Mental and Behavioral Health
At Rowan University, a state school in southwest New Jersey, there have been at least three suicides in just over two months, which officials say is the most ever in a single semester. Thursday, a male student was critically injured in a fall from a parking garage, less than a week after another student jumped to his death from another nearby garage. About two dozen students and faculty members gathered that afternoon outside Rowan’s Wellness Center to discuss access to mental health services. Other students gathered for a candlelight vigil to honor the lives of classmates lost and to demand better mental health services on campus. The head of the wellness center, Scott Woodside, held an impromptu forum Thursday night where he urged unity. In a letter to the community, the school’s president, Ali A. Houshmand, wrote, “So many losses in such a short time have been shocking. As a father, I am moved with compassion for each person who struggles. I implore those who need help to ask for it and for everyone to speak and act with kindness as we move through this difficult time and beyond.” Students have been vocal on campus and on social media about access to counseling. One former student told CBS3 that he encountered a wait time of several months to see a counselor in 2015. Current students say they’ve experienced similar wait times. The university says they are now adding three more counselors on top of the 15 they currently have in their Wellness Center.
Student activists at the University of Chicago are calling on the Cook County state’s attorney to drop felony charges against a former student who was shot last year by a campus police officer. Charles Soji Thomas, then a senior at Chicago, was experiencing a mental-health crisis when he charged at an officer of the university’s private police force in April 2018. Thomas’s family and friends say that when he first began experiencing symptoms of bipolar disorder and sought help from Chicago’s Student Counseling Services, he wasn’t given treatment. After Thomas was shot, hundreds of students and Hyde Park residents marched on the campus, demanding that the university disarm its police officers and instead invest in mental-health resources for students. Now the student campaign #CareNotCops is urging Chicago’s president, Robert Zimmer, to voice support for Thomas and ask that the charges against him be dropped. In an op-ed for The Chicago Maroon, the group lambasted the university for “underfunded and insufficient” mental-health resources, pointing to long wait times at the student counseling center, a “toxic” campus culture, and the university’s policy on mandated mental-health leaves of absence.
The University of California San Diego student newspaper, the Guardian, ran an editorial by Chloe Esser stating that the school’s counseling center should be able to keep up with demand for mental health services. The argument goes on to say that despite advertising that all students paying tuition will have access to the Health Services’ programs, CAPS will refer students with pre-existing mental health issues off-campus. According to Esser, CAPS also does not provide sufficient help with the referral process. Esser argues that UCSD should allocate more funding to CAPS so its services can match the needs of its student body, and allow for more long-term counseling options or provide more guidance through the referral process. Esser states other schools have started offering teletherapy options that provide counseling through phone and video chats.
In an op-ed in the Boston Business Journal, Nicholas Covino, president of William James College in Newton writes that the campus mental health crisis is solvable. Covino writes, “Young people in need of mental health treatment are overwhelming the counseling centers at most universities and colleges, creating huge administrative and societal problems. When these kids go untreated, they often drop out of school, which poses a financial problem for schools and a decline in the country’s educated workforce.” He argues that colleges need supportive programs and pathways for budding mental health practitioners. According to Covino, colleges must find better ways to reward and compensate those who choose behavioral science as a career path.
The CT Mirror reports on Connecticut’s legislative task force charged with making recommendations on the prevention and treatment of mental health ailments on college and university campuses in the state. The task force, which met recently for the first time, will identify gaps in mental health services on campuses and submit recommendations to the legislature’s higher education committee. “There’s a very large discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots in our state,” said Janet Spoltore, director of student counseling and health services at Connecticut College and task force member. Joseph Navarra, who coordinates services for students with disabilities at Manchester Community College, said the community colleges offer very little in the way of mental health services. The first meeting of the group, which includes representatives from the state’s public and private institutions as well as clinicians from the community made clear that not only do services vary significantly from campus to campus, but demand for those services has skyrocketed in recent years.
The News-Gazette reports that in the 2018-19 school year, the number of crisis walk-in appointments at the University of Illinois Counseling Center reached 471, up 85 percent in two years. And the number of hospitalizations for students who present a danger to themselves or others rose from two per semester five years ago to nine last spring, according to Director Carla McCowan. A UI student group, Students for Mental Health Reform, called on the UI to increase staffing at the Counseling Center, make more appointments available and hire more licensed psychiatrists.
