Daily Lumina News 090823

Brooke Samuelian graduated from West Chester University in Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in forensics and toxicological science in 2013. A decade later, the Philadelphia resident still owes about $25,000 in student loan repayments.
The United States is an outlier when it comes to high tuition and the debts that students take on to pay for college. Could other countries hold the key to college affordability here?

The cover of Ruth J. Simmons’s memoir, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey, depicts a silhouette of her profile forming the crown of a tall tree. Underneath it, little-girl Ruth sits on a hill, her nose in a book, as she says was often the case during her childhood.
It’s an apt illustration for a coming-of-age story that details how Simmons, a sharecropper’s daughter, made it out of the East Texas cotton fields and rose to the pinnacle of American higher education.

Between advancements in artificial intelligence and the end of affirmative action, the traditional college admissions application process is more fraught than ever.
Amid these sea changes, some colleges are trying a novel approach to the application: meeting students face-to-face.

Millions of Americans will soon be doing something they've never done before: signing into their federal student loan accounts to make an actual payment.
After three and a half years, the pause on federal student loan payments is coming to an end. Getting more than 40 million borrowers back into repayment will be an enormous challenge, especially because many students who graduated when the pause was already in place have never made a payment.

More students are turning to private systems to create online groups around individual college classes. While the practice has gone on for years, teaching experts say it intensified during pandemic campus shut-downs when students were looking for ways to connect with each other.
Some professors worry that online systems like Discord and GroupMe are used for cheating; others say they help build a much-needed sense of community.

With only two weeks before she had to report to federal prison in 2019, Ashley Furst scrambled to get her affairs in order. At the top of her list: addressing the nearly $50K in student loan debt she had taken on to earn a master’s degree.
Today, Furst is out of prison and has rebuilt her life. But her story illustrates the importance of figuring out ways to help incarcerated students manage their loans before, during, and after prison.