Daily Lumina News 052621

Many colleges and universities are already suffering through an unprecedented fall-off in enrollment. Lower birth rates, which lead to a smaller pool of high school graduates, could squeeze them even more.
That reality is prompting some institutions to make long-overdue structural changes—ones that could flatten or lower students’ costs, reduce dropout rates, better connect their academic offerings to workplace demand, make it easier to transfer, and adapt to the needs of older adults and other untapped markets.

Robert Mason graduated from Virginia State University in 1984. He often becomes emotional when describing how transformational the historically Black college was for a student raised by a single mother in a public housing project in Roanoke, Virginia.
In 1990, after working in admissions at Virginia State and at Clark Atlanta University, Mason founded the Common Black College Application. For $20, students can apply to all 61-member HBCUs and specify their top four choices. This year, as many colleges struggled to attract students amid the COVID-19 pandemic, applications through the Common Black College Application jumped 33 percent.

In 2001, Massachusetts families shouldered about 32 percent of the costs of a public university education; by 2018, that figure had almost doubled to 62 percent.
Without financial aid of some sort, Nancy Grossman says her child and many more across the state would simply not be attending college. In this essay, Grossman describes tip-toeing through her son’s college years—and holding her breath every July to see the coming year’s tuition/aid package and the final out-of-pocket tally.

At Southern University at New Orleans, a public historically Black institution, university administrators hope personal calls to former students who left without completing their studies will motivate them to come back.
Southern University is not the only HBCU doing such outreach. The United Negro College Fund, an organization representing 37 private historically Black colleges and universities, recently launched a new initiative to bring 4,000 students back to HBCUs across the country and guide them to graduation with one-on-one coaching.

It took Jasmine Lane five years to discover and fulfill her passion for English literature and teaching—but a year and half to burn out.
Lane’s story is one of a growing number of anecdotal tales of stress and anxiety emerging from the ranks of Black teachers over the course of the last year. And that has researchers and educators concerned about the implications for student achievement and ongoing efforts to diversify the nation’s teaching workforce.

Recipients of this year's New York Times College Scholarship—which provides students with $15,000 in financial assistance for each year of college—have overcome poverty, bullying, physical and mental health struggles, and family tragedies. They each completed their senior year of high school during a pandemic that threw the city’s inequities into full view.
The students also share a common goal: to create a brighter future, not just for themselves, but for their families and communities.