Race, Class, and Campus Climate: A Chronicle of Higher Education Webinar
Tomorrow, the Chronicle is hosting the final session in a series of webinars examining race and class in higher education. The webinar, hosted by Sarah Brown, senior reporter at The Chronicle, and Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College, will explore how colleges can make meaningful change to achieve greater equity and inclusion. The panel will include Sonja Ardoin, assistant professor of student-affairs administration at Appalachian State University, José Fabre Jr., junior recruitment and outreach officer at Wake Technical Community College, John L. Jackson Jr., dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Jael Kerandi, student representative to the Board of Regents and former student body president at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and Kathleen Wong(Lau), chief diversity officer at San José State University.
Mental and Behavioral Health
The Stanford Daily reports that social isolation is taking a toll on students’ mental health, with many reporting worsening anxiety or depression. Others report that their academics have suffered under the added stress and difficulty focusing in class. Stanford Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) director Bina Patel said, “For all students, the loss of interactive learning and support that happens organically when students can connect in person with classmates and friends has posed another challenge to their mental health.”
In an op-ed in The Hill, Dr. Paula A. Johnson, president of Wellesley College, pushed for Congress to pass the Temporary Reciprocity to Ensure Access to Treatment – TREAT- Act, which would allow health providers who are licensed in good standing in any state to practice either telehealth or in person in other states during the pandemic and public health crises in the future. Dr. Johnson says that she has seen the pandemic accelerate an already growing mental health crisis among college students. “As a college president, I am witness to their distress (and the potential long-term impact),” she writes. “As a physician with a background in public health, I am convinced we can address it – and must.” She argues that therapy is abundant, but the “disconnected patchwork of licensing requirements for health care providers” prevents people from getting the help they need.
Vogue spotlights The Unplug Collective, a blog and Instagram account that amplifies the voices of Black women and gender expansive people who have struggled with body discrimination, mental health, and eating disorders. The Collective was founded by Barnard student Amanda Taylor, with the help of Zara Harding, 21, a Columbia student and the collective’s COO. Taylor told Vogue she started the Collective as a blog in her freshman year. “I was going through a lot in terms of my mental health and so was absolutely everyone around me,” she said. “I felt like no one was talking about it and if people were talking about it, there was nowhere to really listen and learn from each other. And I also felt like I finally was getting the help that I needed because Barnard did have a lot of resources.”
NBC News report that colleges and universities are altering their academic calendars for the spring semester to curtail travel off campus, with many choosing to cancel spring break. The move has been criticized by students at schools across the country, who say it will further harm their mental health. Some schools are opting to offer mental health days throughout the semester. Mark Gaunin, 21, a junior double majoring in computer engineering and physics at San Diego State University told NBC that while he supports precautions to limit the spread of Covid-19, students need a break after a difficult year. “It’s a rough semester,” he said of the semester of class adjustments, Covid-19 outbreaks and fears of contracting the virus.
The Ohio State Lantern reported that the University’s Student Advocacy Center is offering up to $3,000 per student of financial assistance to be used towards mental health care. The Student Advocacy Center was awarded over $52,000 dedicated to supporting student mental health. Domestic undergraduate, graduate, or professional students with a current FAFSA who meet academic standards are eligible and can use the funding for bills accrued for therapy, intensive treatment programming, telehealth, medication management, and more between March and December 2020.
In a piece in University Business, Simone Figueroa, co-Founder and president of U-Thrive Educational Services, an organization that brings mental and emotional wellness programs to college students, argues that investing in proactive mental and emotional wellness programming is key to solving the mental health crisis on college campuses. “We need to not only provide college students with information on what to do if/when they/their friends become distressed, but also focus on helping college students avoid getting to that point of distress in the first place,” she writes.
