Daily Lumina News 111021

Just as the 2020 admissions cycle was reaching its climax, along came COVID-19. Campuses were forced to send students home, pivot to virtual and hybrid learning, and fret about the fall.
Admissions officers and students also had to make decisions about the uncertain academic year that loomed. How did all of this ambiguity play out in the numbers? New research offers insight.

The high school class of 2020 faced a tough choice. They could start college during the pandemic—taking courses online at home, or in person wearing masks in emptied-out lecture halls. Or, they could try to find jobs during a crisis that left frontline workers vulnerable and employment hard to come by.
Then there was a third option that got lots of attention: a gap year. Maybe new graduates could wait out the disruption until conditions returned to something like normal.

Damon Crutchfield grew up in a middle-class household in New Orleans. His parents wanted him to choose a reliable and stable career, one that didn’t require a costly four-year degree.
Crutchfield joined the local carpenters’ union right out of high school. But, technology had always been his dream. That’s when he decided to take the first step into a tech career by attending a coding bootcamp. It proved to be a life-defining decision.

An investigation by NPR found that many student borrowers were prematurely rejected under the revamped Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
The U.S. Department of Education is now promising a fix. Still, borrowers like Melissa Crowe worry that these latest mistakes could lead some borrowers to simply give up on the promise of the department's PSLF overhaul.