Daily Lumina News 021323

New numbers for Black Americans eager to improve their lives with college degrees are alarming: Only 34 percent hold degrees. Worse yet, their college enrollment numbers are steeply declining, down another 30,000 this past fall.
A new Gallup-Lumina Foundation poll tells us why. It shows how discrimination often derails learners’ dreams of better-paying jobs or promotions with degrees and credentials.

It’s a trend slowly happening across the nation: free college programs. After the defeat of President Joe Biden’s nationwide free community college plan a year ago, some momentum for the idea moved to the state level.
More states are now launching their own initiatives, and those that already exist are considering possible expansions.

With the future of a program that protects young undocumented immigrants from deportation in limbo, senators last week introduced legislation to give them a path to legal residency.
The effort is urgent for hundreds of thousands of young adults whose future is in question as a challenge to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that now protects them moves through the courts. But any immigration legislation faces a steep climb in a split Congress.

With about $50,000 in student loan debt and an income that barely helps her stay ahead of interest with her payments, Felicia Brown is relying on credit cards just to make ends meet.
A new bill in Colorado aims to give adjunct instructors like Brown, who may depend on food banks and share housing, full-time employment status for the sake of applying for federal student loan forgiveness.

The state of facilities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities again made headlines recently, with student protests breaking out at Bethune-Cookman University over unsanitary conditions, as well as mold and rat-infested dorms.
HBCUs in the United States have been underfunded for decades. Journalist Adam Harris of The Atlantic talks about the underlying reasons behind the inequality in this interview.

California's community colleges rarely offer student housing, despite the fact that affordable housing is getting harder to come by. The average household income required to afford rent and utilities is $81,191.
Yet out of the 116 community colleges in California’s system, only 12 have student housing, and only 14 have rapid rehousing programs like hotel or motel vouchers or deposit or move-in assistance. Some schools are seeing the benefits of bucking that trend.