Daily Lumina News 040821

This month, students across the country are learning admissions decisions from their prospective colleges and universities. But the pandemic upended the admissions process, often eliminating standardized test requirements and generating an avalanche of applications that threatened to overwhelm admission systems.
At the same time, the changes may also result in benefits as admission officers reviewed students who never would have qualified—or applied—in any other year.

Some 1.1 million workers age 55 and older have left the workforce during this past year. Many have given up on searching for work because of the challenges they’ve experienced—including ageism in the workforce and lack of job opportunities.
Ramsey Alwin, president and CEO of the National Council on Aging, discusses how to make sure older workers aren’t left behind in the post-pandemic economic recovery.

Now more than ever, students are increasingly relying on professors for mental health assistance. A new report shows that professors are willing to step up—challenging long-standing perceptions that it’s “not part of the job”—but they need and want more guidance on how to help.
Suggestions include providing faculty members with more training and straightforward resources on student mental health issues, such as mental health statements to include in their syllabi. This information should speak to student substance abuse issues, as well, according to the report, as professors say they’re even less prepared to help students with this topic. The campus climate for students of color also requires urgent attention.

“Free community college” is an appealing idea. Its plain language meaning is clear: No tuition or fees at any public college that focuses on two-year degrees.
But a look at how the American higher education system is actually structured shows that this notion is much more complicated than it sounds. Ultimately, it underscores how hard it is to base good higher education policy on institutional and degree classifications instead of outcomes. There’s a simpler, better way to achieve the free community college promise.

Last month, a shooter killed eight people in Atlanta, six of them women of Asian descent. This after months of news about Asian-looking people in America being harassed and beaten by those who blamed them for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Asian American student groups say they’re tired of it all—of having to learn, and to teach other students, about Asian American history on their own. They're demanding discussions about anti-Asian bias on campus, courses and programs in Asian American studies, the creation of an inter-Asian center for students. Many of these demands outline changes student groups have been advocating for years, but the tragedy in Atlanta, they reason, could create fresh urgency for administrators to act.

Merger is something of a taboo word in higher education, given that most of them are takeovers in which one college usually disappears. But as financial, demographic, and other issues force many colleges to consider significant changes in how they operate, cross-institutional collaboration of one sort or another is likely to grow.
This episode of The Key examines the growing pressures on colleges to consider working with other institutions to bring significant changes in how they fulfill their missions—and the structural and cultural barriers that tend to make cross-institutional collaboration so hard to pull off.