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McDaniel Hall is nearly empty on Adams State University’s snow-blanketed campus in January, just before the spring semester is set to begin. Juan Cristobal, a 16-year-old Alamosa High School sophomore, walks the academic building’s hallways in his Nike sneakers, the squeak of rubber on vinyl tiles the only sound in the place.
Juan has spent many hours inside McDaniel. When his sister, Mayra Cristobal, enrolled at the school through the federal College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) three years ago, the university became a fixture in his family’s life. Juan participated in summer programs at McDaniel through Upward Bound—a college preparatory program for high school students from low-income families—and began dreaming about attending school close to home. “It just feels like where I belong,” he says.
Juan was born in Oklahoma and raised in Alamosa, about four hours south of Denver, by his mother, Martha, an immigrant from Guatemala who once worked mushroom and potato farms in the San Luis Valley. The idea of a college education for her children seemed impossible. Then, through a cousin, Mayra learned about CAMP, a nationwide education initiative that provides first-year college tuition and room and board, plus academic counseling and other perks, to the children of migrant workers. For the Cristobals—and thousands of other American children—CAMP made a college degree feel possible.
Mayra enrolled at Adams State in 2023 and quickly found friends among the 25 to 30 CAMP freshmen on campus. She decided to major in social sciences (with an emphasis on forensic science) and Spanish, and her brother heard stories about Mayra’s professors, college projects, and trips she’d taken with her classmates in the program. Juan couldn’t help but be excited for himself. He assumed he’d follow.
Juan’s hopeful vision began to cloud this past fall, during his sophomore year in high school, when he learned Adams State would end its CAMP participation due to discontinued federal funding. The move came as President Donald Trump’s administration intensified its immigration crackdown and pursued sweeping budget cuts—including more than $20 million earmarked for CAMP. The initiative served more than 2,400 freshmen nationwide annually, including more than 100 in Colorado.
In budget documents, the administration described CAMP and other migrant education initiatives, including the High School Equivalency Program, as “extremely costly” and said CAMP had “not been proven effective.” In an instant, a reliable academic lifeline for some of the country’s most at-risk students was eliminated.
In Colorado, schools have been forced to cut positions or reassign staff who once tracked CAMP participants’ grades, guided students through the financial aid process, and provided counseling. Adams State administrators plan to shutter CAMP in May. Metropolitan State University in Denver has already eliminated its program, which served about 650 students during its 26 years. And at the University of Colorado Boulder, leaders are scrambling to find alternative funding.
For Juan, the news has been devastating. “It was kind of scary knowing that it can just be taken like that,” he says. His mother can’t cover tuition on her own, and the reams of federal financial aid documents seem impossible to navigate. Mayra, now a junior, will soon be looking for a job that could take her outside the valley. Juan, who wanted to major in math or chemistry and make friends like Mayra’s, can’t shake the worry that his own future has suddenly vanished.
Perhaps more important than the $10,000 CAMP provided for Mayra’s freshman-year tuition and stipends was that the program made her feel like she belonged. She met other CAMP students who had similar backgrounds. They shared stories of favorite family meals, of relatives in distant countries, and of parents working thankless jobs in fields and farms across the San Luis Valley. Among Mayra’s most treasured memories: kayaking the South Fork River with a new CAMP friend and traveling to a CAMP conference in Santa Fe where she met students from New Mexico and other Colorado campuses. She speaks fondly of her first academic adviser, who’d come to the United States from Mexico and understood what it was like to learn English as a second language.
Created as an outgrowth of President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, CAMP extends a helping hand to children of migratory and seasonal farmworkers during their first year in higher education, when students are at the greatest risk of dropping out. Adams State was among the nation’s first colleges to offer CAMP, in 1972, and was soon followed by other Colorado schools, including CU Boulder, Colorado State University, Metro State, and the University of Southern Colorado (now CSU Pueblo). By 2024-’25, Colorado had the fifth-most CAMP programs in the country.
The program’s design was straightforward: a social-mobility effort expressed through education. In addition to tuition, CAMP students get guidance, academic support, and help filing for financial aid—like Pell Grants—following their first academic year. Afterward, students continue to receive CAMP’s social and academic backing throughout their undergraduate careers. CAMP often addresses barriers that don’t appear on admissions forms. Some students have never seen a syllabus before. Some are navigating the college bureaucracy in a second language, and their families are anxious about the costs of a degree. The program helps students with tutoring and academic skills, career planning, and internships. They receive assistance filling out grant paperwork.
