Daily Lumina News 021621

After hours of remote learning, Jaelynn Ciballos, 17, dashes off to her Dutch Bros. Coffee job; Martin Bueno-Garay, 17, heads to his Raising Cane’s gig; and Paola Martinez, 17, drives to the medical office where she works.
They’re all relatively new entrants to the labor market, spurred by a common goal: Help keep their families afloat financially. An after-school job—not an uncommon teenage ritual—has now become a necessity for some students who are watching their parents lose jobs or struggle to pay bills during the pandemic.

Schools and day care centers closed across the nation last March at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, leading to a cascade of improvisation for the parents of Sonoma County’s nearly 120,000 children. The vast majority of kids remain at home nearly a year later, their daily education narrowed to online classes delivered by stressed teachers—and overseen by harried parents.
Prolonged and widespread campus closures have upended the financial outlook for a generation of working mothers, economists say. They are hitting the brakes on their careers, passing up advancement, living off unemployment, and delaying contributions to retirement accounts.

Many states slashed higher education funding last year, fearing the pandemic would torpedo state revenues. The higher education sector, no stranger to steep cuts during economic recessions, braced for further budget reductions in the 2022 fiscal year.
But many public higher education officials’ worst fears have not been realized—at least not yet, experts say. Governors’ proposed state budgets are a mixed bag, with several states pushing to increase higher education funding or at least restore last year’s cuts.

When the chaos of the pandemic eventually subsides and the dust settles, American higher education as a whole may look very different: Wealthy institutions will remain relatively unchanged, but a stratum of even leaner public universities and smaller private colleges are likely to have moved further away from the classic spectrum of a university education.
Their academic offerings, taught by a faculty whose jobs are less secure, will be focused more tightly on job outcomes. And in the aftermath of a crisis that has disproportionately affected the most vulnerable students, they may employ fewer student-support specialists and may call on faculty and staff members more often to fill those shoes.

After several attempts, the puzzle pieces of a postsecondary life were finally beginning to align for 39-year-old Lindsay Pryor. Her dream of becoming a registered dietician had never been closer. Then came the pandemic. The mother of two soon found herself in danger of losing a full scholarship from her Native American tribe, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
To keep vulnerable students from giving up on college—or never enrolling in the first place—some Colorado institutions are working overtime to stay connected to students. Other supports such as new payment plans and more seamless transfer programs are helping, too.

The spring semester is well underway for college students. At the beginning of the month, thousands of them returned to the State University of New York system's 64 campuses—the largest public higher education system in the country—with new COVID protocols and restrictions in place.
But as high school seniors continue applying to college, SUNY is seeing one of its biggest declines in applications. SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras discusses these challenges, plus looming budget cuts, mental health supports, and interventions to keep vulnerable students engaged and focused.