Daily Lumina News 010521

From Pre-K through college, 2020 was a time for interrupted learning.
To capture the impact, EdSource followed 16 families from across California in a year-long project. The resulting documentary illustrates the education struggles they faced and how some students put off the start of their college careers to support their families when the pandemic claimed their parents’ jobs.

As a graduate student, Octavia Lawrence—now associate dean of student services at West Kentucky Community and Technical College—would ask herself what she might do with $1 million in extra funding. How could she better meet student needs?
That question is no longer hypothetical. The college, which received $15 million from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, is aiming to supply technology and possibly transportation for students in rural areas, as well as funding for nonacademic needs. "It actually gives us the space to dream with action in mind,” Lawrence says of the unrestricted cash gift. “To not just dream.”

Nursing, the nation’s largest health-care profession, has always been among the hardest majors at Borough of Manhattan Community College. It’s also a nearly surefire way into a recession-proof career that pays well, especially when the COVID-19 health crisis has stretched the U.S. health-care system to its limits and accelerated the demand for qualified health-care professionals.
But for Marleny Hernandez, a 33-year-old mother of four and a high school dropout, the pandemic is one more obstacle in her nearly five-year journey to becoming a nurse.

With many college admissions testing sites closing down during the pandemic, as many as 50 percent of early applications arrived without any test scores this year. That's resulted in some top-ranked schools seeing a surge in applications, but elsewhere, application numbers are flat or even down.
Jeffrey Selingo, author of "Who Gets In and Why," offers his perspective on how the pandemic is changing the landscape of admissions.