Daily Lumina News 042523

Regina Ray’s commute to work as a mental-health counselor at Virginia Tech is a three-minute walk. Ray isn’t your typical campus therapist: She’s an "embedded counselor" in the university’s residence halls.
Hiring embedded counselors like Ray has a two-fold purpose for Virginia Tech. Administrators want to make it easier for students to access mental-health services. They also want to take some pressure off resident assistants in responding to their peers’ mental-health crises.

Since its creation in 2021, Credential As You Go has become a national movement to reimagine the future of learning and work.
In this interview, Holly Zanville of George Washington University talks about the Credential As You Go model and its work to recognize all learners for what they know and can do.

More families around the country are taking the once-unheard-of step of negotiating financial aid with colleges before the May 1 deadline, when most schools expect students to commit.
Colleges have long held most of the information, and therefore the leverage, in these negotiations, but that may be changing. Entrepreneurs and savvy parents are now creating websites that post information to help other prospective students understand the opaque world of a college’s finances.

One of the benefits of attending community college is that it offers an affordable path to a four-year degree. But that’s not the reality for many students. Some highly selective four-year colleges have policies that allow them to determine which credits count after a student enrolls. But others, like the University of Chicago, reject all credits from two-year institutions.
It’s a practice that costs students thousands of dollars per credit and prevents them from graduating on time and with less debt. Meanwhile, colleges profit off of their enrollment, student advocates say.

The number of people who attended some college but never earned a credential is growing across the country, according to the latest “Some College, No Credential” report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
The new progress report says that many of these students struggled to enroll and stay enrolled because of challenges posed by the pandemic, high college prices, and the lure of decent-paying jobs that don’t necessarily require a certificate or degree in the current labor market.

Terrica Purvis is in her first year of study for an associate degree in nursing at Everett Community College. The 27-year-old is also one of more than 6,000 Washington community and technical college students enrolled in the state’s Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) program.
The effort helps students master academic fundamentals while training for a career. For Purvis and many others, the program is making all the difference in their college journey.