Mental and Behavioral Health
In August, the University of Connecticut closed the Humphrey Clinic for Individual, Couple and Family Therapy, a major mental health resource for UConn students. An op-ed in the Daily Campus argues that closing the clinic, which was the only resource that did not appear on fee bills, deprives many students of these more accessible mental health resources.
University of Southern California’s Engemann Student Health Center is reevaluating its mental health care services. 70 percent of students seeking mental health services at the center are referred out, creating challenges for those who can’t afford to commute or don’t have time to travel off campus. In a memo to the USC community, Chief Health Officer Sarah Van Orman stated that Engemann aims to reduce the percentage of referred students down to 20 to 30 percent by adding 10 full-time therapists throughout this academic year and two more the following year. Engemann has also adopted JED Campus, an assessment and strategic planning initiative, to gather more insight on students’ mental health. The center is looking to launch a peer counseling program based on the initiative’s recommendation. Let’s Talk, a pilot program Engemann has put in place, allows students who do not feel comfortable with the school’s mental health services to receive support at locations across campus. According to Robert Mendola, USC’s executive director for student mental health, “[It] makes sure that we are plugging all the gaps, meeting all the best practices for how to provide health for the campus, which includes a public health model [and] not just an individualized care for the students.”
Marie Claire covers the new series by Thrive Global, Arianna Huffington’s startup dedicated to enhancing wellbeing, on the campus mental health crisis. Thrive claims top student-complaints about their campus mental health centers include long wait times for “initial and follow-up appointments (up to 5 weeks in some cases), a short-term model of service that can’t accommodate those with more serious, ongoing mental health issues, caps on the number of therapy sessions students are allotted, and forced medical leave for students with more severe mental illnesses.” According to a report by Thrive, schools are taking action to address these problems, like “expanding or eliminating caps on sessions, extending hours of operation, hiring case managers to help students navigate things like insurance and making appointments with off-site therapists, employing more clinicians…and providing alternative forms of counseling like group therapy.” Many schools have also designed emergency response directives to help guide faculty, staff, RAs, peer counselors, and fellow students assist students in crisis.
One Thrive story lists nine reasons behind the college mental health crisis, including that: de-stigmatization and years of mental health advocacy have encouraged students to seek help, digital technology has weakened real-life sociality, social media has encouraged a culture of comparison online, student populations have become more diverse, and helicopter parents undermine coping skills.
Dr. Mark Patishnock, the newly-appointed director of CAPS at Michigan State University is making long-awaited changes to mental health service, with the goal of redesigning CAPS from the perspective of students. CAPS has expanded its services, redesigned the way students receive these services and helped create a campus-wide coalition of multiple student groups to address issues and raise mental health awareness. In June, seven full-time health providers were hired and CAPS is in the process of hiring up to ten more. CAPS also expanded location-wise by opening a satellite office in the MSU Union. A new app called “MySSP” allows students to chat or talk on the phone at any time with a licensed counselor. CAPS also redesigned their clinical intake system.
Syracuse University‘s Counseling Center has slashed wait times in half this semester and launched a drop-in system that allows students to meet with a clinician without an appointment. Cory Wallack, the Counseling Center’s director, said the wait for a first-time appointment has dropped from about six and a half days to less than three days in the first month of the fall 2018 semester. The center added counseling staff and drop-in services, and SU’s new first-year forum, which all new SU students are required to take, includes aspects of mental health and wellness in its curriculum. Wallack said the concepts taught in the forum can help students manage stress.
Diversity and Inclusion
A federal lawsuit alleging Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American applicants began this week in Boston. The group Students for Fair Admissions, led by conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, is suing Harvard, charging the university engages in “racial balancing,” which is illegal, and discriminates against Asian-American applicants by rating them lower on intangible traits like courage, kindness and leadership. While the case focuses on Harvard, it could have significant consequences for higher education, especially if it moves on to the U.S. Supreme Court. At stake is 40 years of legal precedent allowing race to be one factor in deciding which students to admit.
In the first day of the trial, Harvard’s admissions dean, William Fitzsimmons, said the lower thresholds for underrepresented minorities take into consideration how the “rather stark economic differences and opportunities” those students face may affect their ability to score higher on standardized tests. He also testified that weaker teacher and guidance-counselor recommendations are one reason why Asian-American applicants as a group score lower than white applicants in the “personal rating” portion of the school’s admissions process.
Providing context for the landmark trial, NPR gives a history of affirmative action and how it become such a controversial issue.
One day before the start of the trial, two warring rallies revealed the deep fissures over affirmative action. Supporters of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions practices-mostly students –demonstrated in Harvard Square on Sunday holding signs with consistent message: “Defend diversity.” Across the Charles River, another group-dominated largely by Chinese Americans-voiced their displeasure with Harvard’s policies, with placards decrying affirmative action. “Discrimination in the name of diversity is wrong” was the motto of the gathering, jointly hosted by the Asian American Coalition for Education, or AACE, and Students for Fair Admissions.
An op-ed in the Atlantic argues that the admissions processes at elite colleges is broken and that the Harvard suit shines a light on the problem that too many students are applying for too few spots at too few colleges. Richard Weissbourd, a developmental psychologist and Harvard lecturer, who co-founded a national initiative that encourages children to be altruistic contributors to society, said, “There’s a disease in that so many people are focused on 10 to 20 highly selective colleges that aren’t any better than 100 other colleges. If we don’t break the back of that [disease], we can’t get rid of achievement pressure.” According to the article, the Harvard lawsuit is merely a symptom of this disease that will likely continue to metastasize.
