Daily Lumina News 072020

As Congress and state legislatures search for ways to make college more affordable, people with direct experience—including many researchers of color—aren’t in the room where it happens. Diversity is absent as borrowers of color face unique challenges that vary by race, ethnicity, and gender.
In this interview, Dominique Baker of Southern Methodist University discusses the importance of Black voices in policy dialogues about affordability and student borrowing.

In the rural Deep South, Black residents born into poverty have long struggled to escape it. Schools here are among the most ill-resourced in the nation, well-paying jobs are few, and necessities like Wi-Fi, public transportation and medical insurance are often out of reach.
With families so sensitive to any disruption, the pandemic risks shattering the fragile lifeline to Mississippi’s rural poor. Terri Johnson is determined to beat those odds.

For some students, the trappings of that “true college experience” represent the appeal of campus life. For first-generation students, they are anything but superficial; they can be among the key forces keeping educational dreams alive.
But as the coronavirus whittles away all signs of normalcy on campuses nationwide, first-generation students and their advocates say their education may be endangered.

Every week, more colleges and universities are reversing their plans to bring students and faculty members back to campus for the upcoming fall semester. Three liberal-arts colleges—Occidental College, Rhodes College, and Dickinson College—are among the latest institutions to alter their decisions.

As colleges establish coronavirus safety measures on their campuses, they also need to transform how students act and think. As part of its norm-setting, the University of Miami in Florida is tasking student leaders with modeling and advocating new campus behaviors on the grounds that "peers listen to peers."
The university also plans to hire—for $10 an hour—a cadre of 50 students as public health ambassadors to enforce mask-wearing, six-foot distancing, and more. The idea is to create positive peer pressure, according to school leaders.

Hammered by mounting coronavirus costs and anticipating lost revenue from international students, fall sports and state budgets gutted by the pandemic, colleges and universities nationwide have begun eyeing what until now has been seen as a last resort—thinning the ranks of their faculty.
The cuts underscore the growing financial crisis sweeping across higher education, which in recent years has struggled with shrinking state support and declining enrollment amid concerns about skyrocketing tuition and the burden of student debt.