Daily Lumina News 050724

America is betting big on the semiconductor industry. Congress has approved $53 billion in funding, and the White House just announced preliminary agreements to give billions in grants to corporations such as Intel, TSMC, and Micron.
Now comes the greatest challenge of all: finding workers to make it a reality. To prepare enough Americans to run the industry, the United States has to rapidly expand community college training, high school vocational programs, and apprenticeships. This might sound easy. It’s not.

Ongoing student protests over Israel's war in Gaza have led to arrests, suspensions, expulsions, and canceled commencement ceremonies. So what happens to those students later, after the national attention moves on?
In this interview, Robert Kelchen, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, discusses the potential consequences of activism.

Finding a steady pool of affordable tutors for elementary and middle school students in under-resourced communities isn't easy, and that’s where Nikita Dutt, a second-year student at the University of California, Davis, comes in. Leaders of some organizations say that college students like Dutt help swell the number of tutors available in K-12 classrooms and may also allow schools to more sustainably fund them.
College students benefit, too. They receive payment for their services through federal and state-funded scholarships, and many develop a passion for teaching.

A growing number of students live with mental illnesses, although they may not realize it. Meanwhile, research shows that mental health has a direct impact on academic persistence and educational attainment.
To get ahead of student crises and connect learners to resources, many colleges and universities offer students access to a screening test to identify signs of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, or other concerns.

By this time of year, college-bound high school seniors are usually celebrating their choices, researching dorms, and even thinking of their majors. This year, that’s not necessarily the case.
Because of the tumultuous rollout of the new application for federal student aid, many students are unsure of their plans after graduation because they still don't know how much tuition they will be paying.

More than 20 years ago, California passed a law allowing some undocumented immigrant students to attend college with in-state tuition if they met certain requirements.
However, immigrant rights advocates claim that confusion over requirements, misinformation, and varying interpretations of the law at different college campuses wrongly denied in-state tuition to many students who should have been eligible. Now, a resolution is in sight.