, the proportion of high school graduates enrolling in community college fell more than three times faster from 2018 to 2021 than the proportion going to four-year universities, according to that state’s Center for Educational Performance and Information. 

Those who do go complain of red tape and other frustrations. 

Megan Parish, who at 26 has been in and out of community college in Arkansas since 2016, says she waits two or three days to get answers from advisers. “I’ve had to go out of my way to find people, and if they didn’t know the answer, they would send me to somebody else, usually by email.” Hearing back from the financial aid office, she says, can take a month.

David Hodges, also in his mid-20s, enrolled at Essex County College in New Jersey, to move beyond the odd jobs he’d been working since high school, including seasonal gigs at Amazon and FedEx. He says he called and visited the school to try to get information about enrolling, but kept being told that he needed his mother’s tax information to get financial aid.

“I was 24. I told them that I’m an adult. I don’t live with my mother anymore. She lives in a different state,” he says.

Finally, the college told him he needed to take remedial courses in writing and math, for which he paid $1,000. Mr. Hodges ended up  dropping out after one semester.

Employers, meanwhile, are “lukewarm” about the quality of community college students who do manage to graduate, according to a survey released in December by researchers at the Harvard Business School. Only about a quarter strongly agree that community colleges produce graduates who are ready to work, the survey found.

“It’s not impossible”

Economic necessity and attention to diversity have prompted some states to try to help address the ailing fortunes of community colleges.

Michigan is trying to prod more people there to go to community colleges by providing free community college tuition to residents 25 and older. More than 24,000 have enrolled through the program, called Michigan Reconnects, and 2,000 have completed a degree or a certificate, according to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity.

In Texas, a commission has proposed tying an additional $600 million to $650 million in funding for community colleges over the next two years to the proportion of their students who graduate or transfer to a four-year university.

That’s the kind of money community colleges say they need, considering how much less funding they’re allotted, per student, than public four-year universities: $8,695, according to the Center for American Progress, compared to $17,540. Community colleges get less to spend, per student, than the average that the Census Bureau says is spent per student in kindergarten through grade 12. 

Yet community college students need more support than their better-prepared counterparts at four-year universities. Twenty-nine percent are the first in their families to go to college, 15% are single parents and 68% work while in school. Twenty-nine percent say they’ve had trouble affording food and 14% affording housing, according to a survey by the Center for Community College Student Engagement. 

Community colleges that fail these students can’t just blame their smaller budgets, says Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and co-author of the December study on employers. 

“The lack of resources inside community colleges is a legitimate complaint. But a number of community colleges do extraordinarily well,” Mr. Fuller says. “So it’s not impossible.”  

Monitor staff writer Ira Porter, Rebecca Griesbach of AL.com, and Ellen Dennis, freelancing for the Seattle Times, contributed to this report. 

Editor’s note: This article has been updated, in two places, to more clearly describe the Harvard Business School study’s findings on employer views of community college graduates.

Editor’s note: This story was produced by The Hechinger Report as part of the series Saving the College Dream, a collaboration between Hechinger and Education Labs and journalists at The Associated Press, AL.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Seattle Times, and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, with support from the Solutions Journalism Network.

Randy Hoeft/The Yuma Sun/AP

Personnel from Arizona county sheriffs’ offices use their smartphones before a February 2023 congressional hearing about border issues inside the Yuma City Hall council chambers. Cellphones have come a long way since the first mobile call was placed on April 3, 1973.

The first cellphone call was a competitive triumph. On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper dialed up his rival at AT&T on a phone that weighed 2.4 pounds and was the size of brick. He wanted his competitor to be the first to know that his team had successfully completed a working mobile phone. 

It was just the beginning.

That competitive spirit of innovation has catapulted the technology upward – and transformed society so much that it’s now difficult to think of life without cellphones. 

How did cellphones arise and spread?

