Daily Lumina News 052021

By the time she finished her sophomore year at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, Nicole Lynn Lewis had long stood out on the pristine 1,200-acre campus, juggling child care and part-time jobs while her classmates rushed for Greek life and partied at football games.
In her new book, “Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Motherhood, College and Creating a Better Future for Young Families,” Lewis provides a sobering reminder of the obstacles that student parents face. She also offers a blueprint for supporting them—by expanding Pell grants, improving child-care access, lowering costs, and reforming federal financial aid.

If enacted, President Joe Biden's American Families Plan would make two years of community college free for eligible Americans. Importantly, Biden's proposal also calls for major investments in wraparound services, such as counseling, child care, transportation assistance, and more.
Such services are hardly incidental. For many students, they can mean the difference between success and failure.

In the blink of an eye, Marco Flores went from on-campus living at Paul Quinn College and having access to a multitude of resources to lacking his own space and sleeping on the couch in his family home.
Many students in Texas share similar stories. A new report from the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice examines the impact of COVID-19 on nearly 13,000 students from 14 Texas colleges and universities through the lens of employment, enrollment, mental health, and basic needs insecurity.

WorkingNation spent four years in Indianapolis researching, reporting, and interviewing people about the city's changing middle class. The result of that work is "The Middle: Indianapolis."
On this episode of All In, WorkingNation's Melissa Panzer and Joan Lynch reflect on some of the stories to emerge about middle-class Hoosiers and the workplace trends affecting their lives. Donte Sims, a former Carrier worker, joins the conversation to tell his story of going back to school to follow his passion for engineering technology.

Kendrick Harrison, a disabled Army veteran, had dreams of earning a college degree after leaving the service. But when the for-profit Argosy University shut down in March 2019, he and hundreds of students were left empty handed. Even worse, no one from the government or his university seemed interested in helping him navigate the fallout of the sudden closure of the college.
When Argosy shut down, Harrison was three months shy of getting his degree. Argosy's closure meant an end to the loan money that paid for the family’s expenses. Harrison couldn’t pay rent, and he and his family faced being homeless.

As the need for a college credential in the labor market grows, so, too, has the price of earning one and the debt that increasingly comes with it. It’s not surprising then that the value of higher education is often reduced to dollars and cents or that people are questioning whether it’s worth the cost.
Yet, the full value of higher education can’t be measured in financial outcomes alone. It must also take into account the advancement of social justice, argue Kayla Elliot and Tiffany Jones in this essay.