Daily Lumina News 090220

Many of the calamities facing higher education today can and should be mitigated in the short run by a sufficiently large federal rescue package. But even that will leave the system significantly worse than it was pre-pandemic: diminished, sclerotic, and vulnerable to the next unforeseen disaster. A fundamentally different policy architecture is needed for American higher education, and the best time to build it is now.
This essay describes how that plan might work.

Many close observers of the fiscal health of higher education in the COVID-19 era have been focused on colleges’ fall enrollments. And while initial signals about the fall have been emerging, newly released figures on summer enrollments offer insights on changes that are already happening. Some of what the numbers say is surprising.

Days into his semester at Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho, Tyrel Henry realized his classes were mostly online. That's a daunting prospect given how his spring semester of digital learning went.
Henry has only one class on campus. But he is effectively a full-time resident of Lewiston for the semester. For college students like Henry, the coronavirus-era line between "in-person" and "remote" course offerings has become increasingly blurry.

The beginning of the semester isn't starting as Zia Huballah had hoped. She's a junior at Emory University. The school announced about a month ago it would be mostly online.
The coronavirus has forced about one-third of all colleges to teach remotely. In many cases, that means classrooms are being replaced by childhood bedrooms or kitchen tables. And for students like Huballah, it also means scrambling to get the technology they need to take their classes.

Kenosha, Wisconsin, a city of 100,000 people, is now in the news as yet another site where police shot a Black man. A viral video shows an officer firing seven shots into the back of 29-year-old Jacob Blake on Aug. 23. Three of his children reportedly saw what happened from his car.
This is “one episode” in a “long history” of racial inequities, if you know Wisconsin’s past, says Dr. Katherine Hilson of Carthage College in Kenosha.

Consumers and employers increasingly are turning to short-term, online alternatives to the college degree, and alternative credential pathways are projected to grow in popularity.
In this podcast, Paul Freedman of the Learning Marketplace at Guild Education and WorkingNation's Jane Oates discuss how high-quality, industry-driven credentials can quickly help people find and keep better jobs.