Daily Lumina News 040620

Katie Jansen, an admissions counselor at Drury University, always thought of admissions work as human work—a job in which one-on-one conversations often matter a lot.
But as Jansen learned from a recent virtual panel discussion with prospective students and their parents, the human touch can still flow through monitors and phones. More than providing information about financial aid or campus jobs, the virtual exchanges offer hope for the future.

The number of college students choosing to major in history has dropped dramatically over the past decade. Students are choosing disciplines like business, economics, and computer science—subjects they believe are better suited to the modern job market.
In response, history professors across the country are banding together to demonstrate the value of a history degree to students, their families, and prospective employers. The historians also are developing new ways to teach—and new methods to assess what history students know and can do.

Last month, students in a political science class called “Forced Migration and Refugees" suddenly found the material deeply personal: Haverford College shut down and evicted most students from the dormitories as the coronavirus spread through Pennsylvania.
Like many college courses around the country, the class soldiered on. The syllabus was revised. The students reconvened on a videoconferencing app.
But as each logged in, not everyone’s new reality looked the same.

Community colleges serve as valuable local assets and resources that work toward the greater good. Now, in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, many are taking that mission to a new level.
For instance, it was just a few years ago that state and local funding helped build Muskegon Community College’s Health and Wellness Center to train health professionals. So when Mercy Health and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services made a request to use the space to accommodate overflow patients, the college readily agreed.
Elsewhere in Michigan, Jackson College is offering its campus housing to Henry Ford Allegiance Health employees who want to stay close to the hospital.