Daily Lumina News 040621

Colleges of all types are struggling under the shadow of the coronavirus, but the nation’s community college system has been disproportionately hurt, with tens of thousands of students being forced to delay school or drop out because of the pandemic and the economic crisis it has created.
Many community college students are adults—the average age is 28—and even before the pandemic, they struggled to stay in school, juggling academic work with financial pressures, child care needs, and even homelessness. For Corey Ray Baranowski—a 33-year-old father of five children, age 5 months to 11 years old—the breaking point came last year.

The pandemic has had a profound effect on college enrollment. Colleges are missing more than half a million students, according to new data. Community colleges have taken the hardest hit. So what are schools doing to find and enroll new students, while holding on to the ones who enrolled before the pandemic?
College leaders, researchers, and others discuss the implications of the enrollment decline for higher ed and the economy at large—plus how some institutions are fighting back with aggressive recruitment and innovative ideas.

The pandemic has taken an outsized economic toll on young workers, who disproportionately hold jobs in hard-hit sectors such as retail, hospitality, and food service. Unemployment among 16-to-24-year-olds soared from 10 percent in March 2020 to 26 percent in April, with the highest rates of joblessness among Black and Latino youth.
In theory, the federal government's Job Corps program is supposed to help. The program, however, has performed poorly for decades. Worst of all, inattention has led to years of underinvestment in new approaches that show promise for young people.

It’s been a little more than one year since college students had their studies abruptly interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. While things are slowly returning to something resembling normal, with enforced mask-wearing and social distancing on campus, many aspects of higher education have changed.
Students at Ringling College of Art and Design, New College of Florida, and the University of South Florida share their perspectives on a year filled with Zoom classes, socially distanced campus life, and uncertainty about the future.

The collective $1.6 trillion owed by millions of American borrowers spans every age group but weighs most heavily on those in their 20s and 30s. While white borrowers hold more total debt, borrowers of color are some of the most burdened. Black borrowers owe on average double what their white peers owe four years after graduation.
Five people from different walks of life describe how student debt has shaped their lives and what relief would mean to them.

In the pandemic's early days, a slew of pundits predicted the financial strain of moving instruction online and losing key auxiliary revenue would trigger a wave of college closures. Robert Zemsky, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania, predicted as many as 200 schools could buckle under the pressure in a year.
That hasn't come to pass, with fewer than a dozen nonprofit college closures announced since the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Still, experts say struggling schools must contend with a shrinking pool of traditional-age students and rising tuition discount rates.