Mental and Behavioral Health
Four years ago, in the midst of its high-profile sexual assault scandal, Baylor University revamped its mental health services. The Chronicle reports that the university directed an additional $900,000 to its annual counseling-services budget, allowing the center to increase its full-time staff from nine to 22. It also spent more than $1 million on renovations to expand the counseling center. Anxiety, depression, relationship issues, trauma, and substance abuse emerged as treatment priorities for the center. The university also invested in addressing a long-neglected set of mental health issues: risky eating behavior and eating disorders, which together afflict nearly a third of college students nationwide. Baylor’s counseling center built a comprehensive program with a multidisciplinary team to help students overcome eating disorders, a rarity at university counseling centers.
The 2019 Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) Annual Report released this week summarizes the state of college counseling centers and treatment outcomes from the 2018-19 year. In addition, the report presents mental health trends for college students seeking mental health treatment from 2010 to 2019. According to the report, while anxiety and depression continue to be a top concern experienced by students, the growth of these concerns has slowed, with anxiety showing a minimal increase and depression showing a slight decrease. Meanwhile, trauma as a primary presenting concern has increased over the past six years and particularly since 2016-17. Ben Locke, senior director of Penn State Counseling and Psychological Services said, “The 2019 Annual Report shows that colleges and universities are continuing to succeed in identifying and referring at-risk students to counseling centers. This raises the critical question of whether we are growing service capacity quickly enough to care for the students being referred.” According to the Chronicle, the report, which also examined the impact of increasing demand for mental-health services on the effectiveness of the treatment, is a cautionary tale about the changes that colleges are putting in place to manage demand at counseling centers. For example, serving many students through same-day drop-in appointments, according to Locke. “This idea that you can provide treatments in a 30-minute, one-time appointment that’s going to meet the needs of people with mental-health concerns is not accurate,” said Locke.
In the Daily Orange, Syracuse University student Jenna Wirth argues that early morning classes cause sleep deprivation that contribute to increased stress, and risk of depression and anxiety. Wirth argues that getting enough sleep as a student is already difficult, with the competing priorities of academics, work and extracurriculars.
In the first installment of a three-part series investigating student mental health at the University of Michigan, The Michigan Daily interviewed students on campus about their struggles to find mental health support on campus. According to the Daily, the most common concern among the students interviewed for the story was wait time for initial consultation at CAPScaps. The Daily reports that students regularly express frustration with the wait times at CAPS through memes in Facebook groups and various petitions to increase CAPS resources and counselor availability. Todd Sevig, chair of UM Student Mental Health Work Group, told The Daily that the longest wait time for a CAPS appointment was two and a half weeks and they had the shortest wait time in Ann Arbor. However, according to the Daily, many students said they waited much longer than two weeks.
The Faculty at Harrisburg Area Community College voted to support a no confidence resolution regarding the school’s president Dr. John Sygielski. These concerns included the school’s elimination of wellness counseling without a plan in place to provide services for students.
In an op-ed in Thrive Global, Yale University students Katherine Du and Ohshue Gatanaga recount their experience on the Yale College Council where they produced a report detailing the status of mental health at the school. According to Du and Gatanga, the key findings of the report, which utilized data from a college wide survey, revealed that although students were happy overall, they felt that Yale was not generally supportive of the student body’s mental health. A year after the report’s release, they note that few changes have been made.
Diversity and Inclusion
Over the past 10 years, the Johns Hopkins University has quietly phased out legacy preferences in admissions, or priority given to the children of alumni. Earlier this month, Hopkins president Ronald J. Daniels told a meeting of the Association of American Law Schools that one of universities’ most fundamental roles in a democracy is to promote social mobility, and that legacy admissions are one of the most pernicious drivers of inequity. Hopkins’ decision to end the practice seems to have had an effect. In 2019 the incoming freshman class at Hopkins comprised only 3.5-percent legacies, down from 12.5 percent in 2009. In that same period, the proportion of students eligible for Pell Grants went up from 9 percent to 19.1 percent.
This weekend, student leaders at George Washington University are hosting a conference on health-related issues pertaining to the LGBTQ community. The conference will feature presenters from the National LGBTQ Task Force and the non-profit health center Whitman-Walker Health. Hannah Edwards, the Student Association’s vice president for diversity and inclusion, said the conference will allow LGBTQ students to ask questions about wellness issues related to their identity and teach students how to advocate for the LGBTQ community. Edwards added that the conference aims to address student concerns about the scope of the treatment options for LGBTQ students at the university’s health center.
Amid concern over international student decline, The Chronicle created an interactive report that strives to paint an accurate portrait of the “new international student.” In examining economic, enrollment, and demographic data, and speaking with admissions officers, international-student advisers, high-school counselors, overseas-recruitment agents, and global-education experts, The Chronicle observed that international students today are: looking for affordable options, seeking specialized programs with a promise of post-grad employability, and, in many cases, already in the United States before they applied to college (studying in American high schools or community colleges, or enrolled in English-language programs).
