Daily Lumina News 121123

Hispanic Americans want to go to college. They’re more likely than their white counterparts to consider it. They’re also more likely to believe that colleges are fulfilling their promises to society.
But some Hispanic students are also unsure how to enroll in college and how to pay for it. That reality demonstrates a need for colleges—especially those faced with dwindling enrollments and worried about the impending drop in traditional-age students—to build links to Hispanic communities.

In a stunning downfall for the leader of one of the world’s most prestigious universities, Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, voluntarily stepped down from the helm of the Ivy League school over the weekend following a torrent of criticism for her testimony about antisemitism on Capitol Hill last week.
During her remarks before Congress, Magill struggled to answer questions about whether calls for genocide against Jews would violate UPenn’s code of conduct. The exchange went viral and prompted a flurry of business leaders, donors, and politicians to demand that Magill resign.

Ohio Wesleyan University is seeing its highest retention numbers in more than a decade. Among first-generation students, in particular, retention is up about 10 percentage points. Among Pell-eligible students, it’s up seven.
Officials at the school attribute the progress to an “all-hands-on-deck” initiative launched two years ago aimed at making student success everyone’s business.

In a year marked by presidential transitions at numerous high-profile universities, a small recovery in college enrollment, campus strife over the Israel-Hamas war, and an increasing number of institutional budget deficits and cutbacks, it was two U.S. Supreme Court decisions that dominated higher education’s headlines in 2023.
Here’s a summary of 10 of the year’s most notable stories.

Despite working four jobs while in school, Nicole Sparbanie, 30, still needed loans to help cover the $120,000 cost of her two-year master's degree. Combined with loans from undergrad, Sparbanie was staring down a total of $67,000 in debt—most used to finance her graduate education.
Yet, it's not the amount that concerns her the most, but the 7 percent interest the federal government wants her to pay on the graduate loans.

College campuses across the United States have been embroiled in conflict since the Israel-Hamas war began.
In this interview, two students—Callie Stolar, a Jewish junior at Northwestern University, and Youssef Hasweh, a Palestinian American senior at the University of Chicago—share how they are coping with the unrest abroad and on campus.