Heading into 2024, public trust in U.S. higher education was declining, and state budgets were under strain. Then the U.S. election occurred, and the new presidential administration threatened to push higher education into free fall. In a speech in 2021, then-senator JD Vance declared that “professors are the enemy,” and the administration’s actions in the first months of 2025 proceeded apace: slashing funding for science and financial aid, deporting scholars and revoking student visas, and proposing substantial new taxes on university endowments. The rhetoric and policies of the White House cast higher education in an antagonistic role, as an adversary of the common good.
An innovative method to add new sociology graduates to the pipeline of scholars launched amidst these rapid changes.
Seizing the Moment
In 2023, Congress restored Pell Grant eligibility to incarcerated students. This opened new opportunities for higher education in U.S. prisons and amplified work already underway in a few states, such as California, to seed state-funded college programs. This reinstatement followed on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had seen sharp increases in mortality (much larger than those found in the general population) and an exodus of staff, devastating prisons across the United States.
Building and sustaining higher education programs in prison in this post-COVID context is particularly challenging, as the University of California-Irvine’s LIFTED (Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees) program, which offers a bachelor’s degree in sociology to incarcerated Californians, proves. Although we launched virtually in 2020, COVID delayed our actual admission and beginning of face-to-face classes until 2022. We only qualified (as one of the first) Pell-eligible prison programs in the United States in 2024, just as our first cohort completed their bachelor’s degrees. COVID, however, is not the only crisis facing efforts such as LIFTED’s to expand higher education opportunities.
Now having graduated its first two cohorts, in 2024 and 2025, we pause to reflect on the program’s early successes and transformative impacts on its human participants—especially students and faculty—and organizational partners—a state prison and university. The program demonstrates the value of community-facing work in a time of social and political uncertainty.
The advantages of LIFTED are most obvious among its students. They derive many of the standard benefits of a university degree, including generally improved life outcomes and the particular benefits of sociological training, including tools to think critically about the ways social contexts shape the dynamics of crime and punishment and ways to engage constructively in civil society. As one graduate put it: “As the first person in my family to pursue higher education, I did not foresee a pathway to earning a bachelor’s degree, let alone from within prison. Now, I am a UCI graduate on the precipice of applying for a PhD program.”
LIFTED faculty also benefits. Instructors face special challenges—including technology restrictions and a student body with distinctive socio-political-cultural experiences and views—but earn singular rewards. Many rediscover the inspiration that drew them to academia in the first place—the joy of ideas, learning, and the life of the mind. To a far greater extent than students on typical campuses, students in carceral settings are attuned to the liberatory quality of higher education—a relationship between the freedom of the mind and the freedom of the person—that brings intensity and electricity to both sides of the teaching and learning experience.
At the organizational level, the advantages of LIFTED accumulate on both sides of the partnership. On one hand, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation buttresses its sometimes-dubious claim to rehabilitate those in its care. On the other side, the University of California fulfills its promise to provide an education to all citizens of California, regardless of status. Transformation follows in both behemoth institutions. For example, the prison has revised policies on disability accommodations and family visitations and has broadened access to academic materials, including allowing a course on free speech taught by the University of California-Irvine (UCI) chancellor. UCI has developed new tools related to financial aid, transfer pathways, student services, and pedagogical training to support the many students touched in one way or another by the carceral system.
LIFTED: A Replicable Model for Public Higher Education in Prison
In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, UCI and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) signed a memorandum of understanding establishing LIFTED—the first in-prison bachelor of arts program offered by the University of California. LIFTED enrolls incarcerated, junior-level transfer students who have already earned associate of arts degrees, and it offers a bachelor’s degree in sociology, with an option to minor in English.
The program operates at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. Its first cohort of 23 graduates earned their degrees in June 2024. They became the first incarcerated college students to earn bachelor’s degrees from a top-ten public university in the U.S. They excelled academically on their journeys: nine earned Latin Honors, and six received campuswide awards for writing and overall records of accomplishment. A second cohort of 15 students graduated in 2025, and about 60 more are in the pipeline.
Even as UCI LIFTED has grown to incorporate more students at Donovan, the LIFTED model is spreading to other UC campuses. UC-Riverside launched UCR LIFTED in 2024; UC-San Diego is exploring a partnership with UCI at Donovan; and UC-Santa Barbara is launching UCSB LIFTED in Fall 2026. At each site, a UC campus connects with a neighboring state prison and a local community college that ensures prospective students meet transfer requirements.
LIFTED extends the promise of California’s Master Plan for Higher Education—that “anyone from anywhere in California” has access to a bachelor’s degree from a top public research university. As our preliminary experience has revealed, LIFTED is a transformative experience for those directly involved and, at the same time, builds the university’s legitimacy and strengthens the academic social contract between the university and wider society.
Future Research Opportunities
The number of higher-education-in-prison programs is growing, and these programs are ripe for additional research. A first set of studies could examine the program’s efficacy and its effects on participants. While studies suggest that educating incarcerated students is cost-effective and lowers recidivism, more work needs to be done to understand: (1) what programs and resources support incarcerated college students’ success before and during their matriculation in degree-granting programs; (2) what factors impact incarcerated students’ academic success, sense of agency, and overall well-being; and (3) how participation affects the faculty teaching in these programs, as well as on others providing support services to incarcerated students.
A second set of studies could examine more macro phenomena: (1) changes in the prison system, perhaps especially regarding the primacy of rehabilitation, associated with openness to universities; and (2) changes in the university system, perhaps especially amidst intensifying demands for relevance, associated with outreaches to prisons.
At least from the perspective of the university and its faculty, UCI-LIFTED represents a promising path forward—a partnership that bolsters the university’s legitimacy by strengthening its service portfolio and extending its social contract. If you are interested in learning more about prison educators, or if you’re a prison educator looking for a network of support, the ASA Community for Sociologists Teaching in Carceral Settings is a good resource.