Daily Lumina News 090222

Leaders of the nation’s community colleges say the Biden administration's loan forgiveness announcement will change lives. They believe the move signals serious conversations about college affordability.
Many are also hopeful that the forgiveness could mean a return to postsecondary education for those with some credit but no degree.

Employers across multiple industries are waiving degree requirements as they compete for workers and look to diversify their candidate pools. Big names in tech, like Accenture and IBM, are leading the way.
In this interview, Taylor McLemore of the Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator offers his thoughts on how companies are actually doing—or not doing—skills-based hiring in tech.

Susan Dynarski, an economist at Harvard University, says she once thought of student loan forgiveness as a crude and inequitable tool for fixing student aid.
In this guest essay, Dynarski describes why she now believes targeted debt cancellation is the best way to undo the damage done to millions of borrowers by a persistently dysfunctional system of college funding and student loan repayment.

America needs a different definition of higher education excellence, one that empowers public institutions at the expense of elites, instead of the other way around. One that measures what colleges do for their country, instead of for themselves.
That’s the philosophy behind the Washington Monthly’s annual college rankings. Instead of rating colleges by wealth, fame, and exclusivity, the publication prizes social mobility, public service, and research. The result is a very different hierarchy of the great, the good, and the not-very-good-at-all.

Like many states across the country, Kentucky faces a critical shortage of nurses and other health care workers. According to state officials, Kentucky is already 12 percent to 20 percent short of the nurses it currently needs.
In response, a newly launched initiative involving educators, employers, and the state government aims to put more candidates on pathways to health careers.

Higher education associations have praised President Joe Biden’s federal student loan debt cancellation plan—but with caveats: Much more needs to be done. Loan relief without proposals for systemic reform is incomplete.
A comprehensive rework of the Higher Education Act hasn’t taken place since 2008. It probably won’t happen now, either, in a gridlocked and highly partisan Congress. But are smaller changes possible?