“For the [migrant] students who actually get to college, we know their situation is precarious,” says Julian Mendez, an assistant professor of psychology at Westminster University in Utah who studies CAMP—and is a former CAMP student himself. “It’s everything from poverty to interrupted schooling to the way teachers and staff treat you in schools, being placed in special education because teachers don’t have the resources to assist you. These are some of the most vulnerable students in the nation.”
U.S. Department of Agriculture data from 2018 shows only 48 percent of crop laborers had a high school diploma. Likewise, the U.S. Department of Labor, in a survey published in 2023, indicated the average crop worker nationwide dropped out after ninth grade. Nearly one in three didn’t make it to seventh grade. In most cases, the Labor Department reported, children left school to help their families earn money in the fields.
To qualify for CAMP, students must have a high school diploma or a GED, be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, and qualify for federal financial aid. Most CAMP participants identify as Hispanic, and each is connected by the realities of migratory labor: constant movement, uneven schooling, and economic instability that often make a four-year degree seem like a luxury. Through CAMP, students make friends with similar backgrounds and find mentors who help them address anxieties about being away from home.
Although the Trump administration challenged CAMP’s effectiveness, both government and independent studies have documented its successes. The U.S. Department of Education in 2022 reported that 71.4 percent of participants completed their first academic year, compared to 68.2 percent of all students. A seven-year study at six California State University schools found that between 2002 and 2009, CAMP students had a higher first-year mean GPA than both the general student population and Hispanic students who weren’t part of CAMP. In Colorado, a 2021 CU Boulder study showed community college students enrolled in its CAMP initiative earned associate degrees at a 66 percent clip, compared to just 22 percent for all other community college enrollees across the state.
“There’s a strong sense of evidence that supports what we do,” says Robert Garcia, the director of CU Boulder’s Bilinguals United for Education and New Opportunities (BUENO) Center, which oversees the school’s community college CAMP services and has served an estimated 875 students over the past 25 years. “We see this whole community get uplifted,” Garcia says. “We see families completely change their trajectory.”
Jesús Rodríguez’s was among them. Today, as the deputy superintendent of Aurora Public Schools, Rodríguez can’t help but see parts of his story within the 38,000 students his district serves. They come from more than 130 countries, and three-quarters meet the federal guidelines for free or reduced-price lunches.
Rodríguez is a first-generation American, the son of Mexican immigrants whose work in a Brighton greenhouse made him eligible for CAMP. At Brighton High School, Rodríguez remembers drifting. He failed classes, was made to attend summer school classes to make up credits, and barely earned the minimum GPA to graduate.
He learned about CAMP while registering for classes at Aims Community College, in Fort Lupton, and applied. He interviewed for his spot and was accepted into the program. After Aims, he transferred to the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, where he got a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and a teaching license. In 2011, he earned his master’s degree in education, equity, culture, and diversity from CU Boulder. He got his doctorate in educational leadership and policy studies from the University of Denver in 2020. “I know everything I’ve been able to do over the last several decades is attributable, at least in some small part, to CAMP,” Rodríguez says.
As it was for Rodríguez, college once seemed like a far-fetched fantasy for Bianca Esparza. Raised by a migrant father, she worked at Toys“R”Us and a local pizzeria as a teenager to help support her family. After a CAMP recruiter visited her high school Spanish class in April 2018, she enrolled at Aims. During her first week there, her father died of kidney and liver failure. The episode would have ruined her, Esparza says, had she not had CAMP staff as a backstop. Staffers checked on her regularly, made sure she was attending class, and gave support on days when life was too overwhelming. Esparza eventually transferred to CSU, earned an accounting degree, and got a full-time job as a technology consultant at an accounting firm. CAMP, she says, “allowed me to break the generational pattern” of poverty that many children of migrants face.
“CAMP was really a big reason why I kept pushing through,” she adds. “They believed in me when I was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ ”
For more than five decades, CAMP followed a predictable rhythm. School staffers would recruit students in the spring, send acceptance letters in early summer, and get federal funding on July 1. This past year, though, that last date came and went.
Program leaders in Colorado contacted the U.S. Department of Education to ask what was going on. The federal agency didn’t provide any answers. Weeks passed, and CAMP staff at several schools notified students that they couldn’t guarantee the financial support they’d initially promised. Two months later, in September, the Education Department finally gave formal notice that funding was being withheld.
