Daily Lumina News 020822

Community colleges, tribal colleges, and minority-serving institutions all received multimillion-dollar gifts from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in 2020 and 2021.
Scott's gifts placed a spotlight on colleges that don’t always get the recognition they deserve. In this interview, school leaders share how they are putting the money to use.

It’s a tough time to be a teacher. But leaders of college education programs are fighting fatalism by trying new strategies for recruiting and training America’s next batch of teachers.
Several strategies focus on an acute pain point: the mismatch between the high cost to earn a degree in teaching and the low pay the profession offers. But the most promising efforts have a common ingredient: close ties between colleges and local K-12 school districts.

College students almost certainly lost ground academically during the pandemic. But how much? And what should colleges be doing to help students recover from the COVID-19 learning disruption?
This episode of The Key explores how colleges are adapting their practices and policies in areas such as placement, instruction, grading, and assessment to help students get up to speed.

As many as 6.6 million students nationwide can’t obtain their transcripts because they have unpaid bills—sometimes as little as $25 or less—with a college they once attended.
Withholding transcripts from students with outstanding balances is a common practice among colleges and universities. That may be changing.

Colorado lawmakers want to expand a program that lets students stay in high school for a fifth year while taking college courses at no cost to them.
Advocates say the Ascent program offers the possibility of tuition-free college credit and a head start on a college education, which can be especially helpful to students from low-income backgrounds.

What is it like to go from spending most of your time as an upperclassman in high school on Zoom or in a virtual setting to an open college campus full of new social opportunities?
It can be exhilarating—but also a lot of pressure. Ilana Drake, a first-year freshman at Vanderbilt University, explains in this essay.