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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Fentanyl-related teen overdose deaths nearly tripled from 2019 to 2021. As the school year gets under way, families in mourning urge education leaders to respond. -
Wesleyan University will end its practice of legacy admissions, which gives preference to children of alumni. This comes after the Supreme Court's decision to ban race-conscious college admissions.
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The U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling on affirmative action renewed calls for elite institutions to eliminate "legacy" admissions — or granting advantages to the children of people who attended.
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Following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action, we look at possible implications in higher education, beyond admissions.
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The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. What does this mean for colleges and perspective students?
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Only a small portion of U.S. colleges have selective admissions, where race-conscious admissions can make a difference in who gets in. But the impacts of banning affirmative action are far wider. -
As college tuition continues to rise, families are figuring out where their kids will go to college, and how to pay for it. (Story first aired on All Things Considered on April 27, 2023.)
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As college tuition continues to rise, families are trying to figure out where their kids will go to college and how they'll pay for it.
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In Kharkiv, Ukraine, a kindergarten teacher visits her classroom which hasn't hosted students for more than a year due to Russia's attack on Ukraine.
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Broken glass, empty desks and a love story: War brought upheaval, scattering classmates across the world. Here's how they're settling in after schooling, friendships and families were uprooted.
