Daily Lumina News 012323

Like many women struggling to turn their lives around behind bars, Alexa Garza found refuge and hope in the college courses that were offered sporadically and unpredictably in her maximum-security prison in Texas.
Despite being the fastest-growing segment of the state’s prison population, women, Garza contends, “are a correctional afterthought.” Several studies support her belief.

Today's college enrollees don't necessarily fit the mold of young adults fresh out of high school. Instead, more college students today are balancing coursework with full-time jobs or parenting. They also are in their mid-20s or older.
Some schools are broadening their support systems to help these learners thrive.

With federal data on college costs and outcomes limited in some crucial ways, and colleges and universities themselves often making it hard to find answers, several states are quietly passing or proposing laws to make certain information available to consumers about what they’ll get for their investment in higher education.
In a country where only 64 percent of students graduate from college in six years, experts say more transparency can only help Americans make better choices about where to attend.

For decades, Bay State College has welcomed students to classes in a swanky, marble-floored office building in downtown Boston. But only a trickle of students arrived for classes last week, following news that the college could lose its accreditation—and its ability to award degrees—by summer.
Students say they are stunned by the for-profit school's demise. Higher education analysts have a different reaction.

After struggling as an undergraduate at University of California, Irvine, Andrea Mora is now the school's director of basic needs and tasked with supervising various services that the university provides to students whose backgrounds and life stories are much like her own: students from low-income or immigrant backgrounds; first in their families to attend college; Black, Hispanic or Indigenous, or BIPOC.
Mora's position is slowly becoming more common, as colleges and universities invest in hiring directors of basic needs to address growing food and housing insecurity among students.

American colleges and universities face a big challenge: plummeting enrollments. For all higher education institutions, but particularly for small colleges, that enrollment cliff spells trouble.
On this episode of On Point, higher ed leaders and policy experts discuss the future of small colleges—and how they'll survive.