Daily Lumina News 091021

Tony Perez has never forgotten the day the sky fell and terror came to his campus. Perez, then the president of Borough of Manhattan Community College, was driving to work on Sept. 11, 2001, when he looked up and saw the attack on New York’s World Trade Center.
BMCC lost eight students and alumni plus a building in the terror attacks. On the 20th anniversary, lessons reverberate amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Student loans were supposed to be the ticket to the middle class. Instead, they grew to become a debt trap for millions of Americans, says Josh Mitchell, who covers economics and student debt for the Wall Street Journal.
Economist Beth Akers interviews Mitchell on the history of the student loan system, what the student debt crisis is precisely, and what it means for the future of higher education policy.

Today's community college students typically accumulate up 82 credits when earning an associate degree—22 more than they should need.
The guided pathways approach to community college reform aims to create a clear, structured path for students to earn a credential. California in particular has jumped on this concept, spending $150 million in 2018 on its guided pathways framework.

Author and higher ed insider Arthur Levine believes that big changes are coming to higher education, and those changes will be bigger and more disruptive than many college leaders realize as online education grows in both size and prestige.
On this podcast, Levine discusses how higher education has become what it is today—and how it might be refitted for an uncertain future.

Does tenure increase or decrease racial diversity in the faculty ranks? The question is imbued with fresh urgency on the heels of recent controversies involving Nikole Hannah-Jones and Cornel West.
Pose the question to some scholars, however, and they tend to bristle, but for starkly different reasons.

Colleges and universities started the summer by waving the prospect of scholarships, laptops, game consoles, and more in front of students who got a COVID-19 shot.
Now, as millions move back to campus, hundreds of schools are mandating vaccines and penalizing those who resist without a medical or religious reason.