Daily Lumina News 040521

While the pandemic’s effect on ordinary college life has been widely chronicled, a new survey from The Hope Center for College, Community and Justice takes a closer look at the profound effect it has had on the highest-risk students. Many, it found, have faced challenges just to make ends meet, with nearly three in five struggling for access to housing and food.
Students of color are more likely to experience these issues, with 70 percent of Black students and 64 percent of Hispanic students confronting food insecurity, housing insecurity, or homelessness.

Colleges everywhere are starting to figure out their vaccination strategies. Rutgers University and Cornell University will require students to be vaccinated to attend in the fall, a step very few other colleges have yet taken. Other institutions are encouraging students to get vaccinated but stop short of a mandate. Some haven’t developed formal vaccination plans, instead relying on existing local health efforts.
The University of Florida is prepping for an all-out vaccination blitz. Starting today, the institution wants to vaccinate 20,000 students and community members a week for six weeks.

More than 30 states have outcomes-based funding models, which allocate money to colleges and universities at least partly based on various metrics for student success. But a report by The Education Trust argues that these models perpetuate inequities in the ways they’re currently designed.
In theory, these policies are meant to get institutions to improve outcomes—by providing clear goals and rewarding those who meet them. But in practice, the report says they often do more harm than good, perpetuating resource inequities that have long deprived certain student groups of an equitable chance at postsecondary success.

Dr. Richelle Brooks, a teacher and single mother, is now part of a group of 100 “debt strikers” refusing to repay their college loans in an effort to pressure President Joe Biden to forgive all outstanding federal student debt in his first 100 days in office.
The strike is symbolic—as the Biden administration has extended a pause on student loan payments through September—but it underscores the crippling financial burden felt by millions of Americans trying to pursue postsecondary education.

In normal times, the campus tour is a big part of the college process. Every year, students and parents make their way across college campuses trying to figure out how the images in a college brochure match up against reality.
These days, the virtual version of a campus tour has to suffice. In this interview, high school seniors describe how they're making one of their most important life decisions sight unseen.

At 18 years old, Alexis Lopez is among what varying estimates say is between 10 percent to 34 percent of high school students who take college-level courses that give them a head start on credits, save time and money, and prepare them for the demands of higher education.
But the number of students enrolling in and passing these classes has started slipping downward—dramatically, in some places—suggesting a potential decline ahead in the number of high school students who end up going to college. For those who do go, it means getting a degree could take longer and cost more.