Sneha Dey

Sneha Dey follows how education policy in Texas shapes the real pathways students take into college and the workforce, with a particular focus on the money, metrics and governance decisions that determine who gets access to opportunity. She is an education reporter for the Texas Tribune, working in partnership with Open Campus, covering pathways from education to employment and the accessibility of postsecondary education. Her reporting stands out for connecting complex funding formulas, campus rule changes and state interventions to concrete consequences for colleges, school districts and students.

Pathways from education to employment

Dey’s core beat is the transition from high school and college into the labor market, framed through how Texas builds and measures “pathways from education to employment.”

She tracks efforts by state higher education leaders to tie expanded financial aid and credential goals directly to workforce needs, including coverage of plans to increase the share of young adults with postsecondary credentials and arguments that broader aid is necessary to meet those targets. Her work often highlights geographic and racial barriers to opportunity, such as reporting that Black and Latino high school students who must drive long distances to reach a community college are less likely to pursue a degree.

Across these stories, she uses data and policy benchmarks to show how seemingly abstract goals land on students’ schedules, choices and futures.

Community colleges, funding formulas and financial strain

A significant portion of Dey’s recent work examines community colleges, especially how new state funding models ripple through local budgets.

In coverage of Texas’ performance-based funding system, she reports on colleges bracing for cuts as the refined formula shortchanges them millions, detailing how hiring and spending plans are being rewritten and how administrators describe the model as unpredictable in its early years. She has followed proposals to limit incentive funding and explained how those changes could narrow the support available for student outcomes at two-year schools.

Her reporting on enrollment trends shows how the job market and the pandemic hurt community college enrollment, and how colleges pivot toward short-term credentials and job training as many prospective students choose work over school. In these pieces, Dey consistently ties line items and formulas back to classroom capacity, program offerings and the stability of institutions that serve nontraditional and working students.

School governance, state intervention and testing

Dey also covers K-12 governance and accountability, with a focus on state interventions in local school districts and the costs that follow. She reported on Houston ISD’s state takeover playbook, documenting how the sweeping New Education System reforms are costing the district a fortune and straining its finances.

In follow-up coverage, she showed how higher than expected enrollment losses led Houston ISD to direct schools to cut staff and slash spending, linking the earlier reform package to subsequent budget orders on campuses. Her explainer on Texas public school takeovers walks through when and how the state can intervene in districts, outlining the triggers, oversight structure and implications for local governance. She has also reported on Texas replacing the STAAR exam with three shorter standardized tests, describing what the new assessments will look like and how they will be phased in across school years.

Together, these stories frame accountability not just as policy but as a series of concrete tradeoffs for districts, teachers and students navigating new rules.

Higher education policy, curriculum and campus climate

Within higher education, Dey closely follows how political decisions and board actions reshape what students can study and how courses are taught. Her coverage of the Texas A&M University System’s decision to remove courses on LGBTQ topics, ethnic studies and climate change from core degree requirements shows more than 200 courses being stripped from the core, and explains how those changes affect students’ paths through required coursework at 11 universities.

She has reported on directives requiring professors to alter or reassign courses in response to new restrictions on teaching about gender and race, documenting how syllabi and core curricula are being rewritten just before semesters begin.

Across these stories, Dey treats curriculum decisions as a matter of access and signal, showing how the removal or reshaping of courses can narrow exposure to certain ideas and fields for large numbers of students. Her work in this area often sits at the intersection of campus governance, state politics and student experience, making clear how policy debates translate into what is on offer in lecture halls and degree plans.

Before moving into her current education beat, Dey reported on children and families, including the foster care system and child care access, and she has prior experience at national and specialized education newsrooms, including a public radio education desk and Chalkbeat. That background informs her current coverage, which tends to combine policy detail, financial analysis and lived experience from students and educators, and to return to themes of equity, access and institutional capacity across Texas’ schools and colleges.