Daily Lumina News 052623

Working adults with family commitments and complex lives can’t always devote two or four years to a degree. Some students also have confidence issues: They think they aren’t college material and doubt their ability to be successful.
Can short-term certificate programs help bridge the gap to better employment and supply companies with the workers they need to fill labor shortages? Schools like Lorain County Community College and San Jacinto College are leading the charge.

It's been a tough four years for the class of 2023. Students weathered the restrictions of a pandemic, watched a nation debate ways to ease the burden of college debt, and lived through the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning that followed.
In their own words, five graduating high school seniors in Colorado share how those experiences influenced their next steps.

About 700,000 incarcerated people will become eligible for the federal Pell Grant this summer. When they do, they will gain access to a critical form of college financial aid for the first time in nearly 30 years.
With Pell now back on the table, colleges and universities are once again designing degree programs for prisoners. But institutions can do more to ensure that incarcerated students are set up for success after their release: They can hire them, say Rebecca Villarreal of Jobs for the Future and Basia Skudrzyk of From Prison Cells to PhDs.

When ChatGPT made its public debut last year, the CEO of OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company, predicted that its significance “would eclipse the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the Internet revolution all put together.”
Even discounting for hyperbole, the release of ChatGPT suggests that we’re at the dawn of an era marked by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, with far-reaching consequences for nearly every facet of society. So, how will AI change higher education? Twelve professors, administrators, and writers weigh in.

Every fall, fewer than 1 in 10 applicants to the University of Chicago walk beneath a flock of gargoyles adorning a fortress-like stone gate onto the main quad as admitted students. Years ago, Alana Nii’s father was one of them.
When Nii applied to UChicago, she checked a box indicating her status as a family member of an alumnus. Nii believes that box shouldn’t exist. Yet it does, on applications to hundreds of selective universities across the country. That may be changing.

Tejani Francis, 13, is an apprentice for Julia Mejia, one of Boston’s city councilors. The eighth grader has a desk in Mejia’s office where he works for two hours after school, learning about the city council and Mejia’s different committee responsibilities.
Led by Apprentice Learning, the apprenticeship program introduces young people to different career paths starting in the eighth grade. Advocates say the effort is part of a growing national trend to reach middle schoolers before they "harden" their thinking about what careers might suit them.