Daily Lumina News 033122

Community colleges enroll 40 percent of all U.S. undergraduates, but too many people are unfamiliar with these institutions and what they offer.
Lumina Foundation's Shauna Davis and Mary Laphin discuss how the Million Dollar Community College Challenge is going to help promote brand-building and marketing efforts at America’s community colleges.

The cost of college keeps climbing—and students are taking on more and more debt to go.
But one liberal-arts college in Michigan recently announced a radical new approach that does away with the idea of tuition altogether and instead counts on something else: gratitude.

Mental-health professionals want students to trust in the confidentiality of treatment sessions, but when the risk of suicide is imminent, college administrators are under pressure to share that information and potentially send students home.
Assessing that risk is one of the hardest judgments they’ll be asked to make. The legal and personal consequences can be devastating if they do too little, or too much.

State lawmakers have proposed a record 238 anti-LGBTQ+ bills so far this year, according to an analysis by NBC News—nearly six times as many as in all of 2018.
The bills mostly target K-12 students, but the hate they engender seeps into campus life, creating stress and anxiety for LGBTQ+ students—and spurring them and their allies into action.

Through a program at the Community College of Denver, Lillian Atunu is earning a new credential each semester she goes to school. By stacking up those credentials, she has the potential to earn far more than the roughly $36,000 a year she earns now with overtime.
Colorado lawmakers hope a new package of bills will open up clearer pathways to degrees and credentials that lead to good-paying jobs for thousands more people.

“Credentials” is a long-established buzzword in workforce development, but it can mean many different things in an ever-changing environment.
In this interview, researchers Paul L. Gaston and Michelle Van Noy break down America's credential ecosystem: how credentials work, the promises and challenges, the differences among credentials, and more.