Daily Lumina News 012020

Nicole Polanco, 21, had mapped out her future while growing up poor in New York City: graduate from Stony Brook University and eventually become a certified public accountant.
Polanco’s odds of reaching her goal are very good: Her college is one of a handful nationally with an especially strong track record of launching students out of poverty and into wealth. But shrinking higher education budgets and skyrocketing tuitions are jeopardizing the ticket to opportunity that institutions like Stony Brook provide.

California’s two public university systems are looking for Supermen or Superwomen who can increase funding, protect academic prestige, bolster graduation rates, ensure labor peace, and work for social justice.
With such lofty goals, unprecedented simultaneous searches are underway to fill the top leadership positions at the 10-campus University of California and at the 23-campus California State University. The unusual timing of the recruitment efforts brings complicated challenges and possible benefits, experts say.

Charles Baker and Jeff Wilson have a lot in common. Second and third-generation coal miners, respectively, they both believed their jobs would last a lifetime. That changed, however, when the coal company they worked for declared bankruptcy.
Wilson and Baker have since forged a new path—this one in a classroom at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College.

Dameon Stackhouse was six years into a prison sentence when he learned about a chance to earn his college degree. He was 37 years old and an inmate at East Jersey State Prison.
Stackhouse, now 43, says access to education through the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prison (NJ-STEP) program transformed the way the prison operated. The college degrees earned inside look identical to the ones a student would earn on a traditional campus. For Stackhouse, the opportunity gave him a pathway to a better life—and a renewed sense of purpose to help others.