Photo: Sara Hertwig 

While the overall proportion of Americans with college degrees has been slowly increasing, the proportions who are Black, Native American, or Hispanic are falling further behind, or staying no better than level.

It’s a problem with implications beyond equity and fairness. Several states are recognizing that, unless they can propel more people through college who have been less likely to go and to finish, they can’t meet their goals for increasing the proportion of their populations with degrees—or be able to fill jobs requiring a college education.

Despite rising numbers of COVID-19 cases, many college campuses expect to be back at full capacity this fall. So do hotels. That’s left some institutions without the robust quarantine and isolation housing that had been critical to their reopening plans in 2020.

The more-transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus is spreading rapidly, once again raising the possibility that infected or exposed students might need to isolate—a difficult task in communal housing like dorms.