Mental and Behavioral Health
The Indiana University of Pennsylvania‘s Health Services reported seeing 122 patients with a mental health diagnosis this fall, compared with 56 in the fall of 2017. “We have seen an absolute explosion,” said Dr. Jessica Miller, director of IUP’s Counseling Center. And Dr. Charles J. Fey, interim vice president for student affairs, said there was an increase for a seventh straight year in the number of students most concerned about a “threat to self.” These increases have come despite the university implementing a triage model to assess students, adding weekday walk-in hours at the health center, and hiring a clinical case manager to expedite local referrals. The university also has a Concern and Response Team, where students, faculty, and staff can seek advice about concerning student behavior.
In the wake of two student suicides, Georgia Tech leadership announced that it will hire three additional therapists to support student mental health needs on campus, months ahead of schedule. While the school planned to hire additional counselors in the next fiscal year, the new staff have been approved for immediate recruitment. The Institute is also constructing a new referral-and-assessment center, which aims to streamline the process for students seeking help. Georgia Tech has also launched the Let’s Talk program, which encourages informal wellness conversations with counselors at sites across campus, partnered with ProtoCall to provide after-hours mental health support, and started offering WellTrack, an app that helps manage stress and regulate mental disorders.
College across the country are teaching students how to cope with failure. Many school officials say students need help understanding that stumbles are inevitable, and even valuable, parts of growing up. Vanderbilt University and Princeton University hold workshops and post online vignettes with students and staff discussing their failures and moments of self-doubt. The University of Montana students post “Best Fail Ever” stories around campus, and Colorado State University has passed out thousands of stickers with inspirational quotes about resilience. At the University of Central Arkansas, the two-year-old Fail Forward Week encourages faculty to talk about and show TED talks on failure.
Diversity and Inclusion
The University of North Carolina system’s Board of Governors did not approve the school’s plan to house Silent Sam, the Confederate monument that was topped by protesters earlier this year, in a new, campus history museum. The board denied support due to “concerns about public safety and the use of state funds for a new building, or the proposal to expend $5.3 million”. Opposition to the plan, which Chapel Hill administrators had hoped would be a compromise solution, had broadened last week to include groups across academia and athletics. The National Council on Public History lauded the recent “principled and historically informed antiracist protests” of UNC students. On Thursday, members of the men’s basketball team, and alumni and NBA stars Vince Carter, Jerry Stackhouse, and Harrison Barnes, alongside several other former black athletes-sent a statement to university officials expressing “deep concern” about the proposal. The letter read, “We love UNC but now also feel a disconnect from an institution that was unwilling to listen to students and faculty who asked for Silent Sam to be permanently removed from campus. The recommendation is embarrassing to us who proudly promote UNC.”
Colleges nationwide are recognizing that rural students need at least as much help navigating the college experience as low-income, first-generation and racial minorities from inner cities. Rural students graduate from high school at higher rates than urban students and at about the same levels as their suburban counterparts. But fewer rural students go straight to college, and once they get to college, they’re more likely than their peers to drop out. After a task force found that rural students had higher dropout rates and couldn’t afford a $1,500 fee for the existing summer program for incoming freshmen, the University of Georgia started providing financial and academic support for these students, similar to what they previously offered to urban students. Several Pennsylvania colleges have started scholarships for students from rural Schuylkill County, a one time coal-producing area. The University of Michigan has begun extending the same kinds of financial and academic support to more rural students, and the University of North Carolina system plans to increase rural enrollment by 11 percent by 2021.
A push to increase enrollment of lower-income students at the nation’s top colleges and universities is showing early signs of success. Since the American Talent Initiativewas launched two years ago, 96 schools have increased enrollment of low-income students by 7,291 students, a 3.5% gain, according to a report released by the group. While the number may be small, it defies the nationwide trend of declining enrollment among this group. The American Talent Initiative, backed by $4.7 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies, has grown from 30 to 108 schools, with the goal of increasing by 50,000 the number of low- and middle-income students who enroll in and graduate from good colleges by 2025.
