Daily Lumina News 060921

Seventeen states now offer free community college tuition, and existing programs cover tuition for many students. But President Joe Biden wants to make that happen nationwide.
On this episode of "Rethinking College," former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings weighs in on the debate over free community college and Biden's plan.

Colleges and universities have embarked on many different efforts this year to start conversations around racism and bigotry. Hamilton College in New York chose to dedicate its entire alumni magazine to Black voices and conversations about anti-Black racism.
The goal, according to the "We Are Hamilton" editors, is to help non-Black readers feel and understand the sting of racism and motivate them into action.

Kate Schweizer and her husband didn’t want their two daughters, just 13 months apart, to begin their adult lives saddled with college debt, so they borrowed much of the money themselves. Beginning in 2005, the couple took out a new batch of parent PLUS loans each academic year, eventually accumulating about $220,000 in debt.
Today, they owe half a million dollars.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been uniquely hard on community colleges, with many students forced to put their education on a permanent pause. One way to bring students back is to connect them to better jobs while they are enrolled. But high-quality, paid internship programs are all too rare in this sector.
Bunker Hill Community College is changing that through its Learn and Earn program. Corporate partners provide money for the college to staff the new program, a transportation stipend for student interns, and a wage of at least $15 an hour. They also agree to provide a mentor to support the type of students Bunker Hill serves.

Toshiki Aburaki, a 2021 University of Maryland graduate, is optimistic about the future. He just landed a gig as an analyst for Deloitte after about a dozen rejections.
His optimism reflects an improving job market that notched modest gains last month. Though it’s still short of pre-pandemic levels, employers added 559,000 jobs in May—around double the jobs added in April. The prospects for recent degree-earners appear better than anticipated, especially since the pandemic has spared college graduates more than those without degrees.

For most of high school, Dale Mcenany spent his time living in Tijuana, Mexico, and commuting across the border every day to attend school in San Diego, California. In four years, he moved a total of 11 times.
In this essay, Mcenany says the path to economic equality and equal educational outcomes must include solutions that fall outside the purview of “education policy." When it does, America’s most vulnerable students will have the same opportunities for success, he argues.