Daily Lumina News 011924

Applying for college can be a stressful and complicated endeavor. Students must manage a multitude of deadlines and portals, submit resumes and essays, coordinate test scores and letters of recommendation, and so much more.
On this episode of What I Want to Know, Lumina Foundation's Melanie Heath discusses if it's time to reimagine the college admissions process and whether a simplified system could improve access to higher education.

It turns out there is great power in the word “free.” While most community colleges are experiencing only a modest comeback from their pandemic enrollment woes, enrollment is surging across Maine Community College System campuses because of the state’s Free College Scholarship program.
Several states have introduced free community college programs to counter declining enrollment rates and workforce shortages, but Maine's effort is one of a few programs specifically aimed at traditional-age college students rather than returning adult learners.

When professors think their students aren’t paying attention in class, they’re probably right.
This new world of fragmented attention and what educators can do to reach increasingly distracted students is the subject of a new book by Georgetown University professor Jeanine Turner. Many of the examples she uses stem from her experience teaching, from interviews with college students, and from investigations of the impact of distance education.

North Carolina has an ambitious plan to modernize its community colleges, starting at square one: funding.
Under a proposal dubbed Propel NC, the system would no longer award money to its campuses based on total full-time enrollment. The new formula is designed to pay a premium to each college based on labor-market outcomes: The more students enrolled in courses in high-demand, high-paying workforce sectors, the more money the college receives.

FAFSA, S.A.I., N.P.C., CSS—it's all part of the paying-for-college process where strange numerical codes and seemingly senseless jumbles of letters rule.
And as the acronyms pile up, parents may feel the urge to back up and ask a perfectly reasonable question: Why does it have to be like this?

When Kevin James became president of Morris Brown College in 2019, there were only 20 students left. The college had lost accreditation in 2002 due to financial mismanagement. Even the water had been shut off.
Across the United States, the news has been about plummeting enrollment and small colleges shutting their doors. Here’s how one Historically Black College and University turned it all around.