Daily Lumina News 030723

ChatGPT, which can produce essays, poems, prompts, contracts, lecture notes, and computer code, among other things, is now pervasive. And higher education, for its part, is still trying to comprehend the scope of the technology's likely impact on teaching—and how it should respond.
For many, this is a head-spinning moment.

Nearly 3,000 four-year colleges and universities enroll students in America. Only about 25 of them have an admittance rate of 10 percent or less, which means that we’re effectively letting the 1 percent dominate the conversation around higher education—and not for the better.
A narrative has taken hold in the public imagination that if you want a good future, you have to get into one of these highly selective schools. That needs to change, say education advocates.

A new report by Anthology says the top concerns of would-be college students center on whether they can succeed in college, time commitments, and finding a job after graduation.
The study's co-author, Mirko Widenhorn, talks about those findings and how institutions can respond in this interview.

Community colleges educate nearly half of all college students in the United States. But too often, students drop out without degrees.
Many of these students have extra needs to begin with, including first-generation students and adult learners. A new cost modeling exercise aims to figure out how much more funding is required to level the playing field so that they have the same opportunity to get through college as less needy students.

Cody Nobles hopes to study environmental science or marine biology at a college on a shoreline town, where he can observe ocean life firsthand. But after his native Florida adopted legislation restricting LGBTQ rights, Nobles, who is gay, plans to find a similar environment in a different political climate.
More students are following that same path in states where such legislation is being pushed.

When someone on the University of California, Riverside, campus commits a low-level infraction, campus police don’t get involved. Instead, campus safety responders are called in—unarmed individuals tasked with handling situations that don’t necessarily require police carrying weapons.
It’s not just cities and towns that have worked to reform their police practices since 2020. More campuses are trying to provide "less triggering" options to police, especially for people experiencing mental distress.