Daily Lumina News 031921

This week marks the 52nd straight week of high unemployment claims, with numbers rising as more than a million people file for state and emergency federal unemployment benefits across the country.
One state, Rhode Island, is working to reverse that trend by matching several thousand job-seeking residents with potential employers who need employees.

Few elite colleges in the midst of choosing their freshman classes like to admit how often they give preference to legacy applicants, a practice that largely benefits higher-income students and by some estimates can double or even quadruple an applicant’s chances of getting in.
Despite calls for reform, legacy admissions is the one topic most colleges do not want to talk about. And that silence puts many low-income and minority students at a big disadvantage in accessing top schools.

Glenn Richards, director of housing at Jackson College in Michigan, used to get one or two students calling every year to say they needed housing with their children. His response was always the same: They couldn’t live on campus.
No more. A mother and her son are moving into the first of the college’s tiny homes this March. The project, which includes affordable rent and nearby childcare, is designed to address some of the added challenges student parents face when pursuing their education.

While the longer-term effects of learning under this pandemic remain to be seen, colleges are diving into their learning-management systems and digging through student surveys to figure out what worked and what didn’t this fall.
If there’s a thread that ties many of these findings together, it’s this: To thrive at a time when we’re spending our days behind doors and in front of screens, students need connections more than ever, connections that recognize their lives beyond the classroom.

Stark differences by race and ethnicity exist in student borrowing trends, as decades of research and statistics on debt, repayment, and default rates have well established.
Lumina Foundation's Katherine Wheatle discusses a Lumina-funded project on better serving student borrowers of color, plus other efforts to address structural racism in higher education.

Ivy League schools and a host of other highly selective institutions waived SAT and ACT requirements for the class of 2025, resulting in an unprecedented flood of applications and what may prove the most chaotic selection experiment in American higher education since the end of World War II.
The question hanging over higher education this month is whether the influx will permanently change how colleges select students and, ultimately, the makeup of the student population.