Daily Lumina News 020624

Lumina Foundation's Stronger Nation tool serves as an invaluable resource to help individuals, communities, and states drive change when it comes to educational attainment.
Whether it’s comparing communities, identifying underserved groups, or charting a course toward equity, this interactive tool illuminates areas of success and opportunities for improvement. Explore the Stronger Nation website to learn more.

A growing body of research shows that student persistence and college completion are strongly connected to and determined by whether students’ basic needs are being met. But college administrators are hamstrung by insufficient funding to fully address basic needs insecurity on their campuses and help students in a comprehensive way.
Could using pre-existing data from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid to identify students who qualify for public assistance programs be a solution? A new study says yes.

Rural community colleges play an important but underrecognized role in expanding access to quality education and workforce training in regions that need them the most. They advance equity, often serve as the largest employer in a rural county, and support economic development.
At the same time, they also suffer from underinvestment and a lack of resources compared to colleges in urban regions. Now, an influx of federal funding could create new opportunities for rural community colleges to build up their grant development process and capacity.

The U.S.-Mexico border is a fraught topic in political debate in Congress and between presidential candidates. But crossing it is a key part of training for some prospective bilingual teachers in California to get insight into their future students’ lives.
The dual language and English learner education department at San Diego State University has taken student teachers on four-day trips to visit schools in Tijuana for about 10 years. The goal is for them to learn about some of the experiences that students from Mexico and other countries in Central and South America face and how those experiences might affect students in the classroom.

State support for higher education saw a significant jump this year, rising more than 10 percent from 2023—even though the share of that money provided by the federal government dropped 50 percent.
That’s according to the new Grapevine report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Experts say pressure from politicians to keep tuition rates at public colleges flat may be helping to drive some of the increase in state funding for the 2024 fiscal year.

Few college admission cycles have been as tumultuous as this one. As schools are forced to rethink their policies in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, it’s not an easy time to be a college applicant, especially for students of color.
And then there is the issue of financial aid.