Daily Lumina News 071320

Cases of the novel coronavirus are spiking in certain parts of the United States, and these hot spots are home to about 450 colleges.
In response, some institutions are quickly altering plans to teach students face to face. The University of Southern California recently announced that it needed to dramatically reduce its density on campus by having undergraduate students take courses primarily or exclusively online and limiting on-campus housing and activities.

As colleges and universities prepare for the fall semester, they have decisions to make about how to keep students safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. But alongside questions about socially distanced classes and dorms, university leaders also are asking themselves about other kinds of safety.
This includes how to approach mental health resources for students of color following a summer of protests against police brutality and a pandemic disproportionately hitting minority communities.

Project Entrepreneur at Boston College, launched last year, is among a small number of similar efforts that use entrepreneurship training programs to tackle high rates of unemployment and recidivism among the formerly incarcerated.
These programs, which take place both inside prisons and on college campuses, are an attempt to provide inmates and ex-inmates with the skills, confidence, and contacts they need to start their own businesses. They also aim to open traditional students’ eyes to the stigmas and systematic barriers to employment former prisoners face.

While many colleges are making safety rules for students to return to campus this fall, it's not clear how they will approach enforcement.
In particular, institutions have a limited ability to control the behavior of students off campus. And mechanisms that would give them some control, such as requiring students to sign formal contracts, risk sending the message that campuses aren't safe.