The Student Life reports that, as part of ongoing efforts to address mental health issues on campus, Claremont McKenna College’s Dean of Students Office has begun training students in suicide prevention. The “gatekeeper course” helps participants identify the warning signs of suicide and get help. In addition to three trained staff members in the Dean of Students Office, CMC’s residential assistants, first-year guides, ASCMC’s executive board and CMC’s Psych Club have undergone training, according to Jessica Neilson, assistant dean of student health, wellness and case management. This is about 10 percent of CMC’s student body. “Our plan is to roll this out to the larger CMC community (open trainings for students, staff, faculty to attend) in the spring,” Neilson said. Following two deaths which occurred within a week on its campus early this year, the college made changes to the way it approaches mental health.
Students at colleges and universities across the country, including Northwest Missouri State and University of Arizona, are facing long wait times for mental health services, as college counseling centers face the seasonal strain of soaring demand.
Diversity and Inclusion
Faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted to condemn a settlement that would keep Silent Sam, a controversial Confederate monument off campus forever – but would turn it over to a Confederate heritage group and pay the group $2.5 million. The Chronicle reports that, in an emotional meeting Friday, interrupted by students shouting in protest, people expressed horror and dismay about the settlement. Faculty also pressed the university’s interim chancellor on the details of the agreement, what campus leaders knew about it, and whether it could be stopped. “This just tears open the wound again,” said Jennifer Larson, a teaching associate professor.
Lawyers representing students, college-access groups, and the Compton Unified School District filed a lawsuit against the University of California, alleging that its ACT/SAT requirement is “flatly discriminatory.” The lawsuit urges the system to stop using the college-entrance exams in all evaluations of applicants. By requiring the ACT/SAT, the UC system “makes its campuses havens for concentrated privilege,” Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm that’s co-representing the plaintiffs, said during a news conference. “It is illegal wealth- and race-discrimination that damages the futures of tens of thousands of students each year.” However, Rosenbaum acknowledges that optional testing won’t completely solve the problem. “There probably is no playing field less level than the journey to go to college and higher education – and the SATs are a part of that,” Rosenbaum says. “But they’re not the whole story.” He hopes the lawsuit will fuel a larger conversation around college admissions.
After months of political infighting, Senate Education Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, released a proposal to make permanent $255 million in annual funding for tribal colleges, Hispanic-serving institutions and historically black colleges and universities. The proposal amends legislation the House passed in September by including plans to simplify the federal financial aid application and eliminate paperwork for income-driven student loan repayment plans.
University of Maryland’s new student affairs vice president Patricia Perillo spoke at the Student Government Association’s meeting last week to ask for their collaboration in addressing a variety of issues, including college affordability, race relations and students’ mental health and wellbeing. Perillo emphasized her focus on student safety in the wake of racist incidents. So far this semester, there have been at least six hate bias incidents motivated by race or color, according to the university’s diversity and inclusion office’s online log. Perillo wants to spark dialogue about the structures and systems that have historically let racial minorities down. “We have to pay attention to the issues around race that have been elevated over the last year and a half,” she said.
Marymount University announced its creation of a new scholarship available to DREAMers, or recipients of the federal DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. Now, MU DREAMers can apply to MU’s university-based scholarship which “seeks to ease the financial burden for a greater number of these students who are not eligible for federal financial aid.”
Sexual Assault and Title IX
William H. Kazez, a mathematics professor at the University of Georgia who was accused of sexual misconduct by at least eight women has retired after being found responsible for violating the university’s anti-harassment policy. According to The Chronicle, he has been barred from attending math-department events and from entering the university’s student center, dining halls, learning center, and other buildings and centers that are “principally devoted to student life.”
The University of New Mexico has met the terms of a 2016 agreement with the Department of Justice that stipulated that it needed to improve how it handles sexual violence on campus, bringing to an end three years of Justice Department monitoring. The oversight followed an investigation that found that the university did not have the right procedures in place to prevent sexual harassment and assault or deal with it when it was reported. “We cannot be a strong university unless we address sexual misconduct effectively, fully, and in a timely manner,” said Garnett S. Stokes, the university’s president, in an email to the campus. “The university has, in good faith, complied with all of the requirements of the agreement and maintained timely compliance during the past three years.”
According to George Washington University’s third unwanted sexual behavior climate survey, about 50 percent of respondents feel comfortable reporting unwanted sexual behavior to the Title IX office. The survey, in which roughly 3,000 students participated, found that 30 percent said they had experienced unwanted sexual comments, jokes, gestures, or looks, the most common type of incident. And, The GW Hatchet reports, seventy-seven percent of respondents perceived that unwanted sexual behavior happens often or somewhat often on campus, while 39 percent felt the University is creating an atmosphere “free from sexual harassment/violence, dating/domestic violence, or stalking.” Officials said the survey results indicate that recently implemented measures like mandatory Title IX trainings have increased students’ awareness about how to access resources like mental health and Title IX services. Ninety percent of survey participants said they were aware of or knew how to access mental health services, and 75 percent of respondents said they knew of or how to access Title IX office services.
