Juliet Schulman-Hall | Boston Business Journal

Juliet Schulman-Hall is a higher education reporter at MassLive who focuses on how colleges and schools in Massachusetts handle power, money and responsibility to their communities.

College closures and student fallout

Her most distinctive work follows Massachusetts colleges through closure, bankruptcy and their aftermath, tracking what happens to students, staff and campuses once an institution shuts its doors. She has reported on colleges laying off more than 100 employees after announcing closures, documenting how job losses and uncertainty ripple through campus communities. In coverage of Hampshire College, she has captured the fear and frustration of students, staff and alumni as successive rounds of layoffs push the institution toward crisis.

Schulman-Hall devotes sustained reporting to Anna Maria College’s abrupt closure, exposing unpaid stipends, missing state scholarships and questions around the use of restricted endowment funds. She details how hundreds of former students across multiple closed colleges struggle to obtain transcripts and records, analyzing state complaint data and explaining how requirements under the FARM law often break down in practice.

She also connects shuttered campuses to broader housing pressures, including work on the sale of a closed college campus and a three-part series probing whether vacant college properties can help relieve Massachusetts’ housing crisis.

Budgets, layoffs and legal fights in higher ed

Schulman-Hall’s beat extends into the financial and legal stress facing major institutions, where she treats budgets and lawsuits as stories about workers and civil rights.

She has covered Harvard employees bracing for waves of layoffs tied to budget shortfalls, showing how staff anticipate cuts and how institutional decisions filter down to everyday campus jobs. In reporting on federal scrutiny of Harvard’s diversity hiring program, she explains a growing legal battle as a federal agency goes to court to obtain documents for an investigation into alleged anti-white bias.

Her coverage of federal visa rules brings a national policy fight into the higher education frame, following the Department of Homeland Security’s appeal of a ruling that halted new limits on international student visas. In that work, she details how proposed changes would have shortened the time foreign students and journalists can remain in the country and situates the case within ongoing litigation in the First Circuit. She also tracks state-level oversight, including how the attorney general examines a struggling college’s use of restricted donor funds and the institution’s multimillion-dollar debts to the U.S. Department of Education.

Access, equity and the path to college

Another through-line in her reporting is the education pipeline, where she links K‑12 outcomes, district budgets and free-tuition offers to who ultimately reaches college. She has written on Central Massachusetts MCAS results, breaking down district-level declines in English, math and science scores and highlighting schools recognized for stronger performance. Her work on statewide education rankings underscores that Massachusetts’ top-line status masks deep inequities, noting that only a small share of fourth graders who are Black, Latino or from low-income families reach reading proficiency.

Schulman-Hall returns often to cost and access, covering colleges that compete for students with offers of free tuition and tracing how those promises fit into broader enrollment strategies. She has reported on high school families confronting staff cuts and lost extracurriculars, including one student forced to choose between band and honors English, using individual stories to illustrate a wider crisis in college readiness.

Across these pieces she treats policy decisions, test scores and financial incentives as part of a single system that either widens or narrows the path into higher education.

Innovation and policy shifts shaping higher education

Beyond crises, Schulman-Hall covers how institutions experiment with new programs and technologies that could reshape teaching and the student experience. She has reported on a national calculus tutoring initiative that pairs trained university undergraduates and alumni with school districts across the country, charting how the program grows from a summer camp into a multi-district effort to strengthen high school math preparation. Her coverage of a major report on AI in teaching and research training at a leading university presents generative AI as a “watershed moment” for higher education and captures how institutional leaders rethink core academic practices.

Her body of work combines these forward-looking stories with accountability reporting, giving equal weight to new models and to the guardrails needed to protect students and educators. She also writes outside MassLive, including coverage of a shuttered Massachusetts college listing its campus for sale for NBC Boston, extending her focus on the long tail of college closures into regional broadcast media.[anchor] Across outlets and formats, Schulman-Hall’s reporting is marked by close attention to documents and data, sustained follow-up on institutions in distress and a consistent effort to center the experiences of people who are usually treated as background in higher education news.