Daily Lumina News 121323

Just one year into a three-year effort to re-enroll adult learners in California who previously attended but did not complete college, the initiative known as California Reconnect appears to be having some success. Seven colleges are boosting re-enrollment rates to four times higher than the national average.
About 5,700 former students who previously stopped out have been contacted by the campaign, and of those, around 480, or 8.4 percent, have re-enrolled. Comparatively, the national re-enrollment rate was 2.1 percent in 2021–22.

Michelle Soto knows how difficult it can be to find affordable child care. As a mother of three young children, she juggles family responsibilities with math and writing classes at El Paso Community College to strengthen the English skills she needs to pursue her associate degree in court reporting.
EPCC's new Family College program will help student parents like Soto, taking the burden of child care off their plate by caring for their children and providing them with fun, age-appropriate classes.

Iveth Díaz has spent much of her career helping immigrant students living in the United States illegally navigate college. But when her own application to renew her work permit and temporary protection from deportation was delayed because of backlogs, she had to resign from her job for three months.
Díaz and other college and university employees with work permits and protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are calling on universities to do more to help them prepare for alternative employment plans in case the program ends.

The “future of work” means different things to different people. Some immediately turn to technology. Others raise questions and ideas about America’s socio-economic fabric.
Community colleges and the students they educate are on the frontlines of the future of work. They understand what is coming and they are preparing for it. The question is how deeply decision-makers will listen to them.

About 68 percent of the nation’s jobs currently require additional training beyond high school. As the country shifts even more toward a knowledge-fueled, tech-based economy, that percentage will soar to 72 percent by 2031.
Nicole Smith, chief economist for the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, weighs in on the most in-demand job skills over the next eight years and what kind of education and training will be needed to get them.

At the turn of the 21st century, Oscar Miranda Tapia was a bright-eyed child making a journey that would radically transform his future. He walked across the border with his family, leaving the only life he knew behind.
Two decades later, Miranda Tapia is pursuing a Ph.D. and making higher education more accessible for first-generation students like him. This is his story.