Mental and Behavioral Health
University of Tennessee’s 2019 Academic and Student Affairs Summit brought together faculty and staff from multiple campuses to discuss measures to improve mental health for both students and faculty. Conversation focused on methods that the University of Tennessee Health Science Center was utilizing to prevent worsening mental health, including the integration of campus institutions to better communicate with each other. The National Behavioral Intervention Team Association or NaBITA was also brought in to assess the campus and make recommendations. The university has also partnered with The JED Foundation to provide students with online mental health resources and materials.
In a blog for Psychology Today, Gil Noam, Ed.D., the founder and director of The PEAR Institute: Partnerships in Education and Resilience at Harvard University and McLean Hospital, discussed the various reasons for increases in youth mental health disorders. While Noam writes that the increases are real, he believes they are not as dramatic as reported in the media. He offers other explanations behind the rising rates, including the reduction of social stigma in reporting mental health issues, and an increased willingness to label deaths of loved ones as suicide instead of providing a different reason for death to shield the family’s privacy. Noam also believes that the inclusion criteria of several disorders have expanded, possibly leading to increased diagnoses.
The Associated Press reviewed wait times for mental health treatment at more than three dozen public universities, requesting five years of data from the largest public university in each state. A total of 39 provided annual statistics from their counseling clinics or health centers. According to the report, most universities are working to scale up their services, but many are far outpaced by demand.
The Oberlin Review reports that, following unusually long wait-times for student appointments this semester, the college Counseling Center hired two part-time interim staff members. John Harshbarger, director of Student Health and Counseling Services said, “We are certainly backed up more than we would like to be at this point.” Students Raavi Asdar and Emma Edney serve on Oberlin’s JED Campus working group alongside faculty members and administrators. “One frustration that we’ve had with some of this is a lot of the staff members that have mental wellness under their umbrella, [but] they just have so much else on their plate, so even if they want to prioritize that work, they are often unable to,” Edney said. “In our meetings with the administration, we’re really trying to push that we really, really, really need to make this an institutional priority and how that means reallocating people’s times so we can dedicate professional time to this issue.”
Mary Christie Foundation’s Executive Director Marjorie Malpiede spoke with WGBH’s On Campus about the mental health crisis among college students, what college and university administration can do to address the issue, and MCF’s recent study that found a majority of parents of college students are concerned about mental health on campus. The segment also featured Laura Horne from Active Minds, who spoke about what students are saying about mental health and what they say they need from their schools. The fourth part of the WGBH series “Stressed And Depressed On Campus” focused on how some colleges are trying to address the rising rates of mental health issues. Malpiede said that schools are struggling to hire enough administrators to keep pace with demand.
In an op-ed in the Daily Trojan, Sophie Ceniza argued that in the midst of the uproar over the quality of mental health resources at the University of Southern California, the university must acknowledge that rising mental health concerns constitute a public health crisis. Ceniza writes that the consequences of the crisis are being felt within the community’s institutions. According to Ceniza, the crisis has exacerbated the insecurity and lack of transparency felt between members of the community and the institution, and the university’s response has felt like no more than an attempt to avoid further controversy.
Penn State Counseling and Psychological Services is offering “Life Hacks” sessions for students, focused around self-care and improving quality of life. Life Hacks are weekly, free, drop-in gatherings led by a CAPS provider that are focused on skills that can help create a foundation for wellness. The goal is for students to leave a Life Hacks session with specific tools and strategies they can apply to their daily lives. Topics include adapting to change, practicing self-compassion, mindfulness, stress management, and healthy relationships.
The Albuquerque Journal reports that an Albuquerque state senator and former University of New Mexico football player said that he plans to try for a second time, to appropriate state dollars to pay for mental health counseling for student athletes. The death of Nahje Flowers, a defensive lineman for the University of New Mexico football team was recently determined to be due to suicide. Sen. Mark Moores, a Republican, had included $357,000 for nutrition and behavioral health services for UNM student athletes in an appropriations bill passed during this year’s session, but Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham used her veto authority to delete the funding from the legislation.
As the need for more mental health support grows, the University of Oregon added drop-in hours to its Counseling Center and created a smoother process for students seeking short-term therapy. This fall, UO also opened a 22,000 square-foot addition to its Health and Counseling Center, which includes additional clinical spaces. The center has more than 20 full-time clinical staff members.