The cellular mobile phone Mr. Cooper used to make his call was the DynaTAC 8000X, requiring a 10-hour charge for a 30-minute call. It would be another decade before it was commercially available. In 1983, consumers could finally buy it for $3,995 ($12,000 in today’s money). 

In 1992, IBM released the first smartphone, or a phone capable of performing the functions of a computer. Variations ensued: shrinking sizes, the flip phone, and the Blackberry. In a 2007 revolution, Apple combined touch-screen and other technologies in its iPhone, popularizing the smartphone as a handheld computer. The phone became a camera and a device for all manner of apps, not just for calls and texts. Developments have continued, led by Apple and Google’s competing Android platform. 

Today, 85% of Americans own a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center surveys. Globally, by some estimates, there are nearly as many active cellphone subscriptions as people on the planet. And the pace of growth in new mobile subscriptions, though slowing as smartphones become ubiquitous, has been above 5% annually in recent years.

Where will they go next?

To understand the future of the cellphone, it’s vital to understand its purpose as a communication device, says futurist Brian David Johnson at Arizona State University. “It’s really important to remember that at the center of this technology is people,” he says.

Phones already have changed forms countless times. What started as the size of a brick is now something you can wear on your wrist or in an earbud. It’s just going to get smaller and more convenient to use, Mr. Johnson says. It seems to be evolving toward incorporation into eyeglasses, virtual-reality headsets, or even chips implanted in (or “tattooed” on) one’s body. New forms of data display could include holographic images.

At the same time, advancements in artificial intelligence are also going to change the game, he says. Cellphone capabilities will continue to grow beyond question-and-answer digital assistants like Siri and Alexa. Your phone will know you and anticipate your needs. Our cellphones will become a personal assistant, says Mr. Johnson.

“They’re going to be your artificial intelligence. Your own autonomous technology,” he says. Scammers too will become more advanced – such as by imitating voices and visual appearances in a video. 

Cellphone-type devices are never going to go away because humans are always going to want to stay connected.

“The more technology we have, the more human we become,” Mr. Johnson argues. 

Are phones actually improving our lives? 

It depends on whom you ask. In developing nations, cellphones have expanded job opportunities, access to education, and the ease of financial transactions and banking. A 2018 Gallup World Poll found that 79% of people in developing economies now own a mobile phone.

In fact, life without a cellphone is difficult to imagine for most, says Joanne Orlando, a digital well-being specialist in Sydney, Australia. A device that can keep track of work, texts, calls, and social media, and provide access to limitless information, is both a blessing and a curse, she says. 

“The way I see it, it’s not an object that we own anymore,” says Dr. Orlando, who regularly interviews adults and teens about their technology habits. “It’s become part of who we are now. It’s like having another arm, it’s become an extension of ourselves.” 

But the flip side, says Dr. Orlando, is that most of the people she interviews tell her they are “addicted” to their cellphones.

Recent studies find that teens especially struggle with technology overuse. The line between connection and over-connection, partly due to pressure from peers, can be blurry. Some Gen Zers are encouraging their peers to unplug from TikTok, influencers, and the like by bringing back the flip phone. 

Amid habits of endless scrolling, Dr. Orlando suggests asking yourself how your phone can work for you, instead of vice versa. 

“How,” she asks, “can you have such an amazing thing and not use it well?” 

For decades, the word “Somalia” has been associated with mass hunger, clan conflict, and the Islamist militant group Al Shabab. For Americans specifically, Somalia is often synonymous with the 15-hour street fight in October 1993 that claimed the lives of 18 U.S. troops, memorialized in the film “Black Hawk Down.”

But today – even as famine looms again over Somalia, amid the worst drought in 40 years – the majority of this nation’s roughly 17 million citizens get on with daily life the best they can. For residents of Mogadishu, that can mean taking advantage of the beaches and warm sea that define the southeastern edge of the capital.

