Daily Lumina News 073021

The set of programs, policies, and pathways by which learners move between colleges and universities is complex and often incoherent. Many students enter the transfer maze and never get through it, costing them both time and money.
This episode of The Key highlights recent work from national experts of the Tackling Transfer Policy Advisory Board and their efforts to challenge old assumptions, dismantle inequitable transfer policies, and build a new approach to transfer.

Freeman Hrabowski III is a college president who has long fought for civil rights and racial justice. When he was 12 years old, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham, Alabama—and got arrested. Such protests in the 1960s were crucial, he says, but largely symbolic.
These days, Hrabowski is trying to "move the needle” in more concrete ways: by helping more minority students major in STEM fields, finish college, and become leaders in science and tech once they graduate.

With COVID cases at a trickle in the spring, and millions of Americans getting vaccinated every week, it looked like colleges would realize a best-case scenario for the fall: a near-normal semester. Now, the more-transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus is changing that scenario.
In response, several colleges have made late announcements that they’ll require their students, staff, and faculty to be vaccinated. Others are stymied by state law or general resistance.

More than any other demographic, Californians age 16 to 24 years old suffered the worst unemployment rate during pandemic.
A Los Angeles-area program aims to help by putting at-risk youth to work through an "earn and learn" program. Called Youth@Work, the paid program provides educational and real work experience, teaches soft skills, and offers connections to local employers. Many participants are then able to parlay their experience into permanent work.