Mental and Behavioral Health
According to Forbes, during the Learfield IMG College Intercollegiate Athletics Forum presented by Sports Business Journal in New York City, athletic directors, conference commissioners, and others expressed genuine concern for the emotional and mental well-being of student-athletes and the critical need for universities to invest in resources to help them. During the first session of the conference featuring athletics directors from Cal-Berkeley, Temple, Marquette, San Jose State, and Michigan, James Knowlton, Cal’s AD, noted they are adding staff to service mental health needs, and Bill Scholl, Marquette’s AD, noted the Marquette athletics department is hiring its first full-time mental health specialist, intimating that using the university-wide counseling center is not sufficient. When asked during his keynote address what areas of improvement were most pressing at a national level, NCAA President Mark Emmert cited “health and wellness”, saying “the mental health issue is gigantic”. In a session featuring Mark and Kym Hilinski (co-founders of Hilinski’s Hope Foundation and parents of Tyler Hilinski who took his own life while competing in Division I athletics), Kim Hilinski noted that the athletic trainers in particular can play a key role in this identification process since they “engage with students” so frequently.
In an op-ed in the Daily Texan, University of Texas at Austin student Hanna Lopez argues that, “when determining their attendance policy for the spring semester, professors should include mental health days in their number of accepted absences.” Lopez believes that there is not sufficient time allocated for students to take care of their mental health. According to Lopez, there must be proactive measures in the classroom to prevent mental health crises.
The apparent suicide of a student on the University at Buffalo‘s campus has prompted a petition to better secure the building where the 20-year-old jumped to his death last week. The petition, started online at Change.org, calls on the university to provide some type of suicide-prevention barrier in the open stairwell of Clemens Hall, a 10-story academic building.
Diversity and Inclusion
The fallout from the $2.5-million settlement that placed the statue known as “Silent Sam” in the hands of the North Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is widening. The Attorney General Josh Stein sought to distance himself from the settlement, with his office calling it “an excessive amount of money that should instead be used to strengthen the university and support students.” A national civil rights group, The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, asked a court Friday to overturn the settlement arguing that the Sons of Confederate Veterans misled the court by filing a lawsuit that it knew was meritless. Additionally, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a major academic donor, pulled a $1.5-million grant slated for the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in response to the Confederate payout. The foundation told one North Carolina TV station that “allocating university funding toward protecting a statue that glorifies the Confederacy, slavery, and white supremacy – whether from public or private sources -runs antithetical to who we are and what we believe as a foundation.”
According to the New York Times, one of Princeton University’s historically elitist eating clubs, The Quadrangle, is becoming more welcoming to first-generation, low-income students, in part due to the efforts of Daniel Pallares Bello, a first-generation Latino student who became the club president, campaigning on a platform of inclusivity. Pallares told the New York Times, “The first thing I was told by low-income upperclassmen was that they weren’t a place for us. They’re too expensive, they’re not for Latino people like me, it wouldn’t be a friendly environment.” Many first-gen and low-income students view the eating clubs as exclusionary: a representation of the Ivy League’s culture of privilege and extreme wealth. Once elected president, Pallared started recruiting his first-generation and low-income peers. He then approached the club’s board of trustees about covering dues for scholarship students. The Quadrangle now has the highest percentage of first-generation low-income students of all Princeton’s eating clubs, including the newly inaugurated president and one of two new social chairs. Dinesh Maneyapanda, the chairman of Quadrangle’s board of trustees said, “The demographics of Princeton are changing, and my responsibility is to make sure the club can persist for the next 100 years.”
Nearly 150 faculty members at Syracuse University have signed a petition calling for a university-wide, liberal arts core curriculum that would foster critical thinking on issues surrounding diversity. The letter comes in response to a series of at least 17 hate crimes and bias-related incidents on or near campus since early November. Though SU currently requires a single diversity course through first-year seminars, faculty members stress that it has been ineffective in creating an inclusive culture on campus.
The Daily Beast reports that a fraternity at Indiana University in Bloomington has been suspended over an incident at the Pi Kappa Phi house that allegedly involved a physical assault and anti-Semitic and racist slurs. Hours after a purported video of the altercation began circulating, the university announced it had suspended Pi Kappa Phi and said police were investigating. The incident involved members of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a traditionally Jewish fraternity.
Howard University received $4 million from the Hopper-Dean Foundation to fund the Bison STEM Scholars Program, a scholarship program designed to increase the number of minority students earning a PhD or MD-PhD in STEM by alleviating their financial burden. In The Hechinger Report, Dr. Andre Perry, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at The Brookings Institution, writes of the importance of investing in black STEM workers and entrepreneurs. He argues, “If we don’t scout, recruit, invest in and cheer for black engineers, biologists and computer scientists as we do for quarterbacks, linebackers and wide receivers, our youth won’t be able to participate in the game of life when they grow up. If black men on the football field (and everyone else in the stands) don’t develop the tech skills that could protect them from the threat of automation, they may find themselves unemployable when they leave.”