A small fleet of fishing skiffs is moored in the quaint old port in the shadow of the ruins of Italian colonial-era buildings dating back nearly a century. Men bring in hauls of tuna and sometimes shark, while children play in the surf. But the real place of unbridled happiness lies just up the coastline, at Lido Beach. It is here that families feel the rush of the waves, laughing and shouting as they enjoy the freedom offered by the sea. Women enter fully clothed, and life jackets can be rented for those who can’t swim.

Keeping the beach clean has become a priority, in the process turning its increasingly pristine expanse into an unexpected community hub.

At dawn on Friday mornings citizen volunteers take to the sands, leaving daily dangers behind as they comb the coastline for trash.

“We need our city to be cleaner, for that we do it. It is too important,” says Sirad Mohamed Nur, a volunteer who also runs a rehabilitation center for children that focuses on drug abuse.

The volunteers have been out every week for more than a year, their numbers having grown from just six to more than 300.

“The environment is important for everyone,” says Abdisatar Arbow Ibrahim, who started the beach cleanup project. “In Somalia, people are starting to understand the value of volunteer work and the environment.”

Guy Peterson

A mother sits with her children on Lido Beach, where a volunteer cleanup initiative ensures the waves can be enjoyed by Mogadishu residents.

Guy Peterson

A fisher carries a shark on his head at Mogadishu’s old fishing port, down the coast from Lido Beach.

Guy Peterson

Volunteers gather rubbish on Lido Beach. The weekly cleanups, which started with six people more than a year ago and now involve more than 300, have made the beach not only safer but also a source of pride.

Guy Peterson

Children play near ruins built during the Italian colonial era.

Reuters/file

Migrants wash dishes after a free meal distributed by L'Autre Cantine association in Nantes, France.

There are 295 million people worldwide living outside the country of their birth – most of them economic migrants and refugees, according to the World Bank. Some countries, like Canada, see this human flow as an economic boost for their aging populations. For others, immigration raises questions about security and national identity.

A new study of the migrant experience in France, however, shows that the most difficult challenge may be managing perceptions. Immigration has been a persistent political fault line from one French election to the next. Yet new insights from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies show that immigration is steadily deepening bonds of unity and affection. As demographer François Héran told Le Monde last week, immigration “is not a massive intrusion, but a lasting infusion.”

The evidence is not immediately clear. The French national police reported 12,600 racist, xenophobic, and anti-religious offenses in 2022. A modest dip from the previous year, those incidents likely reflect only a fraction of the real total. Officials estimate that most go unreported. At the same time, however, the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights found in its latest index of social harmony that “tolerance has never been so high.”

The National Institute reports 1 in 10 people in France is an immigrant – consistent with the average across Western Europe. Those immigrants have an average standard of living that is 22% lower than the national average. But their experience shows that, starting from the earliest school years, inclusive education is resulting in more economic equality, secularization, and shared identity. One-third of the children of immigrants attain management-level or middle-class jobs. Two-thirds form multiracial life partnerships.

“The great replacement of the French population is a myth,” wrote a collection of 400 French intellectuals in an open letter last week calling for a citizen convention on migration to promote accurate public dialogue and unity. Year by year, they noted, “prejudices are losing ground in France [and] tolerance of others is increasing.”

Daily social contact has served as an important buffer against hate. Even after two French-born Muslim brothers attacked the offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo in Paris in 2015, killing 12 and injuring 11, a Pew public opinion survey found an across-the-spectrum rejection of anti-Muslim hatred.

Nowadays, French traditionalists have a different way of measuring their gratitude for how foreigners are enriching and preserving their cultural heritage. Since 1970, France has been losing 400 artisanal bakeries a year as industrial bakers have overtaken markets, according to UNESCO. But in recent years, the baguette has found a new line of defense – a batch of young bakers with names like Mahmoud M’Seddi and Makram Akrout, who have become the bread makers of French presidents.

“I’m French,” Mr. M’Seddi, the son of a Tunisian immigrant, told The New York Times. “This is my home.” Yet it is a home defined by both France’s past and the country’s welcoming of future citizens.