Daily Lumina News 121522

First-year college students started this school year with a lot stacked against them. On top of moving away from home for the first time, many had to confront a tough reality: COVID robbed them of learning, especially in math, after more than a year of attending high school from home.
Colleges are now working overtime to help students catch up. But despite the struggles facing these newly minted adults, most are embracing college life.

It is not unusual post-COVID to see hybrid classes, students in person, and students online.
But there is something unusual about two distance learners in this first-year law class. Maureen Onyelobi and Jeff Young are serving life sentences in Minnesota prisons for aiding and abetting murder in separate cases. They also represent the first students ever allowed to pursue a juris doctorate from behind bars.

While President Joe Biden’s one-time student loan forgiveness plan remains tied up in the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Department of Education is working on a more far-reaching and costly plan to overhaul how people pay back their loans.
Experts say an overhaul of the department’s income-driven repayment program has the potential to remake how higher education is financed in America—if borrowers take advantage of it.

Colorado’s community colleges more than doubled their graduation rates from 2015 to 2020. How did they do it?
According to a report released this week from Complete College America, the progress is tied to improvements in basic needs support in and out of the classroom, more academic advising, and changes to remedial education.

A mainstay of the college-selection ritual, enrollment deposits require admitted students to put down a few hundred dollars or less to signify their intent to enroll and lock in their seats for the coming term. The money then applies to their tuition bill.
Some colleges are now abandoning this ritual, with the goal of reducing financial barriers for low-income students.

Professors nationwide are currently immersed in an end-of-term ritual: grading. At the University of California, however, fall grades have been thrown into disarray as a strike involving teaching assistants reached its one-month mark.
Many professors say they are forgoing the submission of final grades, either out of solidarity with striking workers, or because they simply can’t grade hundreds of assignments without the help of readers and TAs—even with grading deadlines extended through the holidays.