Not All Student ID’s Are Created Equal; Cal. State Institutes a Foster Care-to-College Pipeline

National Student Power Convergence Demands Attention. At the end of the four-day conference, over seventy young leaders from the National Student Power Convergence marched from the Ohio State Student Union to the Obama for America campaign office to protest the ineffectiveness of politicians who have “failed our youth.” Demonstrators accused politicians of neglecting to address key social issues that young people face – such as racial injustice, sexism, LGBT discrimination, environmental degradation, political corruption and bribing.Students dispersed after the march to head to college campuses where they held workshops and training sessions dedicated to student activism and campaign organizing.   [Huffington Post]

Free Textbooks for Rice U. Rice University will offer students several free textbooks through a program implemented by the campus’s free e-book company, Connexions. The OpenStax College project will draw money from both grants and optional “add ons,” like problem sets and other exercises, in order to provide students with textbooks written by their teachers and reviewed by their peers. The organization has already published two e-books and more than 13,000 students have downloaded them in the past 10 weeks. Professor Richard G. Baranuik, who founded the project, said that he estimates OpenStax will help over one million students save upwards of $95 million in the next five years alone. [Chronicle of Higher Education]

Foster Youth to Become ACE Scholars. A new program at California State University at San Marcos aims to create a foster care-to-college pipeline for youth. Nationwide, only 50 percent of foster youth graduate from high school; of that subset, only three to five percent even go to college, let alone graduate. So far, 88 percent of the students participating in CSU-San Marcos’s program, known as ACE Scholars Services, have graduated--a higher percentage than the school’s overall 80% retention rate. The organization’s connections with two neighboring counties, San Diego and Riverside, ensures automatic acceptance to the university for all foster youth who are able to meet the school’s minimum admission standards. [Inside Higher Ed]

Student Voting Suppression. Students at Morehouse College discovered that unlike their peers at Georgia State University, they would not be allowed to use their student ID cards to vote. Georgia’s current laws state that only state school ID cards are valid at the voting polls and that private school ID cards are not uniform and therefore more difficult to regulate. The restriction could seriously hinder student and overall youth turnout at the polls this fall, since many students scramble to find or pay for valid forms of identification. Similar voter ID restrictions potentially inhibit thousands of young voters nationwide. Many student ID's do not provide addresses or expiration dates, and have been deemed unfit to serve as proof of identity at the polls. [New America Media]

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Story Tags

• affordable education
• voter suppression
• voter id
• student activism
• campus informer