Daily Lumina News 081621

The City University of New York announced last week that it would temporarily stop withholding transcripts from students with unpaid bills, reversing a long-held policy that prevented thousands from transferring between schools or entering the careers of their choice.
CUNY students are among the millions across the country hit hard by the pandemic and left struggling to finance their education. But the problem of transcript withholding long predates COVID, as The Hechinger Report’s Jon Marcus found when he began investigating this issue as part of a Hidden Debt Trap project.

A new report from the Brookings Institution calls for a major infusion of federal money into an overlooked group of schools: regional colleges in economically challenged areas.
In this interview, one of the report's authors talks about his vision for the proposal, the barriers still facing regional colleges, and how to sell the idea of new federal support to policymakers.

The CARES Act, passed in March 2020, gave $1 billion to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Minority Serving Institutions. More than 20 of the roughly 100 HBCUs around the country have been using these funds to help their students pay off debts owed to the school.
Research shows that Black students often shoulder larger amounts of student debt; they are also more likely to struggle to repay their loans after graduation. Additionally, Black graduates, on average, make less money than their white peers, even with a college degree. Canceling student debt, many advocates argue, is one of the fastest ways to close the Black-white wealth gap.

Aerospace is the largest industry in Oklahoma City. The area also has the fourth largest Native American population in the United States.
Phil Busey, Sr. of Delaware Resource Group sees great workforce development potential in the local Native American community—and he's looking for ways to get members the skills they need to address a growing aerospace workforce and education gap.

Caria Taylor, a recent graduate of Cass Tech High School in Detroit, spent much of the last year documenting the pandemic with her camera.
In poetry and photographs, Taylor gives a first-hand account of the losses and lessons of a pandemic-fueled school year.

It is what many universities fear. After months of gearing up for a fall semester that seemed like normal, with in-person classes and packed football games, the University of Texas at San Antonio recently announced that almost all courses will be held online for the first three weeks because of a surge in Delta variant cases in San Antonio.
Fully remote classes are something leaders of universities across the country hope to avoid this fall. Yet, even as infections rise, public universities in Texas and elsewhere are denied the most potent tools to stop the spread—they cannot force students or staff to get vaccines or even wear masks.