Daily Lumina News 010523

Seven states, including Florida, have passed legislation aimed at restricting public colleges’ teaching or training related to critical race theory.
Some tenured professors are resisting anti-CRT pressure. But those without the protection of tenure are finding it harder to resist laws that ban certain racial topics. Their students suffer the consequences.

The 2023 calendar year is the first since COVID-19 arrived when every higher education trend doesn’t have to be viewed through a pandemic lens.
Effects of the coronavirus crisis linger, but new topics are taking center stage. Among them: potential reworks to the federal financial aid system, race-conscious admissions policies, and fresh scrutiny—and the rejection of—U.S. News & World Report’s highly influential college rankings.

For one student, it’s the time spent walking an hour each way to campus. For another without a reliable ride, it’s the stress and expense of getting to class for a big exam.
Advocates who want to ensure more community college students graduate are zeroing in on one key barrier to remove: transportation.

Community colleges across the country experienced major staffing losses during the pandemic. The schools lost 13 percent of their employees nationally from January 2020 to April 2022, according to recent research.
Now, those institutions are suffering from the ripple effects as campus leaders try desperately to recruit and hire new people.

With little fanfare, a historic, live-streamed debate took place in 2022 between incarcerated residents from the Maine Department of Corrections and the debate team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Providing more of these opportunities is the goal of the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison and its work to showcase what students in prison are capable of doing.

A federal judge in Boston has sentenced the so-called “architect“ of the Varsity Blues college admissions scheme to three and a half years in prison and ordered him to repay the IRS more than $10 million in forfeitures.
William “Rick” Singer's sentencing marks the end of the federal case that charged dozens of wealthy parents with doctoring their children’s applications to make them look like ace test-takers or top athletes.