Daily Lumina News 022724

As financial pressures increase, enrollments stagnate, and pandemic-era-funding stopgaps ebb, college administrators across the nation are contemplating major cuts and restructuring at their institutions.
Faculty members are increasingly looking to reassert their role in shared governance and to resist centralized administrative control by digging into their institutions’ finances and proposing alternative visions for making cuts. But is anyone listening?

The University of Michigan officially went test optional last week, four years after resisting the test-optional wave in 2020 and instead allowing alternatives to the SAT and ACT. Meanwhile, Yale University, which had operated with a temporary test-optional policy during the pandemic, adopted its own test-flexible policy.
The swap illuminates the complicated patchwork of disparate policies emerging as colleges reassess their pandemic-era testing strategies amid intensifying debates over the purpose and usefulness of standardized exams.

As president of the University of Texas at Austin’s Black Student Alliance, Aaliyah Barlow is in charge of securing funding for three dozen of her peers to attend an annual conference for Black student leaders. For months, she's been asking different colleges and departments within the university to sponsor their travel. But this year, it’s been crickets.
Situations like Barlow's are playing out on college campuses across the state. At UT-Austin in particular, feelings have been fraught with students and advocates saying the school is going above and beyond what's required by the state’s new ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

One of Kaelyn Carter’s ongoing challenges these days is working early hours as a landscaper through the cold, often rainy San Francisco Bay Area weather—a world away from the stagnation he remembers feeling when he first arrived in California less than two years ago. Then, Carter had just been released from prison after three years of incarceration.
Carter's new lease on life is courtesy of a state effort led by California Volunteers that works to bridge work and education gaps for low-income, former foster, justice-involved, and unemployed youth.

Call them power skills, durable skills, or 21st century skills, but career development experts say it’s time to acknowledge that proficiency in empathy, critical thinking, and collaboration are required to be successful in most jobs. And some younger employees aren’t cutting it.
Some higher ed advocates contend the best way to equip students with interpersonal and professional skills is to offer meaningful work and learning experiences. This includes undergraduate research, study abroad opportunities, first-year seminars, and community-based service learning.

The U.S. Department of Education released the revised Free Application for Federal Student Aid last December to great fanfare. The new version is supposed to make applying for financial help easier. But for some students, including those whose parents don't have Social Security numbers, ongoing technical issues have kept them from fully completing the application.
A new temporary workaround is designed to help; still, students and others remain concerned. Three high school seniors in the Chicago area share their frustrations and fears in this interview.