Daily Lumina News 060722

As president of Nashville State Community College, Shanna Jackson is struggling with a dilemma that reads like good news: Her students are taking jobs from employers who are eager to hire—and paying them good wages.
The problem is that students often drop their plans to earn a degree in order to take the attractive positions offered by these desperate employers. Jackson worries that when the labor market cools, an incomplete education will come back to haunt these students.

Imagine a new way for colleges to admit students: Students don’t apply. They just create a single, basic portfolio, showing their grades, their interests, and relevant information.
Colleges would look at the portfolios and make offers of admission, without even knowing the names of the students. And what about those students who want to go to Harvard University (or equally competitive colleges)? They would go on using the current system. This is not an admissions system for them.

They’re the invisible infrastructure that colleges and universities rely on to target prospective students for recruitment, to build financial aid offers, and to monitor student behavior.
Now, a new report from the Government Accountability Office is urging Congress to probe how higher education uses these consumer scores, algorithms, and other big-data products, and to consider who stands to benefit most from their use—students or institutions?

The team behind California's Cradle-to-Career data system will begin hosting public discussions this week to hear what users may want from the effort's new data dashboards and tools.
Cradle-to-Career will be the state's first statewide data system that tracks a student's progress through the education system. It also is intended to deliver information on workforce outcomes.