Daily Lumina News 021324

The U.S. Department of Education announced last week of plans to allocate $50 million to help make up for the debacle of its much-delayed launch of the revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid form.
Now colleges are wondering how they can get a piece of that assistance. More important, which institutions will be eligible?

The most recent annual report of the State of Local News Project by Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism reveals an alarming uptick in "news deserts" across the country. Since 2005, the country has lost almost 2,900 newspapers and 43,000 journalists.
Nearly 600 rural colleges are in or near a local news desert. That makes them a perfect solution to help communities fill the news gap and restore the flow of information that feeds civic participation and economic success, experts say.

How could anyone not be a fan of a better, easier, faster Free Application for Federal Student Aid process? But the U.S. Department of Education's launch of the new FAFSA has been far from easy or fast.
Instead, students, colleges, counselors, states, and foundations are in limbo, wondering whether the new form is doing more harm than good this year. Some worry the kinks could cause some prospective students to give up altogether. One analysis shows only 676,493 seniors had completed the FAFSA by late January, fewer than half of the 1.5 million who had done so at the same time last year.

Christian Robinson juggles two jobs, working for a security company and serving fast food. She wishes she had received more guidance about attending college from her school.
But Robinson’s story is typical for Black students at Adelanto High School, where more than eight out of 10 Black students graduated in 2020 without the college prep courses—known as A-G—required for admission to California’s public universities. Some schools are now stepping up to address those inequities.

Charles L. Welch, the new president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, is concerned that the teaching-focused, broad-access institutions he represents are being unfairly tarnished by the growing public narrative that all colleges are costly and ideology-obsessed.
But making the case for regional public universities is part of his new job. In this interview, Welch explains his plans to reframe the conversation about higher education from cost to investment.

Nearly half of students who left community college without earning a degree or credential cite work as a major reason why they’re no longer enrolled, according to recent survey data from New America.
In the survey, stopped-out students share several policies that could encourage them to reenroll. More than half indicate they may attend college again if their programs offer free tuition. Others say free textbooks and course material could nudge them to return to higher education.