Daily Lumina News 031620

In the year since more than 30 parents were charged with facilitating fraud and paying a combined $25 million in bribes to get their children into elite schools, the specter of the "Operation Varsity Blues” scandal has hovered over the world of college admissions as a stunning reminder of how flawed the U.S. college application process is.
But for all the conversation about the need for admissions reform, and as hundreds of thousands of high school seniors wait to hear back on where they’ll be starting classes in the fall, experts say little has changed.

Nobody planned for an abrupt mass migration of traditional college courses to the internet. But because of coronavirus, it's happening.
Making it work will require much more than giving every professor a Zoom account and letting instruction take its course. That’s partly because not all students will be able to access or benefit from suddenly online courses equally.

In the wake of coronavirus, hundreds of thousands of college students are now coping with the stress of an uncertain future. Alana Hendy, a junior at Georgetown University, wonders what will happen to her work-study job in the dean’s office at the School of Foreign Service. How will her responsibilities as a teaching assistant in a geography class change with the new online format?
But counterbalancing the uncertainties, she says, is support offered by the university. It is helping defray low-income students’ costs for shipping medication, books, and other necessities. And the campus’s food pantry is open and stocked twice a week.

As a senior in high school, Jada Ponce was surprised to get a letter stating that she’d been admitted to the University of Idaho—without having applied.
Rather than waiting for students to apply, Idaho admits those who meet a certain combination of requirements to all of its public universities and community colleges, before they fill out a single form.
The idea is not only to embolden these students to pursue degrees, but to get them to stay in Idaho, which has experienced a brain drain of high school graduates leaving for college elsewhere and never coming back.