In a letter to the University of California Berkeley community, Oscar Dubón, vice chancellor for equity & inclusion, Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies and dean of the graduate division, Catherine P. Koshland, vice chancellor for undergraduate education and Stephen C. Sutton, Ed.D., vice chancellor for student affairs, wrote that amid rising tensions between the United States and Iran, the university acknowledges the impact on students of Iranian descent, students with ties to other parts of the Middle East, and others, including veterans and reservists. The group asserted the paramount importance of the physical and emotional safety and well-being of students, and reaffirmed their commitment to an inclusive culture where all can feel safe, respected, and welcome. They also pointed to campus resources available should students feel the need for support, including counseling services.
College Affordability
As several leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination discuss extending free college to four-year colleges and universities, Education Dive focuses on lessons learned from the programs at two-year institutions. “People tend to get really excited about these programs, as well they should,” said Megan Schneider, senior director for government affairs at the National Association of College and University Business Officers. “Our concern from the business office is that lawmakers get so excited about it that they forget there are a lot of less glamorous details, but no less-necessary details, that go into providing a higher education.” Education Dive reports that four year institutions will have to get creative in order to pay for the programs, as many two-year colleges have. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is taking money out of its existing budget, the University of Texas is using a slice of the funds it gets from oil and gas royalties on state-owned land, and the University of Tennessee is establishing an endowment to cover the costs.
Mass student-debt cancellation has emerged as a major policy proposal in the Democratic primary. Critics of the plan argue that it would be difficult to enact unless Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress. But on Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren announced she would use a little-known shortcut that would circumvent Congressional approval. As president, she says, she would cancel the debts of tens of millions of student borrowers “on Day 1”. “Our country’s experiment with debt-financed education went terribly wrong,” Warren wrote in a statement. “Instead of getting ahead, millions of student loan borrowers are barely treading water.”
According to a new Gallup poll, just one in four U.S. adults believes an education beyond high school is affordable to anyone in the country who needs it. Education Dive reports that public opinion on this issue has been consistent since Gallop started posing the question in 2012.
A paper released by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress suggests that a failure to address mounting graduate debt could undermine efforts to make higher education more affordable. Even if people can earn a bachelor’s degree at little to no cost, those savings could become inconsequential if they pursue an advanced degree.
Value of a Degree
According to a new report from the College Board, individuals with bachelor’s degrees will earn $400,000 more in their lifetimes than those with just a high school diploma. College graduates who enrolled at age 18 and earned a degree in four years “can expect to earn enough relative to a high school graduate” by age 33 to make up for paying tuition and other costs and for being out of the workforce while in college. The study comes as polls show some are skeptical of the value of higher education and whether a traditional degree is worth the investment.
A new report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce shows that liberal arts colleges tend to have higher returns than most other types of institutions, though graduates don’t see their investment pay off immediately. The report showed that a decade after enrolling, students at liberal arts colleges see a median return on investment of $62,000, which is roughly 40% lower than that of all institutions. But at the 40-year mark, they have a median return on investment of $918,000, compared to the $723,000 median for all schools.
Free Speech
In a case that has stirred debate about free speech on college campuses, an adjunct professor at a Massachusetts college was fired after posting on Facebook what he described as a joke suggesting that Iran pick sites in the United States to bomb. In response to President Trump’s comments that he would target Iranian cultural sites if Iran retaliated against the United States, the professor, Asheen Phansey, wrote on his personal Facebook page on Jan. 5 that Iran’s supreme leader should “tweet a list of 52 sites of beloved American cultural heritage that he would bomb,” suggesting the Mall of America in Minnesota and a Kardashian residence as targets. His post drew attention almost immediately. Mr. Phansey deleted his post, but not before it was captured in a screengrab and circulated on social media with the school’s phone number. Babson said in statement that it condemned “any type of threatening words” and “actions condoning violence” and suspended Mr. Phansey. After his firing, Mr. Phansey said in a statement that he was “disappointed” and “saddened” by the decision “because people willfully misinterpreted a joke” that he made to friends. “I would have hoped that Babson, an institution of higher education that I love and to which I have given a great deal, would have defended and supported my right to free speech,” he said. “Beyond my own situation, I am really concerned about what this portends for our ability as Americans to engage in political discourse without presuming the worst about each other.”
A lawsuit claims that the University of Connecticut violated two students’ free-speech rights by attempting to expel them from college housing for allegedly using a racial slur. The suit raises the question of whether a university has the authority to punish offensive speech on its campus. The students, Ryan Mucaj and Jarred Karal, both seniors, were arrested in October 2019 after the campus police tracked them down following the online posting of a video that allegedly shows the pair shouting a racial slur in a parking lot. They were charged with ridicule on account of creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality, or race. The lawsuit doesn’t dispute that the students used the slur, but says the university’s attempt to terminate the students’ housing agreement after their arrest is unconstitutional. Adam Steinbaugh, a First Amendment lawyer and an official at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech group known as FIRE, said that UConn is overstepping its authority and that the slur is protected under the First Amendment.
