Daily Lumina News 013023

Philadelphia’s most renowned universities—Temple, Penn, Drexel, La Salle, and St. Joseph’s—have an enormous impact on the city, with combined budgets of more than $6 billion. But their impact on students from Philadelphia is much smaller.
Only 14 percent of the combined first-year students from these universities are from Philadelphia. Local high school counselors and nonprofit leaders discuss why.

Public colleges in Oklahoma are hurrying to compile details on “every dollar” spent over the past decade on diversity.
It’s another example of heightened interest by a Republican state official in documenting, and potentially curbing, colleges’ efforts to promote equity and inclusion.

Two bipartisan bills in the Colorado legislature aim to boost adult high school diploma programs, as well as ensure students learn digital literacy skills.
Both bills are designed to meet critical needs for Coloradans and also for the state—namely to produce more educated workers and to train more people for jobs that have been stubbornly hard to fill.

About 30 percent of African American STEM professionals begin their higher education at a Historically Black College or University, but only around 1 percent of the U.S. Department of Defense's research funding is directed toward HBCUs and other minority serving institutions.
Last week, the U.S. government took a major step toward remedying those disparities.

Evan Mandery is an alumnus of Harvard University. He's also a vocal critic of wealthy colleges.
Mandery recently published a book, compiling his criticisms and making the case that upper-tier college admissions drive a segregated higher education system in the United States. He explains more in this interview.

The U.S. News & World Report rankings list, long a major force in higher education, faces a growing revolt by law and medical schools that are refusing to cooperate with a system they say is based too much on wealth and prestige.
Critics of the rankings say the uprising soon could spread to undergraduate institutions.