Daily Lumina News 090623

More top companies are providing access to admissions counselors as a benefit to their employees. These employers say that offering private coaching for college admissions as a perk—which typically costs around $140 an hour—is a way to recruit and keep workers in a tight labor market with record-low job satisfaction and to prevent the stress of the admissions process from cutting into productivity.
Critics contend it’s just another advantage for wealthier parents over lower-income ones.

Sixty-plus years ago, the white leaders of Newport News, Virginia, wielded their eminent domain power to seize the core of the thriving Black community of Shoe Lane to build a college.
The school has been gobbling up the remaining houses ever since.

Recent state government actions attacking diversity efforts at public colleges and the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling are hindering partnerships between community colleges and employers and their mission to create more racially equitable opportunities and outcomes for learners and workers of color.
In this essay, Lumina Foundation's Kermit Kaleba and Kysha Wright Frazier of the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce argue that we cannot allow government officials who are unready or unwilling to wrestle with past and current inequities to undermine these essential college-business relationships.

Deysi Parga Macias faced a dilemma last fall in the first week of classes at the University of Colorado Boulder. She couldn’t find daycare for her son, Ramiro, and her grandparents, who were supposed to watch him, were sick.
Macias, now a 20-year-old junior at CU Boulder, tries her best to separate parenting and coursework on campus. Often, however, she feels that her fellow students can’t relate to her life. Many student-parents express the same sense of isolation.

To transform how potential students get into college, Lumina Foundation is launching a new funding effort to find and support the best ideas on how to simplify the admissions process.
Applications for The Great Admissions Redesign are due October 6, 2023. You can learn more about eligibility, criteria, and application questions here.

Here’s a story. Higher education is as valuable as it has ever been. Here’s another story: Confidence and trust in higher ed are fast eroding.
To work in higher education is to worry over the space between those two storylines. What happens to a public good when much of the public stops thinking it’s good? A new survey examines higher ed’s public-perception challenge—and the solutions to it.