Daily Lumina News 101823

As colleges continue to struggle to meet students’ psychological needs, some are beginning to outsource mental health education and support duties to an unlikely contingent: undergraduates.
Students interested in counseling have long provided informal peer support through clubs and organizations. Now some universities are backing such work in more formal ways, paying students to administer mental health education and programming and even peer counseling and coaching.

Daryl Burleigh is the University of Pittsburgh's inaugural rural recruiter, a position that the university created two years ago with hopes of bolstering its rural attendance.
The red-haired, bearded millennial is the face of Pitt for thousands of high schoolers in about 30 rural Pennsylvania counties who are deciding whether college is an option for them—and then where to go.

A longtime professor at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge will resign rather than work under the state’s newly elected governor, Jeff Landry, a Republican.
Robert T. Mann Jr. wrote on the social-media platform X over the weekend that he had “no confidence the leadership of this university would protect” the Manship School of Mass Communication, where he is a tenured professor, from “a governor’s efforts to punish me and other faculty members.” Mann’s announcement is sparking a flood of somber reactions from other professors and former students.

If colleges and universities want to close the graduation gap for their Latino students, their target goal is clear: help another 6.2 million Latinos earn a degree by 2030.
That’s according to Excelencia in Education, which highlights some of the ways colleges can improve Hispanic college graduation rates in a new report. Among the suggestions: Changing campus cultures to be more flexible to students’ needs, providing additional support to cover basic needs, and expanding outreach to students with some college credit but no degree or credential.

Student parents often face a complicated path when it comes to higher education. That includes managing the financial burden of paying for college and balancing competing demands on their time and energy as they attend classes, work, and provide care for their children.
On-campus child care can make it easier for student parents to manage some of these challenges, especially when that care is connected to other campus services and supports. Yet, just 38 percent of public institutions and seven percent of nonprofit institutions have on-campus child-care options to serve students.

Next month marks one year since the public release of ChatGPT, the AI-enabled chatbot. When it was first introduced, the technology immediately sent shockwaves across college campuses: Would it revolutionize higher education, or simply lead to widespread cheating and plagiarism?
In this interview, higher education leaders, reporters, and students discuss the influence of chatbots in higher ed, from college essays to classroom teaching.