Daily Lumina News 041521

On this episode of The Key, Michael Itzkowitz of Third Way discusses recent research on a new way of judging the performance of colleges and universities based on how quickly their students recoup what they spent out of pocket for a degree or certificate.
Rutgers University’s Michelle Van Noy joins the conversation with her thoughts on the overall landscape of holding colleges accountable for their students’ workplace success.

College health officials scrambled this week to comply with a federal recommendation to pause the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine after rare blood-clotting cases emerged in six recipients.
Some college leaders are now concerned about the psychological effect on students who were already vaccine hesitant. “From a practical sense, it’s maybe a nothing,” says Michael Lauzardo, who is in charge of the University of Florida’s mass-vaccination effort. “From a psychological sense, vaccine hesitancy is a fragile thing."

Dr. Alisa Stephens is a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania, and the technical and detail-oriented nature of her work requires long uninterrupted stretches of thought. Like many women during the pandemic, Stephens found working from home to be a series of wearying challenges.
Even before COVID-19, many female scientists felt unsupported in their fields. Now, some are hitting a breaking point.

In this video, two education leaders—one an assistant principal in Syracuse, New York, the other a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education—discuss how schools can work toward dismantling racism.

A new report argues that early college programs could help the state of Massachusetts tackle a number of pressing challenges like yawning credential gaps across race and class, sagging enrollment in public colleges, and a shortfall in skilled workers.
But the current state program—established in 2018—only served around 4,000 students this year, about 2% of the students who would stand to benefit. The report’s authors, and supportive advocates, are asking officials to speed up its rollout.

The California Community College system witnessed a 12 percent enrollment decline from fall 2019 to fall 2020, a staggering figure for the largest college system in the country and a likely harbinger of the demographic and fiscal challenges that lie ahead for the sector nationally.
The downward trend is occurring at community colleges across the country—the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center recently reported a 9.5 percent decline at community colleges nationwide—and is being compounded by the acute socioeconomic effects of the pandemic on students.