Daily Lumina News 010524

Nestled in the rolling hills of the Ozarks, Miah Bressie’s blue-collar hometown, Houston, has a median income of $40,893 and a bachelor’s degree attainment rate of just 14.5 percent. So for Bressie and many of the other 70-some students in her high school graduating class, attending a selective, private institution like Washington University in St. Louis was seen as out of reach.
That's quickly changing as WashU recruiters ramp up outreach efforts to rural high schools in Missouri and southern Illinois to help diversify the school's student body.

David Carrillo holds a position that is extremely rare in prison: He’s an incarcerated professor teaching college-level classes to other prisoners at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility.
Carrillo is part of a new initiative at Adams State University—one of the first of its kind in the country—that employs incarcerated people with graduate degrees as college professors, rather than bringing in instructors from the outside. The program gives incarcerated graduates experience and training while helping to alleviate the staff shortages that can hinder prison education programs.

When it comes to improving faculty diversity at California's community colleges, progress remains painfully slow, according to the agency representing all 116 of the state’s two-year institutions.
For Nikia Chaney, a professor at Cabrillo College, that reality hits home.

Many higher education experts fear that the public battle over Claudine Gay and her resignation as Harvard University's president could deter candidates from seeking top posts at colleges and universities, which already lack racial and gender diversity.
In a New York Times op-ed—her first comments since her resignation earlier this week—Gay issues a warning, too. She writes that the campaign against her “was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.”

Isaac Crawford admits that his first attempt at college was a disaster: In his first year at the Community College of Allegheny County, he “flunked out miserably.” But a second chance, courtesy of The Pittsburgh Promise, gave him the funding, support, and confidence to keep going.
Since its inception in 2008, The Pittsburgh Promise has helped nearly 12,000 students attain a college degree. But in 2028, the program's signature scholarship program will end. Leaders are now strategizing for what's next.

The landscape of opportunity for working learners is a big question mark in 2024. Can our “miracle” economy with strong growth and cooling inflation hold? Will state governments and companies make good on their promises to hire more workers without degrees? And how will AI affect just about everything in the world of work and learning?
Joseph Fuller, co-leader of the Managing the Future of Work initiative at Harvard Business School, offers this thoughts in this interview.