“To me, it says [the Trump administration] doesn’t care” about migrant communities, says Adams State president David Tandberg. (The Education Department did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment for this story.)
In September, a bipartisan group of 19 U.S. senators, including Colorado’s Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, urged the administration to release $52.1 million for CAMP and the High School Equivalency Program in the 2025 fiscal year. “We should strive to retain more students enrolled in college, just as CAMP programs have achieved,” the letter says. “These are results that can help strengthen the economy for agricultural farmworker families and rural communities.”
A negotiated agreement later that month saw 40 CAMP schools receive funding. Adams State, CU Boulder, and Metro State were left out, but Colorado State University in Fort Collins secured funding.
BUENO’s Garcia says he’s approached local foundations and trusts to support CU Boulder’s initiative, recently renamed Patitos—Spanish for “ducklings.” But competition for funding is fierce, particularly as the Trump administration continues to cut federally backed programs. For now, CU’s institutional funds are keeping Patitos afloat through the end of the fiscal year in June, and the BUENO Center has so far avoided layoffs. “We have a countdown,” Garcia says.
Perhaps most alarming: The president’s mass deportations have impacted CAMP students’ willingness to pursue financial aid, Garcia says. Before Trump began his second term, Garcia often reassured participants that their undocumented family members wouldn’t face immigration-related consequences. Now, he’s not sure. “We have students who don’t feel like they have access to those anymore because they’re scared [for their parents],” Garcia says.
With the next presidential election still more than two years away, CAMP’s most realistic chance for survival could come from outside Washington, D.C. Mendez, the professor who studies CAMP, says universities should try harder to raise awareness about the funding losses, because the program isn’t known to most Americans. That spotlight, he says, could lead to more support from foundations and other private donations that would allow CAMP to exist outside the federal government. It’s hardly an unattainable goal: Eastern Washington University received a $2.1 million donation from a local foundation in August that will fund its CAMP initiative for the next five years.
Many migrant workers move to the United States to toil on farms and help bring food to dinner tables across the country with the hope their contributions will create a better life for their children through education. The removal of college entryways for potential first-generation students affects more than individual families, however: Entire communities will miss out on economic contributions from a more skilled, higher-paid workforce. Taken in totality, advocates say, the stripping away of CAMP on campuses nationwide erodes values that form the bedrock of the American dream. “I don’t want to sound so harsh,” Garcia says, “but things will be dire.”
Nearly every day while Mayra and Juan Cristobal were growing up, their mother repeated the same phrase in her native Spanish: Échale ganas. You can do whatever you put your mind to. As Juan gets older, he thinks he finally understands his mother’s message. “You can do this,” Juan says. “You don’t necessarily—and I don’t mean this in a bad way—have to be like me. You can plan your life.”
It’s a Monday in January. Juan’s sister has just started her shift at Lucky Bamboo, a Chinese restaurant about a mile from Adams State’s campus, and it’s slow so far. Mayra wraps paper napkins around forks and knives and checks on her few tables this afternoon.
She waitresses to help support herself and the rest of her family while balancing her final semesters of college. She works alongside Martha, her mother, who’s been here since the mushroom farm went bankrupt three years ago. During the spring of 2025, Martha had surgery to treat carpal tunnel syndrome and missed two months on the job. Her daughter picked up extra shifts to make up some of the difference and help cover the cost of groceries and utilities.
Now 40, Martha always wanted her children to have options. She saw her sacrifices and days in freezing packing rooms as worth the effort. The work helped get her daughter to college. She thought her son would follow.
As high school graduation approaches for Juan, the plan that once felt like it would provide a foundation now feels fragile. Martha is considering picking up a second job to fund college for her son—anything that could help offset some of his school costs if he stays close to home and earns a degree.
Juan, meanwhile, can’t stop thinking about his future. He did an internship in March 2025 at the Alamosa Fire Department. He’s considered becoming a firefighter, serving his community. He could pursue CAMP at a campus outside Alamosa, but there’s no guarantee those programs will be around when he graduates from high school in 2028. Even if they are, his education would take him outside the San Luis Valley, away from his mother and her needs.
For now, the teenager wrestles with questions he never thought he’d have to consider. He’s hoping for something like a miracle. “CAMP’s been around so long and impacted lots of people’s lives,” he says. “Why can’t I get the opportunity, as well? Why can’t I have the chance?”
