Daily Lumina News 011023

Where colleges are located is, in most cases, now a given, like the presence of a river or a major transportation hub. But what a college decides to do with and for the community outside its gates is a choice.
More colleges are recognizing both the responsibility and the potential rewards of choosing to make “town and gown” a serious priority rather than just a slogan. Gannon University epitomizes this trend, as does Colby College, a liberal arts institution in Waterville, Maine.

Regardless of geography, nearly all school districts in the United States today face chronic challenges finding teachers for math, science, special education, foreign languages, and bilingual education.
But there are some things colleges and universities can do to address this issue. To start, schools of education can partner with districts—especially those in under-resourced communities—to build parallel pipelines into the teaching profession, writes Robert Lee of National University’s Sanford College of Education in this op-ed.

Mathematicians descended on Boston last week for the first in-person Joint Mathematics Meetings since the start of the pandemic.
But ongoing tensions over how the community fosters—or fails to foster—diversity and inclusion loomed large.

As the pandemic altered her high school education, Abigail Mendoza became less focused on learning. She just wanted to get the grade and move past the difficult time. She realized that mindset wouldn’t help her when she came to the University of Pittsburgh last fall. She was right.
After spending nearly five semesters of high school in a pandemic, many students are confronting new realities as college freshmen. College leaders share what they are doing to help students acclimate to a new learning environment.

When schools in Virginia reopened their doors for in-person learning, public transit agencies went into overdrive to find ways to increase ridership. Among their strategies: add more stops and offer free services.
Community and technical colleges should be important targets in these efforts, say some policymakers.

Pending lawsuits stand to reshape the higher ed landscape in the next year, with the U.S. Supreme Court expected to rule on a handful of high-profile cases.
Those rulings include the fate of race-conscious admissions, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the Biden administration’s proposed plan to forgive broad amounts of student loan debt.