Daily Lumina News 021524

When it became apparent that the rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid would not be as simple as promised, Saint Louis University quickly pivoted to Plan B: It created its own institutional aid application that replicates the FAFSA’s questions.
SLU’s experimental workaround is just one example of how higher education is responding to major delays in the federal-aid process this year. Institutions throughout the country have been assessing how, or if, to adjust their financial-aid processes and timelines—and what to tell anxious families who are waiting for answers.

At 47, Ibrahim Mohamed doesn’t fit the typical image of a college intern. Upon arriving to the United States from Sudan in 2016, he went online to look for a steady job and decided he wanted to be an electrician at a water treatment facility.
Mohamed started his internship a few years later through a state program known as a “High Road Training Partnership.” The state has spent roughly $370 million on these workforce programs, but are they working?

You might call it a bachelor party: Rhode Island saw an almost 4 percent increase increase in bachelor’s degrees in 2022, according to new national data.
One factor might be the founding of the Rhode Island Promise scholarship in 2017. The effort helps students attend the Community College of Rhode Island tuition-free, easing access to a four-year degree if a student decides to pursue that path.

For nearly 30 years, incarcerated people had almost no avenues to pursue a higher education. Thanks to the recent restoration and expansion of Pell Grants to incarcerated students, that is changing—and the U.S. Department of Education estimates that 760,000 people will be newly eligible for federal financial aid.
The expansion also gives broad authority to the states to decide how to approve and evaluate aid-eligible prison education programs. In this interview, four prison education experts discuss how to balance accountability goals while ensuring vulnerable students have equitable access to high-quality instructional programs.

In what may be the first such acquisition of its kind, the independent student paper at Iowa’s flagship university has purchased two local weekly newspapers.
Some in the news industry are now hopeful the model could be replicated elsewhere, saving struggling community papers that might otherwise be forced to shutter or sell to a hedge fund, which have become known for wringing profits out of local publications while depleting the quality and quantity of their coverage.

Even before the pandemic, the demand for nurses in North Carolina was on the rise, and experts predict that the state will see nursing shortages over the next decade. By 2033, North Carolina could face a shortage of roughly 12,500 registered nurses and more than 5,000 licensed practical nurses.
As leaders across the state discuss the looming health care challenges facing North Carolina, one community college is piloting a way to help.