The Need for Data: Mental Health during Unprecedented Times
The Need for Data: Mental Health during Unprecedented Times
Unprecedented. In recent weeks this word has risen to prominence in our collective lexicon. We are living in unprecedented times. Nothing is as it was before.
Now more than ever, we need data and evidence to guide our decisions and inform policies and programs. This is true at all levels, including in higher education. Colleges and universities will need data in order to meet the needs of their students moving forward. But what will those needs be?
Pre-COVID, there were high and rising prevalence rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicidality in college student populations. Many referred to this as a campus mental health “crisis.” Data have and will continue to be essential in informing campus investments in student mental health. When campus closures began in March, my colleagues and I began thinking about how the pandemic will impact student mental health. As is the new norm, we had only questions, no answers.
We quickly realized the opportunity to collect new data to measure the impact of the pandemic in college student populations, which include about 60% of all U.S. adolescents and young adults. One of the most wonderful things about working in the field of college student mental health research is the partnerships and collaborations that my Healthy Minds colleagues and I have with other organizations across the country. As we began developing new COVID-19 survey questions to add to the national Healthy Minds Study, we partnered with the American College Health Association, which will also be adding this set of questions to its National College Health Assessment (ACHA-NCHA III). Together, we came up with a set of ~10 new survey questions that will be added to the existing surveys for campuses that participate in the remainder of the spring 2020 semester. With these new questions, we focused on measuring unique experiences related to the pandemic and campus closures, narrowing in on factors likely to vary significantly across students. Ultimately the new questions fall into three categories: (1) the personal impact (symptoms/infection, economic, living situation, discrimination); (2) preventive behaviors and attitudes; and (3) perceived supportiveness of campus stakeholders.
The process of writing questions for immediate implementation into Healthy Minds and ACHA-NCHA III also resulted in the initial drafting of a longer survey “module” focused on COVID-19. For fall 2020, we plan to offer a Healthy Minds survey module (~25-30 questions) related to COVID-19, which campuses will be able to opt into. We welcome feedback and suggestions for this new survey module. If you have ideas for research priorities related to mental health in college student populations during these unprecedented times, please email healthyminds@umich.edu.
Sarah Ketchen Lipson is an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and co-Principal Investigator of the national Healthy Minds Study: http://healthymindsnetwork.org/.
Coronavirus Impact
The Dream.US, an organization that provides scholarships to immigrant students known as Dreamers, released a survey on the impact of COVID-19 on its scholars. Dreamers are enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides work authorization and temporary protection against deportation to undocumented young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. Of the 76 percent of respondents who work while in school, 80 percent reported loss of income due to reduced work hours or temporary or permanent job losses. Half of respondents said they’d temporarily lost their jobs, and 7 percent said they’d permanently lost them. Fifty-eight percent of Dreamers said they needed mental health support. Dreamers said their top needs are help with rent or utilities (65%) and help with food or meals (48%). About a fifth said they need help with free or low-cost wireless internet access, and 13.6 percent said they needed a free, borrowed or low-cost computer.
Inside Higher Ed reported that The Center for American Progress on Thursday urged Congress to immediately begin working on another coronavirus relief package, saying the help for education in the $2.2 trillion bill passed last week was inadequate. “The roughly $43 billion targeted for early childhood education, K-12, and higher education will only make a dent in addressing the long-term crisis for education funding,” the progressive group said in a report. In a series of recommendations, the group said Congress should in the short term extend the six-month suspension of student loan payments in the last package to the 1.9 million borrowers with Perkins loans and 7.9 million with commercially held Federal Family Education Loans, who were excluded from the bill.
The University of California will suspend its admission testing requirements for students seeking to enter as freshmen in fall 2021. The UC announcement followed a growing number of prominent colleges that have temporarily or permanently stopped requiring prospective students to submit SAT or ACT scores, including Case Western Reserve University, Tufts University, Davidson College, University of Oregon and Oregon State University.
