Daily Lumina News 070723

Equity experts worry that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to ban race-conscious admissions will send a message to Black and Hispanic students that they are not wanted on college campuses, or push them to more troubled schools. It could also lead to a rollback of groups and programs that center on race.
Yet, for many students, the biggest barriers are practical: applying to, paying for, and completing college.

Bikram Mishra earned three business degrees from Adams State University during his 12 years of incarceration. He became known as the “educator behind bars.” After his release from prison, Adams State administrators asked Mishra to continue teaching inmates via remote learning.
More recently, Mishra joined several other formerly incarcerated individuals to testify in support of a bill passed during the 2023 state legislative session that seeks to make college degrees more accessible—and enticing—for incarcerated students in Colorado.

Graduating from high school and going to college, or beginning a career, was particularly daunting for the class of 2022, with many students spending more than a year studying from home during COVID-19-related pandemic school closures.
The new adults struggled academically, especially with math, and socially due to their prolonged time out of school. Some students changed long-held plans to attend colleges far from home; others decided not to attend at all. All are determined to leverage the lessons learned during COVID to move forward.

In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection last week of race-based affirmative action, many college leaders across the country are asking themselves the same question: What can we do now?
Colleges have potential tools to pursue racial diversity without actually looking at race in admissions. But many of the options are challenging, controversial, and maddeningly indirect.

After the U.S. Supreme Court ended President Joe Biden’s debt cancellation program, advocates for lowering student loan debt say the federal SAVE plan, an updated loan repayment program, could save Texans and other borrowers a lot of money in interest.
The U.S. Department of Education estimates that borrowers could see their total payments fall by 40 percent under the SAVE plan, with a reduction of 83 percent for lower-income borrowers. On average, Black, Hispanic, and Native American borrowers would have their total lifetime payments cut in half.

What started out as a local high-touch support program has become the focus of multiple, external research studies. It also has been replicated across the country, at campuses large and small.
That program is the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, better known as ASAP. Now, college leaders are launching new, large-scale efforts to replicate and scale the academic model in hopes of getting more underserved students across the graduation stage.