Daily Lumina News 070623

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking down affirmative action, the world of college admissions is poised for a transformation—which could also be an opportunity.
Education and equity experts offer their ideas on how higher education should move forward from here.

Over the weekend, more than 760,000 incarcerated students became eligible for Pell Grants, and applications began to be accepted on Monday.
In this interview, education watchers talk about three key questions facing colleges as they try to move into prison education.

Since 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed colleges and universities to consider the race of applicants. That decision was reaffirmed repeatedly until the current ruling by the court’s conservative majority.
University presidents and education reform advocates are decrying the recent Supreme Court opinion, calling the decision "a true step back" for diversity on college campuses.

The college application process has always been a stressful and opaque process, especially for students from underrepresented backgrounds eyeing top schools. But when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the use of race in college admissions unconstitutional, whole new layers of uncertainty were created.
As colleges and universities rethink their approaches to admissions, students of color are having to rethink everything from the subjects of their essays to the schools they’re targeting.

Many students had high hopes for debt relief when the Biden administration announced a program to ease their student loan burdens in August 2022. Those hopes were dashed last week when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the president's loan forgiveness plan.
Selveyah Gamblin, who is the first person in her family to graduate from college, counted on having her loan burden reduced. Now, her dreams for law school may be put on hold, she says.

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ended race-conscious affirmative action, colleges and universities across the country hoping to enroll diverse student bodies will need different strategies to do so.
For ideas, college leaders could look to California, where public colleges haven’t considered race in admissions since voters in 1996 approved a ballot measure banning it.