Sexual Health and Reproductive Rights
According to Inside Higher Ed, Edgewood College students are protesting and requesting an apology after the college removed a link to Planned Parenthood from its website. An off-campus far-right organization had repeatedly petitioned the Wisconsin college to remove the link from its off-campus resources page. College officials said they did not see this petition, and that the Planned Parenthood information is still available in printed form at the campus wellness center. A public letter from a student organization criticized the decision made by the president. Students have demanded college leaders apologize for their actions and return the link.
Student Success
According to The Hechinger Report, California is increasing their public higher education budget, bucking a national trend in the other direction. With this money, California is taking on seemingly intractable problems that plague higher education nationwide. These include the longer-than-expected amount of time it takes students to graduate; high dropout rates; financial aid that doesn’t cover living expenses; courses that cost more than students will earn from what they learn; institutions that prey on veterans and others; overly complex financial aid applications; admissions policies that favor relatives of donors and alumni; credits that won’t transfer; pricey textbooks; and frustrating “remedial” education requirements. Among other initiatives this year, the state has invested heavily in helping community college students transfer into four-year programs, spent more than $50 million on food banks and other programs to combat student hunger and homelessness, opened an online community college to serve people who are already working and boosted state grants for students with children. Its financial aid program is the nation’s biggest, and its community colleges alone have a collective enrollment of 2.1 million.
Physical Health
The Seattle Times reports that, as Washington state’s 120-day ban on flavored vaping products nears its halfway point, Gov. Jay Inslee plans to propose legislation that would eliminate bulk sales and cap nicotine levels in noncannabis vaping products. Additionally, the proposed legislation would put a permanent ban on flavored vaping products, grant the state’s Liquor and Cannabis Board the authority to seize illegal products, and allow the state health secretary to issue emergency bans on certain products or chemicals.
College Affordability
On Wednesday, Columbia University announced the Scholarship for Displaced Students, a scholarship specifically for refugees and students displaced by wars and natural disasters. The scholarship, underwritten with a commitment of up to $6 million a year, is the first of its kind in the world, university officials said. As many as 30 students a year who are admitted to any of the university’s undergraduate or graduate programs will have all of their education and living expenses covered.
Democratic presidential hopeful Mayor Pete Buttigieg jabbed at the free college plans of his more liberal opponents in a new ad airing in Iowa. The plans of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren would make free public college available to all. Buttigieg’s plan would offer tuition-free college at public four-year colleges for all students from families earning up to $100,000 annually. It would also offer assistance for families earning more than that, phasing out at $150,000. In the ad, Buttigieg emphasized that he doesn’t believe in making college “free for even the kids of millionaires.” His plan would take steps to help people deal with debt, like automatically enrolling debtors in income-based repayment programs and expanding public service loan forgiveness programs.
In an essay published in The Chronicle, Kevin Carey, director of the education-policy program at New America argues that the Warren and Sanders free-college plans are badly designed. He argues that both plans would punish states already doing the most to support students and reward the ones doing the least. Carey argues that a better policy would be to give grants directly to any public college – or private nonprofit college – that agrees to join a national network of institutions dedicated to providing free, high-quality higher education. Under this plan, in exchange for charging zero tuition and fees for all students, in-state and out-of-state, participating colleges would receive a direct annual subsidy of $5,000 per full-time-equivalent undergraduate. This funding would be in addition to the Pell Grant program. Pell-eligible students could use their grants tax-free to defray the costs of books and living expenses. According to Carey, these grants would be enough to make college tuition-free for millions of students nationwide.
Currently 19 states offer free tuition at their public community colleges and several other states are in the process of establishing such programs. Now, scholars and education policy analysts are questioning whether two-year institutions and the students they serve are actually benefiting from the free tuition programs. Recent research by both The Brookings Institution and the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) found that the programs are not contributing to rising graduation rates. According to the Brookings article Policies and Payoffs to Addressing America’s College Graduation Deficit, “While reducing community college tuition and fees to zero does lead to more associate degrees, some students are drawn away from the four-year sector in the process.” The article added that low-income students see the smallest gains from free community college policies.
