Daily Lumina News 010720

As Dara Byrne rose through the ranks of the administration at John Jay College for Criminal Justice—an institution known for training New York City’s future police officers—she noticed a mystery right on her campus: Why were 2,000 seniors, with only one year left to graduate, not enrolling in the fall?
Typically, colleges work on improving graduation rates by investing more in students when they first arrive on campus. But Byrne’s observation convinced her that she needed to turn this model around and nurture older, non-traditional learners at the end of their college careers.

Roughly 200,000 military veterans transition into civilian life every year. Some of them go directly into the job market. Others, armed with the post-9/11 GI Bill, see a college education as a pathway to success after their military career has ended.
The Warrior-Scholar Project is designed to help veterans make the jump from service to studies. The effort, which includes mentoring and other forms of guidance, is built on a series of highly intensive one- and two-week academic boot camps held at various colleges and universities around the country.

Martha Paz left Mexico with her family when she was only a few months old. For most of her life, Paz lived in a small town outside of Dallas with her parents and younger siblings. She worked hard to get good grades in school.
Paz has temporary protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Now a student at the University of Texas, she is working toward a degree in management information systems. But as early as this month, the U.S. Supreme Court could issue a decision that spells the end of deferred action for Paz and hundreds of thousands of other young immigrants looking to improve their future through education.

Few things in life loom over American high school students more than college admissions tests. After years of toiling to earn good grades, years of slogging through Advanced Placement courses, and years of participating in extracurricular activities to burnish their credentials, many students take a test that they’ve been told can either catapult or crush their college hopes.
But now a movement is accelerating across the country, with more colleges giving students the choice of either submitting their SAT or ACT scores or not. It marks one of the biggest changes in college admissions in the past two decades.