Daily Lumina News 082922

When construction crews arrived at Berkeley's historic People’s Park to start a planned student apartment complex, demonstrations and protests immediately began to unfold.
The tensions playing out in People's Park are an extreme example of the challenges facing colleges with housing shortages, as students eager to return to on-campus run up against limited dorm space and sky-high rents for off-campus accommodations.

The Biden administration is again trying to shore up the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program against ongoing legal challenges that threaten to revoke protections for thousands of immigrants.
While an important signal of the Biden administration’s commitment to the program, it is far from a perfect fix. The more than 450-page final rule, effective October 31, formally codifies DACA as a federal regulation, but it offers current Dreamers little immediate protection.

For millions of students, borrowing thousands of dollars has become the key to paying for an undergraduate degree.
The Biden administration's newly announced student debt cancellation plan will give graduates—and those who have taken out loans but not finished school—some relief, but the need to overhaul a system reliant on debt remains as urgent as ever.

For more than a decade, the state of Maine has been dealing with the college enrollment declines now happening everywhere. Yet, the University of Maine managed to increase its undergraduate enrollment during that period by about 5 percent.
It accomplished this feat by luring out-of-staters with in-state tuition prices and by breaking with long-standing attitudes through which higher education sometimes alienates rather than embraces prospective applicants.

Last week, President Joe Biden unveiled a plan to cancel significant amounts of student loan debt for tens of millions of Americans.
This episode of The Daily explores the details behind that plan, the intense debate it has generated, and if it's possible to transform the way Americans pay for higher education.

It has been more than 15 years since two of the country’s top public university systems, the University of Michigan and the University of California, were forced to stop using affirmative action in admissions.
Since then, both systems have tried to build racially diverse student bodies through extensive outreach and major financial investments. Those efforts, according to both universities, have fallen abysmally short.