Daily Lumina News 041420

When COVID-19 happened, the kinds of in-person activities that career centers set up to get graduates on the career path came to an abrupt halt: internships, job shadowing, corporate-recruiting meetings, and lunches with potential future colleagues.
The rapidly shifting landscape has meant profound changes for all of the participants in the college-to-career pipeline. Some career centers are still trying to figure out how to re-engineer their services. Others are already connecting undergraduates to alumni through videoconferencing, offering career counseling via Zoom, and starting to provide bite-size career lessons online.

Moo Ko Wah is a senior at South Division High School in Milwaukee. Wah and her family are refugees from Myanmar, and she relies on counselors at her school to help her through the college application and decision process.
Now she’s stuck at home, trying to figure out how to submit paperwork to verify her family’s income on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
Wah is fortunate. She's getting extra help through the College Possible program, an effort that pairs low-income or first-generation students with coaches who help them navigate the red tape of college applications.

The pandemic and the nation's economic turmoil are combining to crush the college hopes of many low-income and first-generation students. Those who work with low-income students worry freshmen from poor families who were sent home this semester may never return and high school seniors won't get the hands-on help they need with their financial aid applications.
Some colleges are trying to ease the way for incoming freshmen by pushing back their college decision dates to beyond the traditional May 1 deadline, waiving standardized test score requirements, and stepping up virtual advising efforts.

Low-income, first-generation college students of color are demonstrating resilience across the country amid the coronavirus pandemic. Some are trying to put food on their families’ tables. Others are balancing their own college classes with home schooling their elementary-school-age children or siblings and translating for English learners in their families coping with the crisis.
These are typical students at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), and they are also quite typical of college students across the country.
Two administrators at CSUDH share on-the-ground perspectives on how COVID-19 is disrupting higher education far beyond the abrupt shift to online instruction.