Mental and Behavioral Health
In Forbes, Elizabeth Bradley, President of Vassar College, debates the pros and cons of technology in the context of young people’s mental health. While the increased use of smartphones and social media are often blamed for the mental health crisis on college campuses, Bradley contends that technology also offers channels of communication that can promote mental well-being. Bradley cites the many studies that have shown that various web-based tools can be effective in reducing anxiety, depression and stress, including those that deliver internet cognitive behavioral therapy (iCBT) and web-based counseling sessions. According to Bradley, “Technology does not have to be the demon in this story; rather, it can also be a key to addressing the devastating and costly effects of mental health issues among young adults. What if we could combine the appealing-even addictive-nature of electronic games with the health-promoting CBT and other tools that have been proven effective web-based supports for those at risk of depression and anxiety?”
Indiana State University‘s board of trustees finance committee is recommending a $40 per semester health and wellness fee effective in 2020-21. The fee, recommended by the Student Government Association, would be used to increase mental health services and prevention programming.
In the Daily Californian, UC Berkeley student Anh-Vy Phan writes about her difficult experience interacting with the university’s financial aid office while dealing with mental and physical health issues. According to Phan, students attempting to navigate the financial aid system while struggling with basic needs, mental health and physical health receive little help from the university.
Martha S. Robes ’66, a DePauw University alumna, together with her husband, Dana Robes, have made a gift to enhance university mental health services and educational programming. Their aim is to fund initiatives that promote wellness and coping, address issues of stigma, remove barriers to service and improve access to care. The Robeses’ support will specifically fund the hiring of a professional health educator and enhance psychiatric services for students. The gift also supports peer-to-peer health education, as well as mental health assessments, self-help and counseling support available online, an approach that has been identified as especially effective with Generation Z students.
In an op-ed in the New York Daily News, three renowned experts offer suggestions to protect college student mental wellbeing. Jeffrey Lieberman, the chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and past president of the American Psychiatric Association; Randy Auerbach, an associate professor at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and co-director of the WHO World Mental Health International College Student Initiative, and Carl McCall, the chair of the SUNY Board of Trustees and former controller of New York State offered a number of recommendations: Carefully consider the risk of mental illness in the student population and the scope of its impact on student lives; Determine how to provide for the mental health needs of student populations, and the required infrastructure, personnel, and funding; Train faculty and other staff in mental health first aid; Make sure that the policy for dealing with student needs is clearly communicated to students and their families; and encourage students to talk about their concerns and help their friends. The authors write, “By prioritizing measures that will foster awareness, reduce stigma and increase access to quality treatment for mental illness within our respective institutions, we can increase the number of students who are helped when in distress instead of suffer and falter.”
Diversity and Inclusion
In an interview with the Chronicle, Glenn Loury, Brown University Professor and economist, and the first black tenured professor of economics in the history of Harvard University, said of affirmative action, “We’re sliding into a dispensation where we concede that blacks can’t compete academically, so we configure things to achieve titular representation. Equality is the only legitimate long-term goal – racial equality, not head-counting. I’m talking about equality of dignity, respect, standing, accomplishment, achievement, honor. People have to earn these things. What do I want to do? I want to reorient the discussion around the development of African-American capacities to compete.”
In the aftermath of the “Varsity Blues” scandal, the Hechinger Report highlights the “far more meaningful supply and demand crisis” facing higher education. The article asserts that the country can’t produce more college graduates without getting more low-income students to and through college, yet poor teenagers with top scores are no more likely to earn degrees than mediocre-scoring students from well-off families. The report cites a 2017 study that found that less than one-half of 1 percent of children from the poorest fifth of American families attend elite colleges and universities, and a recent American Council on Education report that found that vast inequities remain in both the enrollment and graduation rates for minority students. Students who could benefit greatly from rich offerings at top four-year colleges are too often left out of the equation entirely. Ted Mitchell, a former U.S. undersecretary of education who now leads the American Council on Education, said that he’d like to see the public and policymakers focus less attention on highly selective schools and instead begin thinking about how to do more to help institutions that serve larger numbers of poor, minority students and first-generation students, including HBCUs, community colleges and regional public universities. That would require paying more attention to the many ways higher education has become more segregated than ever by wealth and race, with merit aid increasingly going to wealthier students.