Diversity and Inclusion
Harvard University released the results of its Pilot Pulse Survey on Inclusion and Belonging, a first-of-its-kind, community-wide initiative that asked all faculty, academic personnel, staff, and students to answer 10 questions aimed at assessing the culture and feeling of inclusion and belonging across the University. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they agree or strongly agree with a statement inquiring whether they feel they belong at Harvard, according to the results released. In addition, 25 percent said they “somewhat agree.” Students dissented most strongly with the statement “I believe Harvard leadership will take appropriate action in response to incidents of harassment and discrimination.” Thirty-four percent of students disagreed with the statement, while 23 percent of staff did not agree.
Tensions are high at Syracuse University after more than a dozen incidents were reported this month, including offensive graffiti, racial slurs shouted at students, a threatening anti-Semitic email sent to a professor and a white-supremacist missive that allegedly appeared on campus. Students and others are accusing the administration of failing to act swiftly or aggressively enough. After fraternity members yelled racial epithets at black students, the university suspended Alpha Chi Rho and all social activities for all fraternities for the rest of the semester. Four students are on “interim suspension.” However, the university was already under fire for not responding quickly enough to the graffiti. Then, the story that a white-supremacist manifesto, allegedly copied from the writing of a terrorist who killed dozens of people at two mosques in New Zealand, was Air-dropped to students’ phones reached The New York Times before the university could argue that it was probably a hoax – an explanation that many students don’t believe. Some students started a protest against the administration’s reaction, while others left the campus early for Thanksgiving break, despite an increased police presence. The school remained open, but many faculty members canceled classes and school officials announced that students who chose to leave early would not be penalized. Over the past two weeks, Syracuse “has endured the ugliest of hatred, based on race, national origin and religion,” Chancellor Kent D. Syverud told the University Senate on Wednesday, in remarks both practical and deeply personal. Syverud also said that the word of the first instances of graffiti was “not communicated well enough.”
A group of law students is calling on Washington and Lee University to give future graduates the option of a diploma stripped of portraits of the school’s namesakes, George Washington and Robert E. Lee. The proposal, which is supported by more than half of students at the Washington and Lee School of Law and has sparked intense backlash from alumni, comes amid a national reckoning over the legacy of historic figures. A commission examining how history shapes Washington and Lee suggested numerous changes last year but stopped short of recommending renaming the school. Students who organized the petition say Lee’s role as a Confederate leader has made him a symbol of white supremacy for many – especially after violence erupted in nearby Charlottesville in 2017 amid debate over a statue of the general. For that reason, and because Washington enslaved people working on his estate, they argue that the prominence of the portraits does not reflect the university’s values.
The Wall Street Journal explored the effect of considering adversity in SAT scores. The College Board, which administers the SAT, developed an adversity score for every U.S. high school, measuring about 15 factors such as income level and crime rate in a school’s neighborhood. While the single-number measurement was abandoned after a public outcry from educators and parents, it still plans to give colleges a range of socioeconomic data on high schools and their neighborhoods. The Journal used the College Board school-adversity scores to adjust the average SAT results of 10,353 high schools where at least 30 students took the SAT. The data analysis found that more than half of the 50 high schools with the highest SAT scores are private, and that top public magnet schools performed exceptionally well in adjusted SAT scores, meaning their scores jump when adversity is accounted for. Additionally, the Journal found that, of the 10% of high schools with the highest SAT scores, a total of 1,035, just 64 had an adversity score of 50 or higher on the College Board’s scale (1-100). And the data showed that some of the poorest schools punched well above their weight while some of the wealthiest performed poorly.
According to a report in Politico, democratic primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders wants to provide billions of dollars to historically black colleges and universities and other colleges that largely serve minority students. “Historically Black Colleges and Universities have educated generations of African American leaders, and helped build and grow the culture of diversity that makes our country what it is today,” Sanders said in a statement. “Unfortunately, too many HBCUs have struggled financially in recent years from a lack of federal resources, a drop in enrollment, and from crushing institutional debt. Yet the need for HBCUs and the education they provide has never been greater.” A Sanders campaign official said the proposals would cost an estimated $36 billion over 10 years. That’s in addition to an estimated $13 billion the campaign said is needed over a decade for the senator’s free college plan.
