Daily Lumina News 062921

Christian Couric is living proof that short-term, career-focused educational programs—provided they are high-quality courses for in-demand fields—can put workers on track to high-paying jobs. Most of these programs don’t, however, qualify for federal financial aid through the Pell Grant program, putting them out of reach for workers who are low-income or unemployed.
The three courses Couric took at Blue Ridge Community College cost about $5,600, including $1,998 for a welding fundamentals class and about $3,700 for two courses in pipe welding. Although Virginia offers a workforce training grant program that can pick up two-thirds of the tuition, BRCC President John Downey says many students in his corner of rural north-central Virginia still can’t afford to enroll.

Getting to college, we’re often told, requires smarts and determination. But that’s not the whole truth. What’s true in Kenya is true in China, the United States, and everywhere else: The admissions realm is divided between insiders and outsiders, applicants who understand the rules and applicants who don’t even know the rules exist.
For refugees, the most vulnerable students of all, the barriers are immense. Fewer than 30 come to the United States on an F-1 student visa each year. To get there, they must overcome complex systems that in many ways work against them.

As the pandemic continues to shift the American job landscape, the Maine Community College System will launch a free training program called Remote Work for ME to prepare more than 700 rural students for remote jobs over the next three years.
Students living in rural areas of the state will be able to take six- to nine-month-long online courses in fields especially conducive to remote work, such as IT support, customer service, and medical transcription. Participants will receive training and earn a certificate in remote work skills. The program also includes a certificate course for supervisors on how to manage remote workers.

Community colleges—which play an invaluable role in addressing the educational needs of students of color, working adults, and students from low-income backgrounds—often see an increase in enrollments during an economic downturn. But the pandemic changed that expectation. Instead of returning to school to upgrade their skills, many people are just in survival mode.
Now, college officials are scrambling to recapture those students and put them back on track.

Between 2005 and 2050, the United States is projected to add 117 million people as a result of new immigration—a stunning 82 percent of the population growth. That’s 67 million incoming immigrants, 47 million of their children, and 3 million grandchildren. They know, arguably better than those who are native born, where the roadblocks to stability are located, where the pain resides, where the trajectory loses steam, and where outdated hierarchies and racism work to exclude them.
Seven first- and second-generation immigrants share what they’ve come to understand about the middle-class American dream.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a giant, real-world experiment in admissions policy that so far has underscored the drawbacks of mandatory entrance exams, writes Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown University, in this op-ed.
While we don’t yet know the full results of the great pandemic test-optional experiment, emerging evidence from the past year and previous studies of test-optional schools suggest that making entrance tests optional—permanently—is good for higher education and for students. It expands the applicant pipeline, brings more racial, ethnic, and economic diversity to campuses, and raises the aspirations of students residing on the tough side of American inequality.