Daily Lumina News 031120

Countless ideas about getting students to and through college have come from policymakers, lawmakers, and any number of advocacy groups. But what if a solution comes from students themselves?
A new campaign launching this week will urge students to share stories of how they’ve struggled to get into college—and to overcome obstacles once they do.

Kiara Galvan’s constant calculations about where her next meal might come from no longer stand in the way of the 20-year-old’s goal of becoming a social worker.
Thanks to help from her school, the Metropolitan State University of Denver sophomore recently qualified for benefits from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Colorado is trying to change the narrative around college student hunger, pushing its colleges and universities to better connect students to SNAP benefits and reverse years of higher education institutions discouraging students from signing up for federal benefits.

Much of the attention on Purdue University's president these days concerns the all-important number of 9,992. Not only is that the dollar amount an in-state student will pay Purdue for tuition and fees next year, it also is the amount such a student paid Purdue when Mitch Daniels became president in 2013.
The university also has reduced the price of food services and textbooks. An undergraduate degree from Purdue, in other words, is less expensive today than it was when Daniels arrived.

Inside a small, cluttered office at the high-poverty Howard School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Nicholas Siler wields a powerful software tool that greatly boosts the odds the students he counsels will successfully complete college.
Siler is at the pointy tip of a revolution so new that many high schools around the country are not even aware a revolution is taking place: combining powerful data with finely honed college match tactics to find a college where the student is most likely to earn a degree. It takes college counseling out of the dark ages where students routinely get sent off to colleges that are little more than failure factories.