Daily Lumina News 011322

In spite of all the talk in recent years about supporting first-generation students, campus officials don’t necessarily hear directly from them very much. That may be why stubborn gaps continue to trip up too many students.
As colleges try to develop better approaches and programs, what do students themselves have to say? Several first-gen students offer their perspectives on what's working and what can be improved.

Tomas Keen is a 2019 graduate from University Beyond Bars, a college-in-prison program in Monroe, Washington.
In this essay, Keen describes how college-in-prison programs gave him hope and purpose—and why more efforts like them are needed to help incarcerated individuals transcend prison walls.

For tens of thousands of Indiana students, the cost of returning to college is more than just tuition—it requires cash up front for unpaid bills from their previous attempts at degrees. These aren’t colossal student loan debts, but smaller missed payments to colleges for classes, fees, textbooks, or other supplies.
An initiative called Indy Achieves aims to knock down those barriers.

According to The MENTOR Network, there are more than 16,800 children in foster care in Pennsylvania; 95 percent will leave the system with no source of income and under 3 percent will earn a college degree.
It doesn’t have to be that way. A longtime university president calls on local colleges to steal an idea from Michigan: recruit and educate the nearly 17,000 foster kids in Pennsylvania.

Baker College promises students a better life. It sells itself as a place where students thrive and lives are transformed: “a haven for those who dream big.”
In reality, few students ever graduate, and even those who do often leave with crushing debt and useless degrees. No one—not the board, nor the accreditors, nor the federal government—has intervened.

Like many industries across the country, U.S. manufacturers are facing a shortage of qualified workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturers had more than 1 million open jobs in October 2021.
Companies are tackling the skills shortage on many fronts, from creating or expanding internal training efforts to collaborating with educational institutions on skills certification programs.