Daily Lumina News 101023

As more colleges take the tuition reset plunge, questions around the effectiveness of the strategy remain. Some see immediate and long-term benefits from the practice, with surging enrollments and applications.
But for many institutions, that growth tapers off in a few years. Plus, the tuition resets are often not enough to produce any real change in their balance sheets.

It’s somewhere between a Cinderella story and a “so there” to the academic-science establishment. Decades ago, the University of Pennsylvania demoted Katalin Karikó and told her she wasn’t “faculty quality” after her research failed to secure funding.
Last week, that same research—which paved the way for COVID-19 vaccines—won her a Nobel Prize.

Food insecurity and homelessness affect students everywhere, at all types of colleges and universities. Despite federal and state financial aid, 23 percent of undergraduates—an estimated 4 million students nationally—lack the resources to afford adequate food on a regular basis.
Yet in too many places, the best students can hope for is a campus food pantry. The basic needs challenge demands a much more comprehensive and effective approach from higher education leaders and policymakers at all levels, writes anti-poverty scholar and activist Sara Goldrick-Rabb in this essay.

As student loan payments resume for many borrowers this month, Mary Ansell is discovering that her expected payments are completely wrong. She's not the only one.
The issue is especially frustrating for people enrolled in a much-touted new repayment plan that the Biden administration says could save the typical borrower $1,000 a year. More than 4 million people have enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education program, which bases monthly bills on income and family size.

This month, payments on student loan debt for millions of borrowers across the country restarted after the three-year pandemic pause. California has some of the lowest tuition rates in the nation, but the state’s residents carry higher-than-average student debt balances, risky graduate school debt, and a unique reliance on parent-held debt.
A new guide offers guidance and information to help.

Since the launch of ChatGPT last November, college admissions officers have been wringing their hands over the impact of generative artificial intelligence on college applications.
But the counselors reading those applications are increasingly using AI, too—a move that raises new possibilities and ethical concerns.