Mental and Behavioral Health
According to a meta-analysis recently published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, mindfulness-based intervention has at least a short-term positive effect for some university students. Mental Ill-Health Outcomes: Meta-analyses revealed that distress was “significantly reduced” post-intervention in study participants who received a mindfulness-based intervention. In addition to distress, anxiety was also significantly reduced among participants who underwent a mindfulness-based intervention.
As student demand for mental health services grows, more colleges are turning to mental health apps to increase the bandwidth of college counseling centers. But experts say universities must begin to consider the sensitive information relayed through these apps, and the consequences of encouraging or mandating these technologies. Lynn E. Linde, chief knowledge and learning officer for the American Counseling Association, worried that students may be giving up more information than they realize. “Millennials understand that with the use of their apps they’re giving up privacy rights. They don’t think to question it,” Linde said. But mental health apps thrive on data – the more an app learns about a user, the more it can customize the experience. Last year, the Institute for Science, Law and Technology analyzed the privacy policies and permissions of hundreds of mobile medical apps and found that only 38 percent had privacy policies pre-download, so consumers couldn’t determine what was going to happen with their information.
Last year, Yale University’s most popular class ever – Psychology and the Good Life, became a podcast. “The Happiness Lab” with Dr. Laurie Santos, the original course’s instructor, relies heavily on research, and weaves together stories told by experts and celebrities. The Good Life class started as an attempt to teach better coping strategies to undergraduates. The podcast, Santos says, offers “a different way to get content across than I normally do in my teaching. And it’s been so fun to meet all these people and hear their stories and hear how they’re putting these practices into effect in their own lives.”
Inside Higher Ed reports that colleges are increasingly offering students coping mechanisms and enhanced mental health services to combat heightened end-of-semester anxiety. Many are temporarily increasing mental health services and reminding students of the resources available to them. Babson College and Tufts University are pursuing ways to ease students’ academic workload and involve faculty members in discussions about mental health. Erica Riba, senior adviser for the Jed Foundation’s JED Campus program, said, “Not every student needs therapy. The more that we can instill confidence in the support and resources of faculty and staff, administrative support … if we can get everyone to practice these conversations and learn how to reach out, we’re encouraging a safe space just to chat with people.”
More than half of Harvard Law School students who responded to a 2017 mental health survey reported experiencing mild to severe depression and anxiety, according to a report released Friday by a Law School working group of faculty, staff, and students. The group reported that 35 percent of Law School respondents to the survey screened positive for mild depression, 15.6 percent for moderate depression, 5.8 percent for moderately severe depression, and 3.6 percent for severe depression. The survey also found 15.1 percent of Law School respondents screened positive for moderate anxiety and 9.1 percent screened positive for severe anxiety.
Diversity and Inclusion
A homecoming video for the University of Wisconsin, featuring almost all white students, set off a reckoning over what it means to be a black student on campus. According to the New York Times report, the video crystallized a daily fact of life on campus to students of color: They feel they are not wanted at the University of Wisconsin, where there are significantly fewer African-Americans per capita than in the state, which is mostly white. Through interviews with students and UW administrators, The Times detailed the timeline of events.
The Wall Street Journal reports that, as elite colleges and universities seek to be more diverse, the Common Application’s inclusion of a question about racial identity has become more complicated to interpret. According to the journal, college counselors and families say that students feel pressure to answer in a way that gives them an edge. And colleges are frustrated because they have no way to confirm the information students give.
After a New York Times story in July 2013 called out Washington University in St. Louis for the institution’s lack of students from low-income families, the school decided in 2015 to more than double its number of Pell-eligible students by 2020. “I want us to get to 13 percent and maintain that as a minimum going forward,” said Holden Thorp, the university’s provost, speaking to the student newspaper at the time. Now, the university has met its goal, with nearly 15 percent of its student body eligible for Pell Grants. But student activists are wondering if that’s enough. “The refrain we heard commonly during my college years was that WashU was just trying to be in the middle of the pack,” said Shaun Ee, a 2017 graduate and former leader of the activist group, Washington University for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity, or WU/Fused. “My concern is that WashU makes changes to meet certain metrics, hits its goal of Pell-eligible students, officially goes need-blind, and then just stalls.”
Sexual Violence and Harassment and Title IX
The Chronicle summarizes some of the biggest sexual-abuse scandals that gained significant media attention in the 2010s, including those at Penn State, Baylor, Michigan State, Ohio State and University of Southern California. The scandals led to dismissals, huge financial settlements, damaged reputations, and continuing litigation and prosecution.
