Daily Lumina News 073020

When Jessica Austin decided to become a teacher, she enrolled at the only option in town, Northland Pioneer College. The rural community college has four campuses, but all of them are hours away from where Austin lives in Kayenta, Arizona. Then the coronavirus hit.
The pandemic is making college harder for students on the wrong side of the digital divide. In rural Arizona, when campuses closed, some students couldn’t log on from home, because they had no access to the internet. A local sheriff flew laptops and hotspots to community college students on the Navajo Nation.

In the era of the coronavirus, gap-year programs like High Mountain Institute’s outdoors-based trips are seeing soaring interest from students looking for alternatives to online learning.
Indeed, survey after survey has shown that 2020’s prospective college students may be rethinking their plans. And while it’s too early to tell how many students colleges will lose, skyrocketing interest in gap-year programs could signal what’s to come.

The switch to fully online learning during the pandemic has challenged everyone, but student-parents have been hit harder in many ways.
Janette Zuk helps student-parents by acting as a “resource broker” at Northampton Community College, connecting them to financial assistance information, tutoring, resources, and more. Since the pandemic, the requests have become more “anxiety-ridden,” Zuk says, because some parents are now jobless, worrying about child care, and facing health issues.

The University of California (UC) system admitted its largest, most diverse class of Californians this year, according to preliminary data. But how did this class come to be? What strategies did campus leaders use to boost underrepresented admissions?
Some campuses, like UC Berkeley, took the lead, with a major overhaul of the admissions process and intensifying outreach efforts with counselors from high schools underserved by the school.