The California Community Colleges Board of Governors announced that Oct. 15-19 will be Undocumented Student Week of Action, encouraging its campuses and surrounding communities to participate in events that support undocumented students, and asking Congress to establish a way for the group to obtain citizenship. “It is imperative that the California Community Colleges, the single largest provider of post-secondary education in the nation, stand up our students, regardless of immigration status,” said Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley. “We are committed to collaborating with community organizations to raise awareness about resources, including financial aid, for undocumented students, and we continue to advocate at the federal level for a permanent resolution to this issue.”
Laney College in Oakland has received a $125,000 grant to increase services for undocumented and mixed-status students and their families. The grant from the California Campus Catalyst Fund will allow Laney College to create a three-year plan to broaden services such as career and college counseling, legal services and access to health and wellness programs.
Washington and Lee University will rename two buildings and make changes at Lee Chapel, part of and effort to confront its complicated history. Portraits of Robert E. Lee and George Washington wearing military uniforms that hang in Lee Chapel will be changed to portraits of the men in civilian clothing. Lee, the Confederate general and former president of the school, is buried in the chapel. The door to the chamber in the chapel that houses a recumbent statue of Lee will be closed during school events, to mark a separation between the university and the memorial.
Carol Folt, the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill marked the public university’s 225th anniversary with an apology for its role in slavery. “As chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I offer our university’s deepest apology for the profound injustices of slavery,” she said Friday, acknowledging that enslaved people helped build and sustain the school. “Our unique legacy demands that we continue to reconcile our past with our present and future and be the diverse and just community that is fitting for America’s first public university,” Folt said. “Our apology must lead to purposeful action, and it has to build upon the great efforts and sacrifices of so many across the years who fought so hard for much of what we value about Carolina today.”
Sexual Assault and Title IX
Three years ago, a survey on campus sexual assault drew national attention over its finding that one in four female college-student respondents said they had experienced unwanted sexual contact. The findings prompted some institutions to change their policies and procedures on campus sexual assault. The Chronicle profiles three examples of colleges shifting their practices since that survey: Harvard, Tulane and Iowa State.
The University of Texas at Austin is rebranding a program designed to enlist men in discussions about sexual abuse and dating violence. The program, MasculinUT, was put on hold last spring after conservative media outlets accused the university of treating masculinity as a mental-health problem. The university insisted that was never the case, but moved the program from the Counseling and Mental Health Center to the office of the dean of students. MasculinUT will continue to focus on drawing men into a conversation about sexual assault, but educational materials on the subject will be moved to a publicly accessible wiki page, one of several recommendations made by a steering committee of students and faculty and staff members after the program was disputed.
Politics and Policy
In an op-ed in the Chronicle, Brian Rosenberg, President of Macalester College, argues that as confidence in higher education among republicans declines, the work of educators becomes more important not less. According to Rosenberg, this loss of confidence is being driven less by changes in higher education than by changes in the attitudes of a large segment of the American public. He writes, “We are inspiring distrust not because we are abandoning our mission but because we are doing our best to carry it out. That mission has not significantly altered in the past two years, but the world around us has.”
Substance Use
The Chronicle published a list of colleges with the highest average annual numbers of liquor- and drug-law violations per 1,000 students. States with the highest number of colleges on the list include New York, with 18; Colorado and Vermont, with eight; and Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with six each.
The University of Oregon student newspaper, the Daily Emerald, highlights the story of a UO student who has benefited from collegiate recovery programs. The CRC, founded in 2012, offers services like counseling, 12-step meetings and service projects for students struggling with substance abuse. It regularly serves 14 student members who are at least three months sober.
In an op-ed in the Chronicle, Rear Adm. Susan Blumenthal, the senior policy and medical adviser at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, a professor in the medical schools at Tufts and Georgetown Universities and David Xiang, a Harvard University student, argue that colleges must protect a generation of young adults from the destructive effects of the opioid crisis. According to Blumenthal nad Xiang, while middle-aged Americans have been most affected by opioid addiction, young adults, many of whom start to experiment with drugs and alcohol as teenagers, are also at risk.
College Affordability
Berea College, which was the first integrated, co-educational college in the South, has not charged students tuition since 1892. Every student on campus is expected to work; jobs include everyday tasks such as janitorial services as well as those aligned with students’ academic program, like web production or managing volunteer programs. Forty-five percent of graduates have no debt, and the ones who do have an average of less than $7,000. At Berea, the classes are diverse: more than 40 percent of the student body identify as racial minorities; International students, which make up 7 percent of the student body, are required to be low-income by the standards of their own countries. Because the model relies on the schools large endowment, it is unclear if its tuition-free approach will last forever. But for now, it has a simple purpose, to keep education tuition-free for its students for as long as possible.
According to an annual pricing-trends report by the College Board, a New York nonprofit that administers the SAT and tracks university costs, the sticker price for higher education continues to inch up even though fewer students actually pay it. The report indicates that, after increasing for decades, the real cost of attending both public and private college has flattened, and, in some cases, even declined this year. This is due, in part, to the fact that colleges are giving away more scholarships as they compete for fewer students.