The Washington Post published tables illuminating total undergraduate and Hispanic enrollment at nationally ranked colleges and universities. According to data from the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, or schools where at least a quarter of undergraduates are Hispanic, more than doubled in number to 492 between 2000 and 2016. And it is projected to grow further. The data shows that Hispanic students gravitate to colleges near home. Sixty-three of the HSIs are in the predominantly Hispanic commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Of the rest, 211 are public two-year colleges and dozens more are regional public universities in California, Texas and other states with significant Hispanic populations. Hispanic enrollment growth has been slower at more competitive and prestigious schools.
Federal data show that less than a quarter of Native students who began a bachelor’s program in 2009 graduated on time and just over 40 percent finished in six years. For the past three years, The Chronicle followed four students from the Blackfeet reservation on their journey into and through college. Now in their early 20s, they are confronting many of the challenges that cause so many Native students to leave school – family obligations, poverty, and inadequate academic preparation. One has dropped out of the University of Montana last year and is teaching at an elementary school on the reservation. Another is slowly making her way through community college while racking up titles in Native pageants. A third lost his mother and cousin, but has finished high school and is figuring out his next move.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
After the plea deal made by Jacob Anderson, a former fraternity president at Baylor University who was accused of rape in 2016 was made public last week, The University of Texas at Dallas expelled him from its graduate school, and said he’s unwelcome on the campus. UT-Dallas’s president indicated that the university had been unaware when it accepted the transfer student that he had been previously expelled from Baylor for allegedly raping a student outside a party hosted by his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. The accuser in the case claims that Anderson handed her a drink and then assaulted her after she became disoriented, telling the judge that he took her to a secluded area behind a tent and choked and raped her, leaving her unconscious. Both Baylor and the national fraternity suspended the Phi Delta Theta chapter there. A MoveOn.org petition, filed by a UT-Dallas student, called on UT Dallas to protect students from “potential predators” and to make sure its decision to admit Anderson had been “fully informed,” drawing more than 29,000 signatures by Thursday. Meanwhile, a Texas lawmaker announced that he had introduced a bill that would require colleges to note on students’ transcripts whether they had been suspended or expelled.
Sexual Health
Morehouse College in now offering PrEP to its students, making the all-male Atlanta school one of the first Historically Black Colleges & Universities in the country to offer the preventative HIV medication. The campus began offering PrEP through its student health center in August. “There is no magic barrier between our institution and the city, anything that impacts the general population of black males impacts the student population,” Sinead Younge, associate professor of psychology at Morehouse, told the AJC regarding the PrEP program. “Because we have this captive audience, we have a real opportunity to make sure they are as healthy as they can be, regardless of their STI or HIV status.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that universities are installing vending machines where students can purchase emergency contraception in an effort to remove barriers to products like Plan B. Barnard College said it would soon install a vending machine, months after Columbia University did. Stanford University, Dartmouth College and a few University of California campuses have added vending machines with Plan B or its generic alternative in recent years. Yale University students have pushed for one, and the student council at Miami University in Ohio voted last month in support of selling emergency contraception in campus markets. Access to emergency contraception is now sold over the counter to customers, regardless of age. Many schools offer free or reduced-cost emergency contraception in their student health centers, but students say that campus medical offices or pharmacies aren’t always open when the pills are most needed, including on weekends. They also may prefer the anonymity of buying from the machine.
College Affordability
NPR reports on research that shows that federal aid is only tied to increases in tuition in one sector: private, for-profit colleges. According to a 2014 study, for-profit colleges where students can pay using federal aid have much higher tuitions than those schools that can’t accept aid. Researchers Stephanie Cellini and Claudia Goldin found that the difference in tuition between the eligible schools and the less expensive, non-eligible schools was about the same as the federal aid students received. “I think it suggests that there are problems within this sector, not that there are problems within federal student aid,” explains Cellini, an associate professor of public policy and economics at George Washington University. She says the results point to a need for further regulation of for-profit colleges, which have vastly different incentives than public schools and nonprofits. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has scaled back regulation on for-profit colleges since taking office.
