Daily Lumina News 062923

Approximately 600,000 inmates are released from America’s state and federal prisons every year. That’s an outpouring of more than 10,000 people a week who must re-enter society and re-establish lives in communities from which they may have been estranged for years.
Research shows that stable employment reduces the chance an ex-offender will return to jail, yet it remains a rigid barrier for those trying to re-enter society. Hiring ex-offenders is not only humane but also offers benefits for communities and businesses alike, advocates say.

In 1996, California voters passed ballot Proposition 209, which banned race and gender as factors in state university admissions. As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to issue a ruling on whether affirmative action is legal in the United States, California may offer a sense of how a national ban could play out.
Zachary Bleemer, an incoming assistant professor of economics at Princeton University, has studied the impact of Proposition 209. He describes the ramifications of affirmative action bans on campus diversity in this interview.

Fourteen percent. That was the graduation rate when Joe Schaffer became president of Laramie County Community College in 2012.
Across a decade of hard work, LCCC has nearly tripled its graduation rate. Today, the college is helping to meet key workforce needs within its communities, and $130 million in capital improvements have made LCCC a place where people want to be.

With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to announce its ruling any day now on the legality of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, debates around who should pay for the country’s crippling level of student debt—amounting to more than $1.7 trillion—continue to flood the national discourse.
What’s less discussed, however, is how we got here in the first place, and what must change to avoid imposing immense financial hardship on yet another generation, write education innovators Michael B. Horn and Scott Pulsipher in this essay.

Dire warnings of teacher shortages are nothing new, especially during the pandemic. But a confluence of warning signs suggest that the country is at a post-pandemic inflection point.
More teachers are leaving the classroom. Teachers who remain appear demoralized and stressed. Meanwhile, fewer young people want to join the profession. These challenges could get better as the pandemic recedes and policymakers respond, or they could shape a generation of teachers and their students.

Duke University announced last week that it would offer full tuition grants starting this fall to students from North and South Carolina whose family income is less than $150,000.
The new financial aid policy is notable not just for its high income cap and geographic specificity, but also for its timing. It comes in the midst of a weeks-long period of collective anticipation regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in two cases that will determine the fate of affirmative action.