Daily Lumina News 092922

College students across California are on the verge of being homeless as rising rents exacerbate long standing shortages of student housing.
The state is responding with plans for more on-campus dorms, and a new bill could make it easier for colleges to expand housing. Meanwhile, some students are turning to short-term solutions for relief, from living in vans near campus to sleeping in their cars overnight in campus parking lots.

The Biden administration’s newly announced National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health provides a comprehensive set of actions that could meaningfully address food insecurity and improve national health outcomes.
The strategy also highlights how food insecurity is a substantial problem for college students, and aims to address the challenge by permanently reforming SNAP—the largest federal nutrition assistance program—to better meet students' needs.

A lawsuit seeking to block President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel some student debt claims the policy is not only illegal but could inflict harm on borrowers who in some states would be forced to pay taxes on the forgiven amount.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana earlier this week, is the first significant legal action seeking to invalidate Biden’s policy before it takes effect.

Among state flagship universities, the University of Georgia has one of the country’s largest disparities between its proportion of Black students and that of Black high school graduates from the state—second only to the University of Mississippi.
Such racial disparities may be concentrated in the South, but they are pervasive throughout the country.

Indiana’s teacher shortage—and especially its shortage of Black and Hispanic teachers—might be driven in part by its teacher licensing exam, according to a new report from Indiana University.
The study calls for improvements to diversify the expert panels that determine passing scores for prospective educators, as well as more support for would-be test-takers.

Cathy Davidson has spent her career encouraging innovation in higher education. It’s not just about test scores and whether people learn, she argues, but there’s an ethical issue that sometimes gets lost in discussions about teaching.
Davidson, a professor and co-author of the book, “The New College Classroom,” explains why colleges bear a responsibility to update teaching techniques to meet new demographics of students and the changing needs of the workforce in this interview.