Daily Lumina News 051823

The California dream of going to community college and transferring to the University of California or California State University is broken, experts and researchers say. Few students transfer in two years; most take six years, with many more courses than needed. Others drop out altogether.
Students, faculty, and others explore the obstacles behind the ongoing transfer challenge—and what they say can be done to help.

With the help of federal funding, colleges and universities have made great strides in widening access to higher education and opening doors of opportunity to millions of students from increasingly diverse backgrounds.
Institutions now need the same level of support to ensure higher education actually pays off—for individual learners and the country as a whole, writes Yolanda Watson-Spiva of Complete College America in this op-ed.

Stories about the transformative power of artificial intelligence are everywhere. And, with the introduction and popularity of ChatGPT, it feels like the transformation might be coming very quickly—too quickly, according to some people.
Rohit Sharma of ETS and John Fillmore of Chegg weigh in on what AI means for higher education and how it will affect the way people prepare for careers.

Like a lot of today's undergraduates, Yulianna Estrada arrived at college excited about her major. What didn’t particularly interest her? Fulfilling general-education requirements. She's not alone.
On many campuses, general ed still takes the shape of a checklist: two courses from this category, three from that. Because there is no overarching design to this approach, students often flock to courses with the easiest requirements, or the ones that check the most boxes, rather than those that genuinely interest or challenge them.

In the face of a campus takeover at the hands of Gov. Ron DeSantis, New College of Florida students, with help from alumni, are hosting a private graduation ceremony this week separate from the school’s official commencement.
Students, who raised $100,000 for the event, say they want to hold a ceremony “on their terms” after school officials tapped Scott Atlas, a top adviser to former President Donald Trump during the COVID-19 pandemic, to speak at their commencement.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona confirmed this week what many already expected: The pause on federal student loan payments is still set to end later this year. The pandemic-related moratorium has been in place for more than three years and extended eight times.
When the pause ends, roughly 44 million people will have to restart making payments on their federal student loans, and there is some concern about whether the process will go smoothly.