Daily Lumina News 062221

College has always been a goal for Charletta Thomas. Now 58, she currently supervises training for a 44-restaurant chain in southern Louisiana. But after 27 years at a company with education benefits—benefits Thomas pitches to other employees—she still hadn’t taken advantage of them herself.
Employees like Thomas often struggle to use employer-based college benefits as they are most commonly offered. Many times, adult workers can’t balance education with their family commitments. Crucially, many programs require workers to front costs they can’t cover or direct them toward educational tracks that don’t credibly promise a pay bump. Experts say more flexible options could help.

Students and teachers everywhere know that the fallout from this strange, COVID-fueled school year will complicate the path through high school and ultimately college—a path that is already too precarious for many students in Detroit. Nearly half of high school graduates from the city’s main district must take remedial courses if they attend college.
The Detroit Achievement Academy and Grand Valley State University want to change that trajectory—and they're taking a series of unusual steps to make it happen.

Kishore Khandavalli is CEO of a Dallas-based custom software maker. He recently opened a satellite office in India for employees, including a manager who left the United States after becoming fed up with the immigration system. Sooner or later, he says, immigrant tech workers decide, “I don’t have to be treated like a third-rate citizen. What am I doing here?”
Their answer is increasingly to leave. And that’s a growing challenge for the U.S. tech industry, the broader economy, and an education system that has failed to turn out enough Americans with the science skills employers need.

Idaho’s public colleges and universities have lost more than 5,000 students since the pandemic. The enrollment challenge is a financial and economic challenge, since employers need qualified workers in order to locate, expand, or stay in Idaho. Perhaps most important, a college degree opens new career options for Idaho’s young adults—and many have said no to college in the past year, and in alarming numbers.
But the story of Idaho higher education in 2020-21 is one of adaptation.

When Juan Paneto was selected for a spot in a management training program at a bank in 1992, he couldn’t refuse. But there was a problem: He hadn’t finished school. Though Paneto had attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, for four years, he was still five classes short of graduation.
Life circumstances dictated the amount of time—30 years to be exact—it would take for Paneto to earn a bachelor’s degree. But the delay came with a reward: He finally graduated on June 13, the same day as his firstborn son, who also received a bachelor’s degree from Union College.

Melissa Brown left prison 11 years ago. She has since turned her life around, completing her bachelor’s degree and securing a job at a large addiction treatment program in Virginia. She’s also a certified substance abuse counselor. But under Virginia law, her past conviction makes it impossible for her to work directly with patients.
For more than a decade, legislation to reform Virginia’s barrier crime statutes has failed in the General Assembly. And that's a problem because the statutes apply to a wide range of professions where employers are experiencing critical workforce shortages.