Daily Lumina News 121420

Canceling student debt isn’t just an economic issue but a racial justice one, too, argued higher education leaders and policymakers during a virtual convening by the Center for Responsible Lending and the NAACP.
Research shows that Black students with bachelor’s degrees owe an average of $7,400 more in student debt than their White counterparts. And, as time passes, that gap widens. Four years after graduation, Black graduates owe almost twice as much as White graduates at $53,000.

Even as cases of coronavirus surge nationwide, many colleges and universities are announcing plans to bring students back to campus for the spring semester.
Georgetown University, Morehouse College, Smith College, the University of Florida, and Princeton University are among the schools inviting undergraduates to live on campus come January after being largely virtual in the fall. For some schools, reopening is a financial necessity.

Purdue University has made it through the fall semester of in-person classes uninterrupted—not entirely unscathed by COVID-19, but managing to keep the infection rate relatively low with extensive testing, protective measures in classrooms, and a barrage of messaging about personal responsibility.
Purdue's Mitch Daniels is taking the semester as a win—for both the academic and financial benefits of doing so—but some students and faculty members see it differently.

COVID-19. Adult learners. Food insecurity. As the year comes to a close, The EvoLLLution looks back at some of the stories that defined higher education in 2020.
In this interview, Tony Iacono of the County College of Morris talks about adult students who drop out of college—and how institutions may be able to get them back with meaningful transfer pathways that give credit where credit is due.