Daily Lumina News 042023

The sacrifices involved in migrant work are immense. From their homes in Texas, California, Florida, and other states, migrant students and their families may drive to Michigan, the Dakotas, Arkansas, and Washington to sow and harvest America's produce.
The work is grueling. And while the children of these families take pride in their parents' work ethic, they struggle to continue their schooling. The 50-year-old College Assistance Migrant program strives to break this cycle, helping migrant and seasonal farm worker students go to college and earn a degree.

The colors of nature are abundant on the campus of the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. But after decades of a falling birthrate, it has far too few of another important resource: 18-year-old college students.
What’s happening in Japan can offer “clues and implications” for U.S. policymakers and employers and for universities and colleges already beginning to contend with their own steep drops in enrollment.

The U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to strike down affirmative action across the nation, but if it does, little will change in Washington state. Washington has banned the practice since 1998.
This episode of Crosscut Reports examines how the end of race-conscious admissions affected who goes to college; what the University of Washington has done since the 1998 ban to work toward campus racial diversity; and the implications of UW’s challenges and outcomes for colleges across the country.

A new 100-page report featuring six papers from the Institute for College Access and Success explores how the federal government can partner with states to make college debt-free for all students.
Collectively, the papers are aimed at informing the public policy conversation about how to most effectively and equitably address the ongoing crisis of high costs, high debt burdens, and decreasing confidence in the value of higher education.

Higher education’s perennial problem with turnover has been well-documented. But it’s even more acute—and comes with higher stakes—in one department in particular.
That area is admissions, where 71 percent of coordinators and counselors have been in their jobs for just three years or less, according to new data from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The research further illustrates the reality of a profession on the edge of a crisis.

For more than 100 years, high schools and colleges have relied on the same stalwart tool to measure teaching and learning: the clock. That’s because earning credit toward a diploma or degree typically requires students to spend a minimum number of hours receiving instruction in the classroom.
Now, the entity that developed the time-based standard more than a century ago is calling for the creation of a different way to quantify academic progress.