Higher Education

Joni Finney of the Graduate School of Education spoke about the impact of rising college costs on low-income families, saying, “For these families the high cost of college is not a perception but a reality that they must deal with.”

Camille Z. Charles of the School of Arts & Sciences said Black immigrant students are overrepresented at selective U.S. universities relative to Black American students. She said that even though college applications “ask where your parents were born, they're not collecting and sort of storing the information that way because I think it's something that they don't necessarily want to talk about.”

Laura Perna of the Graduate School of Education spoke about College Promise Programs, which help cover students’ tuition and other expenses. Perna said these programs “reflect real concern about how much it costs to go to college.”

In a recent presentation, Jamiella Brooks of Penn’s Center for Teaching and Learning and Yale’s Julie McGurk proposed that educators reframe the concept of “rigor.” They argued that faculty members often look for evidence of rigor in the wrong places and overlook the inequities underlying inadequate student outcomes.

Robert Zemsky of the Graduate School of Education and Lori Carrell of the University of Minnesota at Rochester are leading a pilot program for a three-year undergraduate degree program. “The amazing thing about this is it took off almost immediately. Nobody said, ‘Oh, Bob, that’s an old idea, let it go.’ Nobody said that to me at all,” Zemsky said.

Walter G. Ecton of the Graduate School of Education and a Vanderbilt University colleague shared their research on the effects of doctoral-program funding on student diversity. “Given the relative lack of diversity among university faculty, initiatives that attract students from groups that are currently underrepresented in doctoral education carry great benefits for society,” they wrote.

Jasmine Harris of the Law School said college students with lingering effects from COVID-19 may need disability accommodations. “If we do not address reasonable modifications and disability in higher ed, we risk students dropping out of programs, voluntarily or involuntarily, which means we lose the talent and skills of a growing population of young long-haulers,” she said.

Laura Perna of the Graduate School of Education spoke about efforts to make community college tuition-free. "There's power in the message that tuition is free. Figuring out how much college costs is complicated," she said.

Suvir Kaul of the School of Arts & Sciences and Jonathan Zimmerman of the Graduate School of Education debate returning to the classroom or remaining online for the fall semester.