The Washington Post reports that congressional negotiators have failed to galvanize support for restoring federal funding to minority-serving colleges and universities as part of a bill to prevent a government shutdown. Advocacy groups had hoped that legislation to keep the government running would include $255 million in funding for minority-serving colleges that expired in September. But the bill unveiled Monday by House Democrats made no mention of the higher-education funding. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Senate Republicans blocked the inclusion of a provision that would have restored the money, which has been set aside for tribal colleges, Hispanic-serving institutions and historically black colleges and universities since 2008. Those schools often use the funding for science, technology, engineering and mathematics – STEM programs – and for scholarships and to improve facilities.
In response to a battle in Maryland over funding for in state historically black colleges, Andre Perry writes in a column for the Hechinger Report, It’s past time America paid its debt to Historically Black Colleges and Universities – HBCUs.” Perry argues that leaders in government must acknowledge and repair past wrongs.
Sleep
Recent research found that when students were asked to extend their sleep, they were able to and experienced less sleepiness during the day and had lower blood pressure. The findings suggest that getting more sleep is a feasible and attainable goal for most college students, says Anne-Marie Chang, assistant professor of biobehavioral health and nursing at Penn State. “A relatively minor commitment to get a little more sleep can make a real impact on improving your health,” Chang says. “Our participants were young and healthy and still saw significant, clinically relevant improvements. That, to me, really highlighted the fact that longer sleep, especially if you’re not getting enough, can lead to physiological changes.”
Disability
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga offers UTC Mosaic, a comprehensive support program for students with autism. According to The Hechinger Report, UTC is one of at least 60 colleges and universities that have added some form of support program for students with autism beyond the academic accommodations required by federal law, such as extended testing time and quiet environments for exams. Colleges have created special support programs because other campus disability services, to which students with autism are often referred, don’t always meet all their needs.
Physical Health
Diverse Education reports on the College Diabetes Network (CDN)’s recently launched CDN REACH™initiative, which aims to reduce both physical and mental health risks that college students with diabetes face by working directly with and educating campus professionals. Christina Roth, chief executive officer and founder of CDN, said, “The launch of CDN REACH™ is to combine both an awareness campaign of chronic illness and invisible disease on campus with a solution and an action that administration can actually take to begin to solve the problem,” She added, “I think it’s the responsibility of higher education as a whole and these professional associations that administrators anywhere take it upon themselves to address the needs of this population because this is a form of diversity, this is a form of discrimination. It’s not intended, but it’s there.”
The Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper of Northwestern University, reports that undergraduate students who choose to return from medical leave report encountering logistical problems that made the reinstatement process daunting or even detrimental to their mental health and transition back to the University. According to the paper, students emphasized that they were frustrated with the overall reinstatement process. One student said, “It just catches you in the most vulnerable time, and then you’re stuck with the situation for a really long time,” Wilson said. “I don’t think my parents would have recommended me taking a leave had they known it would be (so) difficult to get reinstated.”
Brigham Young University-Idaho will once again recognize Medicaid as health insurance, reversing a decision earlier this month that would have forced students enrolled in the free government program to buy private coverage or drop out. In an email message sent to students Monday night, the university apologized for “the turmoil caused by our earlier decision.” The change comes after news outlets reported the university’s policy change, which angered students and caught local health providers off guard. Brigham Young University-Idaho, like many others, requires all students to have health coverage. But the decision this month to stop accepting Medicaid and direct students to enroll in private insurance was unusual.
College Affordability
Chile made college tuition-free, after years of angry public protests about escalating tuition, student loan debt and the gulf in quality between the institutions attended by the wealthiest and poorest students. According to the Hechinger Report, Chile’s experience offers important lessons about the pros and cons of free tuition. The reform is making only slow progress toward its primary goal: expanding access to higher education for the lowest-income students.
An NPR report says that economists believe the dramatic debt forgiveness proposals from Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders could boost the economy and help combat income inequality.
Collectively, 45 million borrowers owe more than $1.5 trillion in student loan debt and default at a rate of over 10 percent. Last week the U.S. Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office announced that its new “Informed Borrower Tool” will allow students and their parents to see how much they owe in federal student debt before agreeing to borrow more money. Beginning in July, colleges will be required before disbursing a federal loan to inform parent and student borrowers how much they already owe. Borrowers will also be required to acknowledge that they’ve seen the full debt total.
