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Gen Z asks: what is school for? Plus, rebranding gentrification

A student waits to walk across the stage to receive her diploma during a graduation ceremony at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School in Bradley, Illinois.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
A student waits to walk across the stage to receive her diploma during a graduation ceremony at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School in Bradley, Illinois.

It's September, which means millions of young learners across the country are dusting off their backpacks and heading back to school. But a new study from Gallup and The Walton Family Foundation has shown that students are less engaged, and feel less challenged than last year, and about half of them have no plans to get a Bachelor's degree right after high school. Host Brittany Luse is joined by Karin Klein, education reporter and author of Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving Without a Degree, and NPR Education Desk correspondent and Senior Editor Cory Turner to parse through what has next generation feeling despondent and if we need to rethink the purpose of high school.

Then, Brittany is on the housing hunt, but she's found that even outside major urban areas, small cities across the country are rapidly gentrifying. Richard E. Ocejo, author of Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City, joins Brittany to look at what happens when big city gentrifiers move to town and how some of them have rebranded gentrification.

Want to be featured on IBAM? Record a voice memo responding to Brittany's question at the end of the episode and send it to ibam@npr.org.

Copyright 2024 NPR

Brittany Luse
Brittany Luse is an award-winning journalist, on-air host, and cultural critic. She is the host of It's Been a Minute and For Colored Nerds. Previously Luse hosted The Nod and Sampler podcasts, and co-hosted and executive produced The Nod with Brittany and Eric, a daily streaming show. She's written for Vulture and Harper's Bazaar, among others, and edited for the podcasts Planet Money and Not Past It. Luse and her work have been profiled by publications like The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, and Teen Vogue.
Barton Girdwood
[Copyright 2024 NPR]
Alexis Williams
[Copyright 2024 NPR]
Liam McBain
Liam McBain (he/him) is an assistant producer on It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders. He's interested in stories at the margins of culture.
Corey Antonio Rose
[Copyright 2024 NPR]
Jessica Placzek
[Copyright 2024 NPR]
Cory Turner reports and edits for the NPR Ed team. He's helped lead several of the team's signature reporting projects, including "The Truth About America's Graduation Rate" (2015), the groundbreaking "School Money" series (2016), "Raising Kings: A Year Of Love And Struggle At Ron Brown College Prep" (2017), and the NPR Life Kit parenting podcast with Sesame Workshop (2019). His year-long investigation with NPR's Chris Arnold, "The Trouble With TEACH Grants" (2018), led the U.S. Department of Education to change the rules of a troubled federal grant program that had unfairly hurt thousands of teachers.