Daily Lumina News 072623

College students across the country struggle to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, because of a set of confusing and complicated rules.
Advocates want Congress to make the assistance easier for students as part of a forthcoming update to the farm bill. Simplifying the program and making other reforms could also boost college completion, they say.

Jacob Beeman’s transfer goals were pushed back by about a year because he was taking the wrong community college classes to transfer.
Beeman’s experience is familiar to many students. It also reflects the challenges that California, four-year institutions, and two-year colleges are working to improve but that former and current students say they continue to experience.

Students in American K-12 schools are increasingly diverse. But that diversity is often missing in the teachers at the front of classrooms.
That’s especially true when it comes to the number of teachers who are Black men: The group makes up only 1.3 percent of American school teachers. Why are there so few Black men in the teaching profession and what can be done to elevate their numbers? Two diversity experts weigh in.

Now more than ever, we need immigrants—both to complement the talent development strategies we invest in via education and to boost our innovation efforts in a time of artificial intelligence and increasing challenges brought on by existential threats like climate change and authoritarianism.
It's time to stop arguing about immigration and make it work for us, writes Lumina Foundation's Jamie Merisotis in this perspective. By investing in new immigration approaches, everyone will benefit.

Debating nuclear fusion with Robert Downey Jr. Crossing paths with Matt Damon and Cillian Murphy. It's all in a day's work for Shane Fogerty.
Fogerty is real-life physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Along with dozens of colleagues, Fogerty jumped at the chance to bring the Manhattan Project to life as extras in the hotly anticipated Oppenheimer.

In 10 years, new students heading to college may walk into their first class and find a much less diverse student body than they would today.
As prior paths to achieving diversity on college campuses are closed off, others must be broadened, including ones that promote diversity through the accreditation process.