Mental and Behavioral Health
Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada has launched a 24/7 multi-platform student mental health and support service called My Student Support Program (My SSP) for a two year pilot. The project will provide additional mental health resources for all SFU students, who will now have immediate, confidential, 24-hour access – from anywhere in the world – to counsellors through a phone or mobile app.
Sharon Kirkland-Gordon, the director of the University of Maryland’s Counseling Center, wrote in the student newspaper The Diamondback, that the school is committed to expanding mental health resources and enhancing service delivery to better meet the needs of students. The university has introduced several initiatives, including a new triage system providing students with timely access to needs assessments, the addition of five new positions at the counseling center, a new self-help mobile application that provides resources and tools to help students cope with stress, depression and anxiety,and an increase in the number of psychoeducational workshops. The school also continues to promote Kognito, an online, self-guided training responding to students in distress, and partner with student organizations to educate the UMD community about mental health care.
Megan Sonnenmoser, a freshman at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith is working to establish a support and advocacy group for students on campus that focuses on mental health. Sonnenmoser says there is no organization on her campus that is focused on mental health for students, which is something she has struggled with her entire life. Sonnenmoser said she wants to form a support group that can, in part, educate students on healthy coping mechanisms and available resources.
A new study published in the journal Depression and Anxiety found that stress among college students was “strongly associated” with suicide attempts and mental health diagnoses. The report, based on a survey of more than 67,000 students across 108 institutions, also found that one in five students had thought about suicide in the prior year, with 9 percent reporting having attempted suicide and nearly 20 percent reporting self-injury. One in four students reported being diagnosed with or treated for a mental health disorder in the prior year. The report also found disparities; racial and ethnic minority students were less likely to report mental health diagnoses as compared with white students, although the likelihood for suicidality was mixed. Sexual minorities showed elevated rates of mental health disorders and suicidality/self-injury. Transgender students showed particularly elevated rates of all outcomes, with approximately two-thirds reporting self-injury and more than one-third attempting suicide. Bisexual students were more likely to report serious emotional issues and suicidality as compared to heterosexual and gay and lesbian students.
The editorial board for the Daily Trojan, the student newspaper for the University of Southern California, argued in an op-ed that the school must do more for suicide prevention. The board acknowledged that USC Student Health has introduced new programming this fall focused on mental health and wellness, from resident assistant support groups to weekly workshops. But the board states that while the University is making progress, this is only the first step to truly addressing suicide prevention on campus. In fact, the Board criticizes “impracticalities that make mental health resources even more scarce and difficult to access” including the drop-in counseling sessions that only last from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m., with only one counselor available each day.
The new Cornell Well-being Network provides students with access to services not currently available, including a telepsychiatry service, a 24/7 mobile technology platform that connects students with specialists, and transportation to Iowa City and Cedar Rapids for mental health and medical appointments. A $500,000 gift from an anonymous private foundation funded the pilot program for the next three years.
Diversity and Inclusion
The new head of civil rights at the Education Department has reopened a seven-year-old case brought by a Zionist group against Rutgers University, saying the Obama administration, in closing the case, ignored evidence that suggested the school allowed a hostile environment for Jewish students. In so doing, the Education Department adopted a hotly contested definition of anti-Semitism that includes “denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination” by “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of” Israel “a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” Arab-American activists claim that through this stance, the government is in effect declaring the Palestinian cause anti-Semitic.
Last month, the Confederate statue known as Silent Sam was toppled by protesters on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus. University leaders say they will present a plan to protect and preserve the statue – which was hauled away after it fell. UNC Chancellor Carol Folt said she does not believe the statue belongs at the “front door” of the university. Last week, hundreds of University of North Carolina faculty members sent a letter to school officials expressing their support for her words and urging them not to return it to its original location.
The University of Texas at Austin removed the bronze statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s president, in 2015. Now, the Davis statue is in a campus museum and the campus is home to four vacant pedestals where statues of prominent Confederate leaders once stood. At Austin, a task force of students, faculty, staff, and alumni determined the statue’s fate, based in part on a survey of more than 3,100 community members. The museum exhibit chronicles the statue’s life from its 1916 commissioning by a Confederate veteran to its removal in 2015. William Sturkey, an assistant professor of history at Chapel Hill, told the Chronicle that as UNC decides its plan for Silent Sam, UT-Austin’s quick relocation of the Davis statue could serve as a model.
