Daily Lumina News 010421

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted lives and livelihoods throughout 2020. It also exposed some hard truths about the economy, the workforce, racial justice, and equity.
With the page on 2020 now officially turned, education experts, policy analysts, and others offer their thoughts on how the events of the past year affected efforts to prepare workers for the jobs and careers of today and tomorrow.

The pandemic has left many students struggling to afford tuition, food, and housing. Many are missing classes, dropping out mid-semester, and reporting high levels of disengagement.
At the same time, college students are an integral part of every community around the nation and represent a key component of the future recovery. To succeed, they need emergency cash assistance—delivered fast.

Unlike many colleges, Unity College isn’t waiting for things to go back to the way they were before the pandemic, when higher education was already imperiled by enrollment declines and revenue shortfalls.
It and a handful of other institutions are transforming themselves permanently, using lessons of the COVID-19 era to adopt or speed up dramatic innovations in a sector that in normal times is very slow to change.

Expanding higher education opportunities to incarcerated people has enjoyed growing bipartisan support as a way to reduce recidivism, save taxpayers money, and mitigate the discriminatory effects of mass incarceration and unequal schooling.
But some fear that inmates might end up exhausting Pell eligibility on poor-quality programs that are rolled out too quickly, without the wraparound supports and face-to-face contact they say incarcerated students especially need.

The beginning of a new year during a time of unprecedented uncertainty means many workers will be looking to education for new skills to switch careers or to get ahead in the careers they have.
On this podcast, Michelle Weise of Imaginable Futures discusses why colleges and employers need to rethink the relationship between the workplace and the classroom.

Joseph I. Castro has spent the last few weeks preparing to move from Fresno to Long Beach as he takes the helm of the 23-campus California State University. With him, he hopes to take knowledge of how to remove barriers for underprivileged students like he once was.
Castro has already met with President-elect Joseph Biden’s transition team and talked about goals. Number one on the list? He wants to work with the federal government to make undocumented students eligible for Pell grants.