University Business published excerpts from a recent roundtable of higher ed leaders, hosted by Boise State University President Marlene Tromp, that aimed to address student mental health and wellness in the context of COVID. The leaders spoke about specific actions they are taking and how students are coping. University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel told the group that increased and improved counseling services became a priority. “In addition to counseling, which we’ve ramped up a lot and have changed. Other efforts have included offering students more emergency funds, increasing hours at the campus food pantry and giving support animals a campus presence.” Boise State added mental and physical health to the strategic planning process and launched a campus wellness committee, which reaches across the entire university. Russell Lowery-Hart, president of Amarillo College in Texas, said that his faculty are trained in mental health first and early alert systems now have a mental health component. Maurie McInnis, president of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, said that her institution has taken a public health approach. “We spend a lot of energy on prevention, early intervention, and lastly on counseling. There will never be enough counseling,” she said.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Higher Ed Dive reports that a federal judge reinstated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows unauthorized immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to work and study in the U.S. The decision reverses restrictions the Trump administration placed on the program as part of its efforts to end it.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
An Arizona State University student posted a series of Instagram videos illustrating her negative experience with the university after reporting a rape in February, garnering more than 80,000 views and nearly 300 comments as of last week. The disclosure prompted an open letter to university administration that decried the lack of response to sexual assault cases and called for a new rape crisis center.
Student Success
The American Talent Initiative published a brief encouraging colleges to enroll more veterans. Student veterans are more likely to be people of color, parents, and first-generation students– three groups disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Experts argue that because the GI Bill covers much of veterans’ costs, student veterans are an underserved population that would demand less financial investment than others. Additionally, the brief illustrates that student veterans perform academically better than nonveteran peers, have a lower unemployment rate compared to nonveteran peers who hold the same degree, and earn a higher median income than their nonveteran peers.
DC-area community colleges, like those across the country, have seen a drop in enrollment this fall despite the economic downturn. At the same time, students have expressed greater interest and enrollment in condensed classes. In fact, enrollment in Prince George’s Community College has doubled for its four-week winter term. John Hamman, Montgomery College’s interim chief analytics and effectiveness officers posited that a semester of courses may not seem feasible to students. “Students, I think, are not convinced that they have the money or stability to sign up for a full 15 weeks of classes. A lot of our students had lost jobs or had reductions in their pay. A lot of them were facing some sort of food or housing insecurity.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that two months into the current cycle for college financial aid applications, submissions of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, were down nearly 17% from the same period in 2019. Bill DeBaun, director of data and evaluation at National College Attainment Network, which completed the analysis of Education Department data, said, “To still see double-digit percent decreases from last year is alarming to me.”
Higher Ed Dive reports on new data showing that completion rates are slowing. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, slight decreases in completion rates among traditional-age and community college students drove the slowdown.
Rural enrollment in higher education is persistently low. Federal data show that less than 30 percent of rural residents age 25 and up have an associate degree or higher. Jim Ayers, a businessman raised in rural Decatur County, Tennessee started The Ayers Foundation in 1999, which starts with putting a counselor who is connected to the community in local high schools to help every student develop a career plan, guiding them through the tasks required to apply and pay for a postsecondary degree to execute it. At Decatur County ‘s Riverside High School, where the foundation has been working since 1999, postsecondary enrollment has risen from 24 to 84 percent (95 students). In two other counties, three rural high schools reached that postsecondary enrollment for 76 percent (143 students), 82 percent (98 students) and 87 percent (159 students) of their 2019 graduates. The success of the program attracted the attention of a national group to scale it. RootEd Alliance, a two-year-old philanthropic collaborative, has taken the Ayers model to other rural communities in Tennessee, Missouri and Texas, serving more than 3,000 students.
Inside Higher Ed reported that American Campus Communities released data from 42,600 students who live in campus housing managed by ACC showing that those who lived on or near campus had positive social and academic outcomes. ACC, which experienced a 7% drop in student leasing rates from 2019 to 2020, supported the reopening of schools regardless of whether classes were in-person or remote. The survey asked students about their fall experiences and did not include data from students living off campus. However, the article includes several quotes from Jason Wells, ACC senior vice president of development, claiming that the students living on or near campus had better experiences than when they learned at home in the spring and compared to peers learning from family homes off campus.