Ohio State University’s new First-Generation Pre-Medical Student Association seeks to provide support, education and resources for students who are the first in their families to attend college. Kerestina Khalil, the group’s co-founder and president, said, “As a first-generation college student, I feel like we don’t have that backbone of success.” The club will offer workshops on resume building and test taking, stress management tips, talks from medical professionals and resources for finding the volunteer work and research positions that can prove vital to a medical school application. Ultimately, Khalil said she wants to build a roadmap for students that will walk them through the important steps on the path to medical school, year by year. She said this social and motivational support is especially important to students whose parents might not grasp the scope of challenges a pre-medical student faces. “If you have people that don’t understand your struggles, you tend to minimize your feelings,” she said. “I feel like, as first-generation college students, we usually put ourselves down really hard instead of seeing how much we’ve completed in our academic careers.”
A newly released report published by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, in partnership with the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds that, in summary, “It’s better to be born rich than smart in this country.” For the report titled, “Born to Win, Schooled to Lose: Why Equally Talented Students Don’t Get Equal Chances to Be All They Can,” authors looked at data from hundreds of thousands of students and made policy recommendations to try to level the educational playing field. Among other findings, they found that, compared with students from the highest-SES families, a smaller share of lowest-SES students say they want to attend college, and even fewer perceive themselves as likely to attend. Additionally, tenth-graders in the lowest-SES quartile are relatively likely to stay there as young adults, while 10th-graders in the highest SES quartile are relatively likely to maintain high SES. The report also found that almost all children from the highest-SES families have at least one parent with some postsecondary education, compared with less than a third of children from the lowest-SES families.
In a new report, “SAT-Only Admission: How Would It Change College Campuses?,” Georgetown University researchers examined what the effect on admissions at the most selective colleges and universities would be if the selection process relied on a single variable – standardized-test scores, leading researchers to question the role standardized testing plays in a fair, comprehensive admissions process. They found that it would make the top 200 institutions less racially and socioeconomically diverse. The share of white students would increase to 75 percent from 66 percent; the combined share of black and Latino students would fall to 11 percent from 19 percent; and the share of Asian-American students would fall to 10 percent from 11 percent. The share of students in the top socioeconomic quartile – families with college-age children and a median annual income of at least $122,000 – would rise to 63 percent from 60 percent. More than half the students now enrolled at the top 200 colleges and universities would lose their seats to students who performed better on the test-and the median SAT score would rise by 70 points to 1320.
According to a recent study, if every public high school in Virginia offered free college admission tests, the supply of graduating seniors who could compete for entry to major universities within the state would grow significantly. The pool of prospects for the University of Virginia and the College of William & Mary would expand nearly 20 percent, and as much as 40 percent for broader-access public universities. The boost would be especially notable, the study found, for students from poor families who otherwise might not think about signing up to take the SAT or ACT. Universal testing has been slow to catch on in Virginia even though many states and school systems elsewhere pay to provide one of the two major admission tests during the school day.
Nine colleges and universities have been recognized by the Latino student advocacy organization Excelencia in Education for their efforts to improve outcomes for the growing population of Latino students. Arizona State University, Austin Community College, California State University Channel Islands, El Paso (Texas) Community College, Florida International University, Grand Valley State University, in Michigan, South Texas College, the University of Arizona, and the University of Texas El Paso received the “Seal of Excelencia“. The organization pointed out that while Latinos are expected to grow as a portion of the workforce by about 3% per year, their six-year college graduation rate is 10% lower than white students’ rate.
A surge of research and exploratory initiatives suggest that colleges could replace remedial courses with a mix of assessment methods and alternative supports. Although about half of first-year students are found to require remedial classes in either math, English or both, the assessments colleges use to make that decision vary widely and don’t always reflect students’ potential success with college-level coursework. And students who take remedial classes are generally less likely to graduate within six years than are their peers who didn’t take such courses. “Traditional approaches to college preparedness are increasingly scrutinized because their outcomes are poor, by and large,” said Patrick Partridge, president of WGU Academy, the new remedial education platform offered by Western Governors University, one of the nation’s biggest online colleges. Beyond more carefully deciding which students require remedial classes, nationwide, schools are dropping remedial courses in favor of a corequisite model which places students in a college-level class with the support of a tutor or another class dedicated to reviewing core concepts.