In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Jennifer C. Braceras, director of Independent Women’s Law Center, a conservative women’s group, argues that that attempts to address sexual assault on campus, although well intentioned, have done so at the expense of fairness. Braceras argues that new regulations expected from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVoss will change the way schools investigate sexual harassment and assault and “restore balance by formalizing the obligations of schools to address claims of sexual misconduct, but also requiring that schools investigate such claims fairly.”
Student Success
A recent survey by The Lumina Foundation, Strada Education Network and Gallup found that former college students who left before they completed their degrees said that free or low-cost tuition, flexible schedules and guaranteed job placements would increase the likelihood of them re-enrolling. These stopped-out students cited difficulty balancing work and school obligations, financial pressures and life events among their top reasons for leaving college. According to Education Dive, the authors urged college leaders and state policymakers to make it easier for adults to complete college coursework while working, and to improve their academic and career advising services.
A new report from the Jain Family Institute (JFI) finds that regions in the U.S. with no or few public colleges tend to have a higher number of for-profit institutions. According to Education Dive, researchers mapped the locations of institutions to determine the size of education deserts. They found 10.1 million people don’t have a public college within a 45-minute driving distance, and 30.7 million people only have one public option. The researchers wrote that people who live in poorer zip codes often have fewer choices for college, indicating “systemic inequality in higher education supply across all school types.”
College Affordability
Alissa Quart, author of “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America” argues in the New York Times that the billionaire donations to colleges and universities (some of them earmarked for paying off student debt) are symptoms of a troubled economic system out of whack. According to Quart, “this kind of giving does little to alleviate structural problems afflicting millions of others who are not being helped by a theatrical act of philanthropy.” She writes that the system will continue to indenture college graduates, whose debt burden totals $1.6 trillion.
Hunger and Homelessness
A new study provides policymakers and advocates insight into what it looks like to be hungry while in college. Over a nine-month period in 2017, Trellis Company followed 72 college students and found that 36 of them experienced food insecurity at some point. The study explored the experiences of these students; how they coped with the challenges of food insecurity; and how these circumstances influenced their academic performance. They found a reluctance to seek help, fluctuations in food insecurity, and a pervasive effect on students’ higher education experience.
In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Elizabeth Slater, chief executive of Youth on Their Own in Tucson, a nonprofit organization that works on high school dropout prevention and helping homeless and unaccompanied youths in Pima County succeed, argues that colleges should offer consistent, year-round campus housing for their most vulnerable students. According to Slater, “Colleges and universities can ensure that students of all backgrounds have a true opportunity to thrive in their communities by rejecting homelessness and hunger as a reality within their student body and enacting policies that guarantee access to basic needs for vulnerable students.”
NPR reports on the effect of the Trump administration’s new rule for food stamp recipients which includes low-income college students, some of whom will be among the 688,000 projected to lose benefits. According to NPR, the rule limits food assistance for a share of college students at a time when campuses across the country are grappling with how to respond to food insecurity. The rule makes it harder for states to waive the requirement that adults work at least 20 hours a week in order to receive their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – or SNAP – benefits. Policy experts say it will limit benefits for college students enrolled less than half of the time while further complicating the already confusing process of determining students’ eligibility and connecting them to resources.
Sharing Excess, an organization working to fight food insecurity and address the root causes of hunger in Philadelphia, is especially devoted to helping college students improve their food security through meal swipes, food recovery, and new “food scholarships.”
Physical Health
The Daily Campus, Southern Methodist University’s student newspaper, reports on the difficulties that students with chronic illnesses face on campus. SMU’s Assistant Director of Health Promotion, Griffin Sharp, believes that the biggest challenge with these invisible illnesses is miscommunication and a lack of information on what these chronic illnesses entail. “I think to combat these difficulties, it’s best to educate ourselves on chronic illnesses,” Sharp said. “What works for one person might not work for another person, even if they have the same chronic illness. So, it’s really important to work with those individuals, to best understand how they manage their chronic illness and how they can best be supported by those around them.”
On college campuses in the United States, students suffer concussions twice as often as presumed with most of those injuries occurring off the playing field, new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder suggests. “This study shows how common head injuries are among this population and that concussions are not restricted to the athletic field,” said study co-author Dr. John Breck, lead physician at CU Boulder Medical Services. When varsity athletes weren’t included in the analysis, 64% of concussions were non-sport-related, while the rest occurred during organized sports, such as club sports. Falls (such as slips on the ice or crashes on skateboards) accounted for 38% of concussions, hits to the head (such as those sustained in a fight or accident) accounted for 8.5% and motor vehicle accidents accounted for 6.5%, according to the report.
