Daily Lumina News 011323

Across the country, schools have shifted toward career-focused education in recent years, reviving a long-running debate on whether the purpose of education is to prepare students for jobs or to be well-rounded citizens.
Advocates of a career-education model in Greenville, South Carolina, say such programs serve a dual purpose: Students get career training that could help land them an in-demand job in their hometown, and industries get a pipeline of workers with the qualifications they’re looking for.

Housing affordability is becoming more of a challenge in America. This is especially true in the city of Fresno, California.
A first-ever partnership between the city and Fresno City College hopes to address the issue. The project, which involves students building tiny houses for low-income people, is a win-win, say city and school officials. Families gain new homes, while students gain hands-on work experience and learn in-demand construction skills.

For more than 50 years, the City University of New York’s community colleges would assess students’ math and English skills when they enrolled and assign those who didn’t meet CUNY’s cutoff to “remedial” courses. These courses didn’t confer credits, and students had to pay for them before they could start working toward a degree.
This year, New York City’s public community colleges assigned no new students to “remedial” classes. It marks a major milestone in how the system supports students with academic gaps.

The housing crisis at Historically Black Colleges and Universities is long-standing and well documented. There isn’t enough housing available to accommodate rising HBCU enrollment, students endure poor living conditions on some campuses, and off-campus housing remains largely inaccessible.
Some HBCUs are finding innovative ways to meet the growing student housing demand.

The Bandana Project, which started at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a mental health awareness and suicide prevention campaign that uses backpacks and bandanas to support peers in getting help.
This kind of peer-support effort is one way that college students and their institutions are responding to the mental health crisis currently playing out on higher ed campuses across the United States.

The largest academic strike in U.S. history ended last month with a landmark agreement between the University of California system and graduate teaching assistants, postdocs, and academic researchers.
How significant is this agreement? What will it mean for students and colleges outside of the UC system? And how might the UC strike influence future campus organizing?