Daily Lumina News 080223

Alicia Gangone thinks a lot about her relatives. The 31-year-old master’s-degree student says relatives can be family, friends, community members, or even the plants and animals around us.
As the founder of the Indigenous Student Collective at Wichita State University, Gangone is working to build stronger relationships between relatives at her school, create community among Indigenous students, and educate non-Native American students about Native culture.

Ashley Hooks always planned to retire at Lakewood Regional Medical Center, where she has been a nurse for 12 years. But now, staffing issues are so bad and burnout so severe that she’s rethinking how she wants to spend the rest of her career.
Hooks’ stress reflects pressure many California nurses are under because of steep understaffing that she and others say is driving professionals out of the industry. Do community colleges hold the solution?

Even in a typical year, Aug. 1 is a big day for college admissions. But this year is different; it's the first application cycle since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action.
Already, more than two dozen institutions are introducing new essay prompts. Other institutions are changing their admissions policies; Virginia Tech, for one, announced this week that it would eliminate both its early-decision option and legacy admissions preferences.

Beginning this fall, Massasoit Community College in Brockton will become the first two-year school in the state to offer a degree in Black Studies.
Only a handful of community colleges in the United States offer such degrees, with several of them located in California and one in Philadelphia. The new offering at Massasoit comes as political leaders in other states are attempting to limit diverse curricula.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn race-conscious admissions, there has been a movement toward ending legacy admissions. Recently, Wesleyan University announced its decision to do just that.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat, wants more institutions to follow suit, and his bill, if enacted, would prohibit colleges from participating in federal student-aid programs if they offer admissions based on legacy or donor status. Bowman talks about the legislation and legacy admissions in this interview.

Many schools struggle to find teachers, and many teachers struggle with student loan debt. So the federal government’s long-running Teacher Loan Forgiveness program seems like a win-win.
But new research suggests that the federal government’s educator debt forgiveness program is not keeping teachers in the classroom and probably isn’t attracting new ones either. Researchers say the program’s complexity limits its reach, and few teachers take advantage of it each year.