Daily Lumina News 081321

While the overall proportion of Americans with college degrees has been slowly increasing, the proportions who are Black, Native American, or Hispanic are falling further behind, or staying no better than level.
It’s a problem with implications beyond equity and fairness. Several states are recognizing that, unless they can propel more people through college who have been less likely to go and to finish, they can’t meet their goals for increasing the proportion of their populations with degrees—or be able to fill jobs requiring a college education.

Despite rising numbers of COVID-19 cases, many college campuses expect to be back at full capacity this fall. So do hotels. That’s left some institutions without the robust quarantine and isolation housing that had been critical to their reopening plans in 2020.
The more-transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus is spreading rapidly, once again raising the possibility that infected or exposed students might need to isolate—a difficult task in communal housing like dorms.

With an enrollment of more than 130,000 students, Western Governors University is one of the nation’s largest universities. And just under 50,000 students graduated from the online, competency-based university during the last academic year.
In this interview, WGU President Scott Pulsipher discusses his recent testimony on how to expand access to higher education, different ways of measuring student outcomes, and extending federal aid eligibility to high-quality microcredentials.

Counselors can play a big role in helping students achieve what might otherwise feel impossible: pursuing college and other opportunities beyond high school. But we need more of them, especially given the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
In this essay, Kevin Herrera describes how a school counselor gave him the support and resources to keep his college dreams alive.