Student Veterans
According to The Hechinger Report, the Department of Veterans Affairs has done little to counsel veterans seeking an education or restrict them from enrolling at it or other for-profit colleges and universities. VA officials say their chief role in the GI Bill program is administering payments. Unlike the Department of Education or the Department of Defense, the VA has few tools to investigate the educational institutions. Internal government documents, watchdog reports and interviews with veterans’ policy advocates, government staffers and other officials suggest that little has been done to crack down on colleges accused of predatory behavior. Veterans’ educational counseling is virtually nonexistent, and oversight efforts are largely left to state agencies that are underfunded and overly reliant on self-reporting by the institutions themselves.
Free Speech
President Trump signed an executive order designed to crack down on what he sees as rising anti-Semitism on college campuses. The order drew mixed responses, with critics complaining that the policy could be used to stifle free speech and legitimate opposition to Israel’s policies toward Palestinians.
Student Success
The Chronicle reports that, in the decade since state appropriators slashed its budget by $26 million over three years, the University of Rhode Island has increased its enrollment by 9 percent, raised its on-time graduation rate by double digits, and cut its racial-achievement gap in half. Those gains have translated into millions of dollars in tuition revenue that the university has used to hire dozens of new faculty members. This fall, URI was chosen as one of three finalists for the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities degree-completion award. The progress required a major investment in financial aid and student support, close attention to data, and a fundamental shift in the way the university allocates its limited resources. According to the Chronicle, by doubling down on student success during a budget crisis, the university has been able to retain many more of its students and more than recoup its investment in aid. For every percentage-point percent increase in retention, the university gains more than $2 million in tuition revenue.
A report titled “Expanding Pathways to College Enrollment and Degree Attainment, Policies and Reforms for a Diverse Population” provides suggestions on how states can be more effective in meeting students’ needs. “Systems that may work well for [traditional] students won’t necessarily work well for a working adult who’s taking classes in the evenings or someone who is returning to school after years or may have family obligations outside of their coursework,” said Dr. James Dean Ward, one of the authors of the report. “In this brief, we try to highlight some of the ways in which state policy makers can step forward and facilitate both getting into and then through degree programs for these students who may have a different trajectory.” According to the report, transferring credits from one institution to another is a persistent issue. The report notes that community college students who are able to transfer at least 90% of their credits to a four-year institution are 2.5 times more likely to graduate when compared to students who had less than half of their credits transfer. Despite that statistic, 43% of all transfer credits are not counted.
According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC), nearly 60% of students who entered college in 2013 earned a credential within six years, raising the completion rate to an eight-year high. However, completion rates for Hispanic and African-American students still lag that of white and Asian students, and adult students are completing at lower rates than their peers in the traditional college-age range.
Physical Health and Wellness
The Louisiana Health Department reported that the state now has more than 30 cases of lung injury – and one death – associated with vaping a combination of THC and nicotine. The combination of both substances contributed to 55% of the illnesses, more than the reported illnesses caused from both nicotine and THC independently. The Daily Advertiser spoke with students at the University of Louisiana about how easy it is to get black market vaping cartridges, their growing hesitation about using them and why they vaped illegal cartridges in the past.
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy released a report calling on NCAA schools to do more to provide health care to their student athletes. Murphy released a report recommending the NCAA require full health coverage for athletes and allow players to see doctors who are not associated with their athletic program or school. Murphy also wants schools to guarantee four-year scholarships for athletes, including those who become injured, and allow players to transfer immediately from programs if they believe their health is at risk. He also called for stronger consequences for schools that don’t follow protocols for handling concussions and other health issues. “The NCAA Division I manual is 400 pages long,” Murphy said. “In it, 38 pages are dedicated to stopping student athletes from being able to make money. One page of 400 is dedicated to protecting the health of college athletes. That speaks to the misplaced priorities of the NCAA today.”
College Affordability
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam proposed a $145 million plan – “G3” or “Get Skilled, Get a Job, Give Back” that would make community college free for residents from low- or middle-income backgrounds going into particular fields with skilled labor shortages in Virginia. “Everyone deserves the opportunity to get a good education and a good job, no matter who you are or how much money you have,” Northam said in a statement. “This is an investment in equity and our economy – by helping Virginians get the skills they need, we’re building a world-class workforce while ensuring all Virginians can support themselves, their families, and their communities.”
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates back free tuition for two-year colleges but, according to Politico, they haven’t explained how it would work. College leaders say that, if too many students show up, the system will buckle, even if more cash accompanies them, and students run the risk of being shut out of packed classes. And, Politico reports, there is no way to efficiently transfer community college class credits to four-year universities or to reliably assess how good the programs are in helping students move toward four-year degrees. John Mullane, president of College Transfer Solutions, an advocacy group working to enable students to fully transfer their credits from a two-year college to a four-year university, said, “If you make college free and then enroll all these new students, it would just make the problem even worse.”
