Daily Lumina News 120621

For more than 10 years, a unique community college in New York City has been known for its high graduation rates with full-time, mostly traditional-age college students.
Now, Guttman Community College is preparing for its next phase: adding more workforce development programs that will serve older learners and help them quickly prepare for new workplace demands.

Top officials at the U.S. Department of Education remained mum last week about whether broad-based student debt cancellation is on the horizon.
In their keynote addresses during a conference for financial aid professionals, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and Under Secretary James Kvaal condemned the rising costs of college and focused on actions the department is taking to ease borrowers’ loan burden.

Stephanie Rivera-Beltre is a Brooklyn-native Afro-Latina with a Dominican and Puerto Rican background. She often tells her students about her own experience applying to colleges when in high school. Her guidance counselor’s discouraging feedback nearly crushed her dreams of pursuing higher education.
That experience led her to the role she has today—and to inspiring students to keep pushing forward.

Adam Harris has written a history of American higher education that begins in the decades before the Civil War and finishes in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If there’s one thing to be taken from The State Must Provide, it is that the nation’s power structures historically did not want to give Black people an equal opportunity for higher education. Today, the degree of discrimination has diminished. But the principle remains.

Last week, Wesleyan University in Connecticut held its first booster vaccine clinic on campus. CJ Joseph, a first-year student still figuring out what to major in, wasted no time signing up.
With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommending that all adults get booster shots, colleges and universities must now decide how to incorporate the additional dose into their pandemic response plans.

What is the role of colleges in fighting racial injustice? How can campus conversations about race become more productive?
Two leading scholars—Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy and Georgetown University’s Marcia Chatelain—debate history, accountability, and free speech in this interview.