Daily Lumina News 120723

Paul J. LeBlanc, who transformed Southern New Hampshire University from a small, struggling private college into an online-education powerhouse with more than 150,000 students, will step down as its president and chief executive at the end of the academic year.
More than a mere presidential transition, his departure represents the end of a chapter in contemporary American higher education.

The House Education Committee called the presidents of three elite universities—Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—to a hearing this week and demanded they answer tough questions about antisemitism on campus.
Sometimes they answered directly. Sometimes they didn’t.

The U.S. Department of Education is urging state governors to prepare statewide plans for advancing career and technical education and workforce development.
The plans, which are due this spring, could have important ripple effects on state economies, according to a recent memo from the DOE. Officials there say the strategic plans need to align with new federal investments in workforce development and should be more equity driven.

Janae Montgomery almost gave up on a teaching career until a babysitting gig helped her realize why she wanted to enter the profession in the first place—and why she is uniquely qualified for it.
Montgomery is part of the first cohort of teacher apprentices to graduate from a low-cost higher education program that pairs job-embedded training with online coursework. Montgomery was able to earn her bachelor’s degree through the effort while continuing to work as a paraprofessional, a role she’s held since 2020 at her hometown high school outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

One day.
For Judith Ortiz, whose parents brought her to the United States from Durango, Mexico, when she was just a toddler, a mere 24 hours have made the difference between a life of freedom and opportunity and one constrained by limits and obstacles.

Can workers over the age of 50 be retained or brought back into the workforce if employers offer them opportunities to reskill and learn the newest technology being used in their jobs and professions today?
In this interview, Multiverse’s Gary Eimerman offers his thoughts on confronting “The Great Retirement” and solving employers’ labor shortages at the same time.