Daily Lumina News 112023

Incarcerated students and their supporters celebrated when Congress lifted the 26-year ban on Pell Grants for people in prison, a decision that took effect in July. Many people expected college-in-prison programs to balloon, with higher ed institutions taking advantage of new Pell dollars to expand access to these efforts.
But the reality is playing out differently, as corrections agencies and colleges encounter a slow and bureaucratic process of ensuring the quality of new or expanded programs and that they meet federal requirements.

Declining college enrollment is opening up a new and bigger conversation about the value of a college degree.
On this episode of Where We Live, Lumina Foundation's Courtney Brown discusses the changing face of today's learners and what they need to survive and thrive. High school counselor Steve Schneider and the Brookings Institution's Katharine Meyer join the conversation with their thoughts on college costs, alternative college pathways, and more.

Amid national discussions on the value of higher education—and whether college is even needed to land family-sustaining jobs—a new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce puts it plain and simple: Nearly three-fourths of all U.S. jobs through 2031 will require some form of postsecondary education or training.
Says Anthony P. Carnevale, CEW director and lead author on the report: "Postsecondary education is no longer the preferred pathway to middle-class jobs; it is increasingly the only pathway.”

The U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling to ban race-conscious admissions upended the world of college applications, sending counselors, teachers, parents, and students scrambling to understand what the history-making decision meant, on a personal and practical level, for them.
No one Googled, questioned, and second-guessed more than this year’s crop of incoming high school seniors—seniors like Demar Goodman in Atlanta and, 400 miles west of him in Tennessee, 17-year-old Cole Clemmons. This is their story.

College presidents have been inundated with demands that they issue statements on the Israel-Hamas conflict. But there seems to be no right way to do it.
With pressures on all sides, how do college presidents decide when to comment on world events? And when they do make a statement, what should they say? Several college leaders weigh in on walking the tightrope of responding publicly, or not, to political and world events.

For the past two decades, the College Board has moved aggressively to expand the number of high school students taking Advanced Placement courses and tests—in part by pitching the program to low-income students and the schools that serve them.
Left out of this narrative is one of the most sobering statistics in education: Some 60 percent of A.P. exams taken by low-income students this year scored too low for college credit—one or two out of five—a statistic that has not budged in 20 years.