The Chronicle reports that the $2-trillion coronavirus stimulus plan suspended payments only on federally held loans, not loans made through the Federal Family Education Loan Program, or FFEL. There are 7.2 million borrowers with commercially held FFEL loans. 1.9 million borrowers with federal Perkins loans are also excluded from relief under the law. Borrowers with those two types of loans are also excluded from the two-month moratorium on student-loan interest and student-loan payments issued by the Trump administration before the stimulus law was enacted. Tariq Habash, head of investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center, said that during the crisis, “not only are they going to continue accruing interest and seeing their balances grow, but borrowers are going to have to either make those payments or figure out what the alternative is,” said Habash. “For some, that might mean not being able to make their payment and becoming delinquent on their loans.”
An analysis from Moody’s Investors Service said the stimulus package would only somewhat help colleges weather the financial fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. The roughly $14 billion earmarked for higher education institutions could help the sector retain financially at-risk students and blunt the “immediate budgetary impact” from the crisis. However, colleges will likely face additional financial challenges next year, including tuition revenue losses, decreased state support, and lower income from their endowments and gifts.
The New York Times reports that after a group of about 70 students from the University of Texas at Austin who celebrated spring break in Mexico returned, dozens tested positive for the coronavirus. The Austin outbreak is the latest to result from a group of college students who ignored social-distancing guidelines, went on traditional spring break trips and have now tested positive for the coronavirus. The Chronicle reported that while colleges closed campuses to limit the spread of the disease, some fear students’ unpredictable behavior could increase the likelihood that they’d bring the virus home with them. Experts said that spring break, where some students did not heed officials’ advice to avoid large groups, was the largest unanticipated variable. In Florida, spring-breakers swarmed beaches and packed bars and restaurants, even as millions of Americans elsewhere sheltered in place. Julio Frenk, president of the University of Miami and a former minister of health for Mexico, said that while returning spring-breakers could spread the coronavirus to their home communities, the risk would have been greater if they’d returned to campus. With 4,300 residential students at Miami, “it’s not manageable to do social distancing,” he said. Reuters highlighted that after Vanderbilt University students took part in celebrations and spring trips, about 100 students may have COVID-19.
The Chronicle reveals how the coronavirus is creating additional challenges for nontraditional students as courses move online. Unlike many of their peers, adult students often juggle their coursework with full-time jobs, childcare, and caring for older relatives. Hadass Sheffer, founder and president of the Graduate Network, a program that supports adult students, said, “Some of them don’t have access” to the internet or laptops. Some of them have not yet learned how to learn online. Some people are in fragile mind-sets right now, and so learning probably is not a high priority.” Matt Bergman, an assistant professor in the University of Louisville’s department of educational leadership, evaluation, and organizational development said that expecting adult students working in the medical field or in the military to complete coursework alongside their heightened responsibilities due to Covid-19 may be too ambitious.
The Editorial Board of the Johns Hopkins News-Letter criticizes the university’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, pointing to a lack of timely communication around class cancellation and the campus closure. ” Crucial information was and still is being imparted in a haphazard manner,” they write. The Board writes that Hopkins must do more to support students’ mental health, as students are unaware of mental health resources available to them. In a survey conducted by The News-Letter, 55 percent of students said that their mental health has been impacted by leaving campus or switching to online learning. Over 50 percent said that they were not effectively informed about the University’s remote mental health resources.
Community colleges and tribal colleges are struggling to adapt to distance learning on a shoestring budget. Some community college faculty members live in rural areas, where Wi-Fi is unreliable and uploading a video lecture is painfully slow. Many students don’t have internet access, so one college is trying to arrange for free Wi-Fi – or turn their buildings’ routers toward parking lots so people can study in their cars. The populations served by tribal colleges have long wrestled with poverty, low levels of education, and a host of chronic health problems. Now tribal colleges face a transition to remote teaching in parts of the country where broadband and internet access are spotty at best. Twenty percent of Native American students don’t have computers or internet access at home.
Stripped of graduation and end-of-year rituals, the 2020 graduating college seniors now face one of the worst job markets in recent history. According to the Hechinger Report, last week, joblessness claims climbed by a record 6.65 million, and economists are predicting unemployment could rise as high as 20 percent in the months to come.
