Daily Lumina News 081820

What matters most when it comes to college admissions decisions? Is it merit, grades, scores, and experiences? Or something else?
Authors Jeff Selingo, Melissa Korn, and Jennifer Levitz—along with UW-Madison's Andre Phillips—offer answers about the process, power, privilege, and abuse of college admissions in Lumina Foundation’s first live podcast today at 1 p.m. EDT. You can join the conversation by registering here.

Since COVID-19 forced schools to shutter in March, leaders of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) say they’ve faced difficult decisions and had to make some unpopular ones as they prepare for an uncharted fall.
In this interview, some HBCU leaders describe how they are planning to step into today's new normal.

Colleges and universities are putting extensive measures into place to try to minimize the spread of COVID-19, such as limiting who can enter campus, requiring masks, and mandating or offering different levels of testing.
But for many students at residential campuses, deciding where to live and how to learn involves fraught navigation, in which one question looms large: How seriously will their peers take COVID-19?

The digital divide has always existed in America. COVID-19, which forced the country to jump headfirst into an immersive, all-encompassing digital existence, is only exacerbating it.
Research shows that 10 percent of the nation's college students—that's about 2 million people—don't have access to a laptop for school. The pandemic is pushing colleges and universities to change that.