Daily Lumina News 063023

As expected, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down race-conscious admissions policies in a decision that will reverberate across campuses nationwide.
With the precise legal intricacies yet to be worked out, the higher ed sphere’s immediate response has been resounding: It will continue its work to cultivate campus diversity despite the ruling against an admissions cornerstone.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision limiting the use of race in college admissions may not be a total surprise, but it is still a slap of hard truth about the long road ahead for those who respect and understand the benefits of a more diverse and just postsecondary educational system, says Lumina Foundation's Jamie Merisotis in this statement on yesterday's affirmative active ruling.

As the graduation march played, 85 men came to a stage surrounded by barbed wire fence and constructed by fellow prisoners. These are no ordinary graduates. Their commencement clothes almost hide the prison uniforms as they receive college degrees, high school diplomas, and vocational certificates.
The federal Pell Grant program that helps these student prisoners pay for college will expand exponentially next month, giving about 30,000 more students behind bars some $130 million in financial aid per year.

Nina Owolabi is a student parent and a doctoral student at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. While she proudly calls herself a "mama scholar," she also understands full well the many structural barriers impeding the ability of student parents to pursue higher education.
Today, Owolabi is working to advance equity for student parents. In this interview, she discusses that work, plus how colleges can be more accessible, flexible, and welcoming places for students with children.

Sonya Christian, California's new community colleges chief (and the first woman in the role) has big goals for the system of 116 colleges. Among them: tackling a declining enrollment that she describes as a “crisis situation" and simplifying the state’s complex transfer process.
In her first interview since taking over as chancellor on June 1, Christian talks about what she calls a vision for "success with equity."

Companies for years have been building artificial-intelligence algorithms designed in part to make the jobs of front-line staff easier and more efficient—but they often find that workers don’t like, trust, or use the tools.
As AI expands in scope and capability, the role that advanced tech could play in many jobs across a swath of industries is only expected to increase. That means the stakes are high for how accepting employees will be of new tools and exactly how businesses go about deploying them.