Daily Lumina News 060721

When Kelly Martin Broderick, 40, left the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2014, she was just five classes short of graduating. As is the case for more than 36 million adults who started college but do not finish, life got in the way.
Then she got a letter from UMBC inviting her back to finish her degree. Broderick’s return came as some universities began turning more attention to students who left school before earning a degree, in part, as a way to turn around enrollment declines during the pandemic. For some former students, the push arrived at just the right time.

When Valerie Mekki lost her job in April 2020, she was too scared to share the bad news with her children. Instead, she hid in her room for 45 minutes. But her teenagers surprised her with their optimism. They told her she would figure it out.
More than a year later, Mekki is still figuring it out. She is among millions of women who have yet to return to work full time, despite an economic recovery boosted by the availability of COVID-19 vaccines and falling rates of coronavirus infection.

As part of a recent convening on teaching and learning excellence, community college leaders discussed ways to not only recruit students amid the current health crisis but also support them on their path to completion.
On this podcast, three experts—Dr. Eduardo J. Padrón of Miami Dade College, Dr. Lenore Rodicio of The Aspen Institute College Excellence Program, and Dr. William Serrata of the El Paso County Community College District—take a deep dive into the many challenges brought on by the pandemic, plus the solutions to address them.

In the final stretch of Iris’s last semester of medical school, she and her classmates were drawn into the riptide of an unprecedented crisis. She’d planned to spend her spring celebrating the end of medical school and preparing for the start of her career in internal medicine. Instead, she joined the front lines of the fight against a plague.
Doctors aren’t supposed to spend their first training days on the front lines of a pandemic. But in the spring of 2020, a group of medical school graduates volunteered to do just that.

In early December, California State University leaders made a bold announcement: All 23 campuses would reopen for in-person classes in fall 2021. But with registration underway for the new academic year, the return is looking anything but normal—and it has become clear the pandemic has altered the future of the nation’s largest four-year university system.
Online options are here to stay.

When Brian Sandoval became president of the University of Nevada, Reno, in September 2020, he pledged to make access to technology a priority for the institution and to do a better job of promoting digital equity and digital literacy.
Now, thanks to a partnership with Apple, incoming first-year students will receive an iPad Air, Bluetooth keyboard, and digital pen when they come to campus this August. Sandoval hopes to use the relationship with Apple as a recruiting tool for future students and an example of how the institution can better prepare graduates for a competitive job market.