Daily Lumina News 120321

Professional degrees like dentistry and veterinary medicine are leaving many students with immense college debt, threatening the outlook for fields that provide essential public services, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data.
The culprits span graduate programs at big state schools, for-profit colleges, and some elite private U.S. universities.

For more than a century, California’s approach to incarcerating people has gone mostly like this: Incarcerate them.
But now, there’s a program offered by the California State University system that helps incarcerated individuals not only develop skills but also reimagine themselves as people who can have lives as scholars after serving long prison terms.

The organization known as One Million Degrees has been changing the educational landscape for Chicago-area community colleges for 15 years.
In a leadership webinar held this week, the group shared details of that success—plus the work of a new partner organization, One Ten, to close the opportunity gap for Black workers.

Historically, most Hispanic-serving institutions were small community colleges. Now, more four-year colleges are joining their rapidly expanding ranks.
But becoming a Hispanic-serving institution doesn’t specifically require serving Hispanic students, just enrolling them. New research suggests that the government program designed to support Hispanic education is disbursing too little money among too many colleges, without any assurance Hispanic students are actually benefiting.

Teaching a general-education science course can be challenging. Students may only be in the classroom to meet a graduation requirement. And they typically come in with a range of experiences, from AP classes in high school to science phobia.
That leaves many faculty members wondering how to connect with people who might not care about science—and may even be worried about their ability to understand it. Heather Miceli has a solution: Put students in charge of writing their own material.

Students who stop out of college are disproportionately women, low income, and working students, according to a new study.
The survey of adults ages 20 to 34 who completed some college but earned no degree aims to answer four questions: Who leaves college? Why do they leave? Who returns? and How do we get them back?