Last year in the wake of the unite the right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, the new president of the William and Lee University, William Dudley, convened a group and asked it “to lead us in an examination of how our history – and the ways that we teach, discuss, and represent it – shapes our community.” This year, Dudley announced the changes that would and would not take place from that examination. For example, the university will keep its name, and Lee Chapel will remain an integral part of campus. However, the school has begun a national search for a director of institutional history, a historian who will lead the design, construction and operation of a museum and oversee all of the school’s historical sites.
In the fall of 2015, protests about the racial climate at University of Missouri at Columbia vaulted the campus into the national spotlight. Today, the University of Missouri has new administrators, new policies and, leaders say, a new attitude. Mun Choi was appointed as the system’s president in late 2016, and in 2017, Alexander Cartwright became chancellor at the University of Missouri at Columbia. According to Choi, key priorities include: better communication between administrators; listening to Missouri residents’ concerns; changing public perceptions about the university; and getting enrollment back on track. Racial climate is also a priority, evidenced by the creation of Citizenship@Mizzou, a two-part interactive program for incoming undergraduate students at Columbia designed to prepare them to think critically about a campus filled with people from diverse backgrounds.
Greek Life
In a partnership formally announced Monday, four families whose children have died as a result of fraternity hazing incidents, have joined with the interfraternity conference, and the National Panhellenic Conference, which governs many sororities, to form an anti-hazing coalition. Their partnership has already helped bring about the ban on hard liquor that the interfraternity conference announced last week. The resolution prohibits “alcohol products above 15 percent A.B.V.” from being present in “any chapter facility” – such as a fraternity house – or “at any chapter event” unless it is being sold by a licensed third party. Adults 21 and older are not exempt.
College Affordability
Today, the U.S. spends more on college than almost any other country, according to the 2018 Education at a Glance report, released this week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The Atlantic explores why college in america is so expensive, concluding that the blame for high relative tuition can be place, mostly, on the lack of a central mechanism to control price increases.
NPR reports on the proliferation of “free college” programs — helping qualifying students pay for some or all of their college education. These programs are designed to improve college access, especially for low-income students. But a new review of 15 of these statewide programs, conducted by The Education Trust, finds that states vary wildly in how they define both “free” and “college.” The Education Trust used eight criteria to measure states’ free college efforts. None of the programs reviewed met all eight, and only one, in Washington, met seven of the criteria. Katie Berger, a senior analyst at the nonprofit advocacy group, says that’s because every free college program is a complex balance of priorities and costs. “All of these choices represent trade-offs. There is no truly universal, college-is-completely-free-for-everyone-ever [program].” In the Chronicle for Higher Education, Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University and Michelle Miller-Adams, a professor of political science at Grand Valley State University and author of Promise Nation, dispute the findings of this paper and another from Institute for Higher Education Policy that reached the same conclusion. According to Goldrick-Rab and Miller-Adams, the reports focus too narrowly on the single issue of “last dollar” scholarships, meaning need-based aid that is applied to tuition before students can receive money from “free college” funding. They argue that the reports both “overlook not only the many other ways that free-college programs benefit low-income students, but also their value to the larger project of making college affordable.”
Upward Mobility
US News and World Report has made a change to its annual rankings of America’s colleges and universities, out this week. The 2019 college ranking will include two measures of “social mobility” based on graduation rates for the recipients of Pell Grants. Pell Grants are funded by the Department of Education and are intended to make college more accessible to students with lower family incomes. The two new measures are the six-year graduation rates for Pell Grant students, and those rates compared to the overall graduation rates for the universities and colleges being ranked. The two measures are intended to reward schools that have high success rates for students coming from lower-income backgrounds. The change to the US News college rankings comes amid a broader debate about inequality, with access to higher education and social mobility a big part of that debate.