College Affordability
The Wall Street Journal analyzed newly released financial data from the U.S. Education Department, which for the first time provided information on debt parents took on through a federal college loan program called Parent Plus. The Journal’s analysis found that the schools with the largest parent debt burdens are historically Black colleges, art schools and small private colleges where parents are taking on nearly six-figure loans.
At an Education Department financial aid conference last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos criticized politicians that back debt forgiveness, calling it “the truly insidious notion of government gift giving.” DeVos has been accused by lawmakers and consumer groups of limiting loan forgiveness through existing federal programs. At the conference, DeVos also slammed tuition-free college, calling the policy “a matter of total government control” and “a socialist takeover of higher education.”
The Hechinger Report explores whether student debt forgiveness is the best way to solve the student loan crisis. Many economists believe that any plan to cancel the same amount of debt for all is likely to benefit many more middle and upper-middle class Americans than low-income Americans, who tend to struggle more with student debt.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that pandemic relief for about 41 million federal student loan borrowers will continue until Jan. 31. At the start of the pandemic, student loan interest was set to 0% and collections of defaulted federal student loans stopped.
Coronavirus: Safety and Reopenings
As colleges make plans for the spring, many are reflecting on a difficult fall semester. In the Daily Tarheel, one University of North Carolina student said, “It didn’t go as planned for fall. I think it’s probably just best if they just keep everybody at home.” At University of Mississippi, students and teachers alike found the changes to be difficult. Dr. Noel Wilkin, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs said that remote learning “created challenges for faculty, it created challenges for students. But the stories I have heard from faculty and students is that they have worked together in large part to rise to those challenges and to keep their learning moving forward and to figure out how to meet the needs that students have and also for faculty, to keep their courses moving forward and those students’ degrees on track.”
The New York Times and the Chronicle explore lessons learned about COVID on campus. According to the Times, “The most important piece of the puzzle seems to be aggressive testing. Many colleges that ran their own testing programs successfully kept cases low; those that didn’t often became hot spots.” The Chronicle of Higher Education identified five major lessons learned: protections in place, classrooms and other formal campus spaces are not heavy vectors of infection spread, whereas off-campus social gatherings and residence halls were sites of significant spread; entry and surveillance testing encouraged healthy student behavior and deterred rampant illness in dormitories; and student illness infected vulnerable populations off-campus due to town-gown relations between many college and university communities and surrounding areas.
Increased confidence going into the spring semester has led many colleges to bring additional students back to campus. At College of the Holy Cross, only 230 students lived on campus this semester with all classes online, but the school expects to host between 2,100 and 2,200 students next semester and hold some in-person classes. The New York Times reports that the University of California, San Diego will house more than 11,000 students on campus. And Harvard announced its decision to expand the number of students invited to campus this spring to its full single-room capacity of over 3,000 students, or about half of the student population. Princeton University has invited all students back to campus for the spring. Experts say a major test of whether colleges learned the right lessons would come when students travel back to school from home. In the New York Times, Dr. Tom Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama Administration and is now president of a global health initiative to prevent heart disease and epidemics, said, “When people travel, the virus travels.”
A new preliminary study found that lingering COVID-19 symptoms previously thought to mostly affect middle-aged adults, also are present in a majority of young adults for weeks after diagnosis. “The common belief in the U.S. is that COVID-19 is benign or short-lived in young adults,” Walsh-Messinger said. “Our study, which we believe is the first to report on post-COVID syndrome in college students, almost exclusively between 18 and 21 years of age, suggests otherwise. More research needs to be done to confirm these findings, but until then, we urge the medical and scientific community to consider young adults vulnerable to post-COVID syndrome and to closely monitor those who contracted the disease for lingering viral effects.”