The College Board’s plan to expand the rollout of the “overall disadvantaged level” metric has received mixed reactions. The metric is meant to help colleges consider how difficult a student’s life has been from a socioeconomic standpoint, and how that might have played a barrier in their success. WBUR interviewed writer Tony Rehagen about how the index could help more rural teenagers reach college, and the societal benefits that could provide.
According to an analysis by Pew Research of data collected from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women are on track to make up a majority of the college-educated labor force this year. While women have made up a majority of college-educated adults for roughly four decades, that strength has not always been reflected in the workforce, where men have traditionally dominated. Women, ages 25 and older, now account for more than half of the college-educated workforce (50.2%) – an 11% increase since 2000. Although women’s representation among the college-educated workforce is expanding, they are still earning less than men. On average, a man with a bachelor’s degree out-earns an equally credentialed woman by about $26,000 per year.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
Michigan State University‘s Board of Trustees announced last week that it will hire a law firm to investigate the university’s handling of allegations of sexual abuse by former university sports doctor Larry Nassar. The firm was hired “with input from survivors,” according to a board statement. At its meeting, the board also approved a new fund to pay for counseling and mental health services for Nassar’s victims. The news comes months after an independent special counsel report accused the university of stonewalling an investigation into the events by the state attorney general’s office. Many critics wondering just how independent the review will be, and how committed Michigan State really is to being held accountable for its role in and response to the Nassar scandal. The university employed the sports doctor for nearly two decades, and he abused many girls and young women who came to appointments at his Michigan State clinic. In the past year, three ex-university officials – Lou Anna K. Simon, the former president; William Strampel, a former dean and Nassar’s longtime boss; and Kathie Klages, a former gymnastics coach – have been criminally charged for their roles in the scandal.
Washington state lawmakers are considering new state laws that would shine more light on public universities’ findings of sexual misconduct. They say they’re focusing on stopping employees from being able to quietly move between colleges after findings of such misconduct and ending the use of nondisclosure agreements with students at public universities. In doing so, Washington would join a growing number of states creating laws broader than federal obligations to address sexual misconduct.
Student Success
As employers seek candidates with a range of work-ready skills, schools across the country are beginning to overlay a “skills map” on top of the requirements for a traditional college degree. The map, which details the knowledge or abilities an individual needs to successfully manage a job, is an effort to ensure curriculum prepares students for the workplace in general, not just their specific discipline. Schools see it as a way to distinguish themselves from competitors and attract more students.
College Affordability
Sen. Bernie Sanders and other House of Representative progressives rolled out legislation to cancel all student debt, going farther than a signature proposal by Sen. Elizabeth Warren that considers the income of the borrowers, canceling $50,000 in debt for those earning less than $100,000 per year. Sanders’s proposal also calls for free tuition and fees at two- and four-year public colleges, and $1.3 billion a year to support students at historically black colleges and universities. Sanders vowed that the plan “completely eliminates student debt in this country and the absurdity of sentencing an entire generation, the millennial generation, to a lifetime of debt for the crime of doing the right thing. And that is going out and getting a higher education.” When asked at a press conference why his proposal would extend to top earners as well as low income borrowers, Sanders stressed that “all Americans are entitled to Social Security, are entitled to Medicare, are entitled to education as a right.”
In a wide-ranging report, the Treasury Department’s U.S. Financial Literacy and Education Commission recommends that colleges become more transparent about college costs and debt more thoroughly educate students about their finances by requiring financial literacy courses. The report calls for institutions to make financial aid offers more straightforward, breaking aid down by type, and helping students identify and connect with their loan servicer. It encourages colleges to dedicate staff to advise students on taking out loans, choosing majors and identifying impediments to graduation so they are better able to repay their debt.