For Forbes.com, Dana Brownlee wrote about the pandemic’s unique toll on college seniors. “I couldn’t help but grieve for them a little differently,” she wrote. “Yes, this new pandemic shutdown was horrific for everyone, but for college seniors not only were they being robbed of such a cherished milestone celebration, they were simultaneously being thrust into a job market with more uncertainty than I’d seen in my lifetime.”
The Daily Iowan reports that students living outside the state of Iowa may have limited access to University-based tele-mental-health services because of state licensing constraints. UCS’s mental-health providers are licensed to practice in the state of Iowa and not other states. University Counseling Service Director Barry Schreier said the department is diligently exploring other states’ laws in order to determine how it can extend its services to out-of-state students. “My guess is that eventually we are going to be extending services to students who are living in other states, but we are just not there yet,” Schreier said. “Without any federal guidelines for what is happening right now, [those guidelines] are forming state by state. It all comes down to which state the student is living in.”
After the coronavirus outbreak prompted Harvard’s Counseling and Mental Health Services to transition to remote care, some students have raised concerns about this is being implemented and communicated. Some students told The Crimson they were unaware that CAMHS is now offering remote care. Nour Abou-Hussein ’22 said that while she understands CAMHS is “constrained” in terms of what it can currently offer, she does not think the needs of international students are adequately taken into account. “I see that they are definitely constrained and restricted on what they can do and they are doing the best they can,” she said. “But I still don’t think there’s enough consideration for international students’ needs in terms of mental health or CAMHS services.”
The Lantern wrote that the Ohio State University’s Office of Student Life Disability Services is finding ways to make its resources available to students and faculty online. SLDS provides accommodations, such as note-taking assistance, attendance modifications and assistive technology, for students and individuals who need accommodations. Kelly Bonice, SLDS lead access specialist, said that SLDS and other offices on campus are working together to ensure access for students, including training SLDS staff on captioning audio and making documents more accessible, as well as accommodating for different time zones. “Some students who now live in different time zones have exams scheduled at a time that conflicts with their medication regimen. We are working with those students and their instructors to support flexibility with their exam administration window,” Bonice said.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
A Title IX lawsuit by a former Syracuse University student accused of sexual assault has gained the attention of legal experts, who are troubled by a magistrate judge’s decision to allow a university therapist’s client records to be made available as evidence. In a March decision about the records, Andrew Baxter, a magistrate judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York, wrote that the conversations between a Syracuse University therapist, said to have served as both a mental health counselor and adviser to an alleged victim of sexual assault, and her student client, should be disclosed because the “interests of justice substantially outweigh the need for confidentiality.” Michael Thad Allen, the accused student’s attorney, wrote that Syracuse itself created the risk of having to disclose counseling records by combining the “therapeutic role of counselors” with “the procedural role of advisors” in its counseling center’s Sexual and Relationship Violence Response Team, or SRVRT.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) closed thousands more Title IX complaints than it received during the first two fiscal years of the Trump presidency. Education Dive reports that the department has proposed drastic changes for how colleges should handle accusations of sexual violence under Title IX, the federal sex discrimination law. The final version of the rules is expected to be released soon.
College Affordability
A working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that low-income students apply less often to flagship universities that increase their tuition prices, even if they guarantee they will meet students’ full financial need. The findings, covering 17 institutions, suggest that generous financial aid policies don’t stop sticker shock from putting off some low-income students – particularly if students are unaware of the offer. The report highlights how tuition increases at public flagships following the recession of 2008 have either priced out low-income students or made them wary of attending due to perceived costs.
Sara Goldrick-Rab, founding director of the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University, wrote in the Hechinger Report that the coronavirus pandemic is exposing the consequences of inequality in American life. According to Goldrick-Rab, money in higher education often goes to students with the greatest wealth. “The nation’s college dollars are concentrated in the elite private colleges, which wealthy students disproportionately attend, rather than the nation’s public regional universities and community colleges where most Americans go,” she writes. Goldrick-Rab’s research has found that the financial aid system, meant to level inequalities, often fails and, “imposes heavy costs on students in terms of time burdens as well as application and compliance requirements that prevent students with significant need from getting help.”
