Daily Lumina News 012723

There’s good news and bad in a new report on college student success rates. While many U.S. colleges are improving graduation rates for full-time students, achievement gaps continue to exist for Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic students, students 25 and older, and part-time students.
How do we help them succeed? The new Complete College America report shows what some colleges are doing to close performance gaps and drive success for all students.

Student loan forgiveness, once a far-fetched idea, seemed to become reality in August when President Joe Biden announced a plan to cancel debt for some 40 million Americans. Six months later, many borrowers are back to dreaming.
As the Biden administration and conservative groups now debate their student loan forgiveness arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, borrowers are worriedly wondering if the relief they were promised will ever come their way.

Some universities are taking a page from the corporate world’s playbook and hiring for a new senior-level position—chief experience officer.
One college president defines the job this way: "Everything to do with academics is under the provost, and everything else that is student-facing is under the CXO."

Nationally, just 360 American Indian or Alaska Native students earned bachelor’s degrees in engineering in 2018, a number that barely budged from the 345 recipients earning degrees a decade earlier.
Navajo Technical University is working to change those statistics—and inspire a new generation of future Navajo engineers and scientists.

College students around the country have figured out that they can easily ask a new AI tool called ChatGPT to do their homework for them. After all, it’s tailor-made to craft the kinds of essays that instructors ask for.
Education experts weigh in on what ChatGPT means for teaching—plus what college honor code councils are doing to help.

Three years after the start of the pandemic, professors still report a disconcerting level of disconnection among students even as campuses return to “normal.”
Sanjay Sarma, author and former head of digital learning initiatives at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses science—and what it says on how to reach and teach students.