2/20 – 2/26

Mental and Behavioral Health

As colleges struggle to keep up with an increase in requests for mental health counseling, many are experimenting with new approaches to treatment. The New York Times highlighted several of these efforts, including U.C.L.A’s effort to become an early adopter of internet-based screenings and online mental health treatment. U.C.L.A. invested in “resilience peers” who can serve as “release valves” for stressed out students, but who are not licensed to provide counseling. The article also highlighted Jefferson Community College, the Ohio State University and Kent State University, who have provided mental health training to more than 700 students, faculty and staff members, and created programs to help populations that do not traditionally seek counseling.

According to a report in the New York Times, students increasingly expect their schools to help them cope with the increased pressure and stress of college life. Several admissions officials say they have seen a rise in inquiries regarding counseling and mental health services and accommodations from parents and prospective students. However, critics say many colleges have not adequately prepared for the increasing demand, which has left many students frustrated. According to a 2017 report from the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, students typically have to wait almost seven business days for their first appointment with a college counselor. But at some colleges, it can be more than two months. And while colleges have increased the size of their counseling staffs, many are still straining to meet the demand, forcing some institutions to rethink their treatment strategies.

In an op-ed in the Yale Daily News, student Alex Kane argues that while an increased investment in Yale’s mental health resources is crucial, the school should address their problematic policies like the withdrawal and readmission policy to make meaningful change to mental health on campus. The policies can force students to leave if they “pose a danger to themselves or others,” all the while providing no clear path or procedure for return.

The University of Cincinnati Department of Counseling and Psychological Services has released a new smartphone app to connect students to mental health and suicide-prevention resources. The app, Reach Out, is a community-wide self-help program that provides videos of suicide survivors, information about available UC resources and a direct crisis text line. Tara Scarborough, director of CAPS and executive director of health and wellness, said, “[The app] has everything from how to help a friend, resources, what to do and what not to do, what to say and what not to say. Not only help resources, but connection resources [as well].”

In an op-ed, the Minnesota Daily Editorial Board argues that “hustle culture” promotes burnout to the detriment of students’ mental health. According to the Editorial Board, hustle culture is “being obsessed with striving while being “relentlessly positive.” In other terms, hustle culture is…working yourself until exhaustion.” The University of Minnesota has seen a 29-percent increase in mental health conditions among students.

A Psychology Today blog is calling on-campus administrators to prioritize identifying and disseminating information about appropriate digital mental health tools to their campus communities in order to support student mental health and wellness. According to the blog, universities should be sensitive to the preferences of students who spend much of their day connected to smartphones. And as more students seek help, demand will continue to outpace supply for traditional face-to-face mental health treatments.

John Warner, a writer and speaker with more than twenty years of experience teaching college-level writing, argues in Inside Higher Ed that to address the student mental health crisis, schooling itself must change. According to Warner, ending “the ”college and career ready’ rhetoric that has trickled down as far as Kindergarten” can help alleviate student anxiety. In his book, “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities,” Warner explains how “privileging student choice and agency can help mitigate some of the toxic effects of schooling culture that privileges compliance, and subjects students to high stakes assessments and near constant surveillance.”

University of Kentucky officials say a task force is being formed to assess mental health counseling and services related to student well-being on campus. The officials say the committee will work quickly to assess the current range of support services and make recommendations.

The Beavers Belong Support Network was created to build community and foster belonging among Oregon State University students who may struggle with mental health. The framework for Beavers Belong is modeled off a successful program at the University of Michigan, which has partnered with OSU to launch the support network. The program takes a community-building approach, consisting of weekly meetings led by student leaders. Bonnie Hemrick, a mental health promotion specialist at CAPS, said, “It’s mainly around community building, a sense of belongingness and a normalization of mental health struggles and decrease of mental health stigma. Just making that conversation more approachable, just to be vulnerable with your peers, because that can be hard from what we hear from students.”

Northwestern University students demonstrated the intersection of mental health awareness and art at an open mic event co-hosted by Northwestern Active Minds and The Slam Society on Saturday. The event featured 10 different performers and was held in the Dittmar Gallery in the Norris University Center. About 30 people attended the event, and performances ranged from spoken word poetry to essays and music performances.

Over 200 attendees convened to discuss the experiences of mental health amongst Asian and Asian-American students at Washington University’s first pan-Asian mental health conference Saturday. The student-organized conference, called In-Between, brought together speakers from around the country to address mental health concerns that affect Asian and Asian-American students and to give students a space to talk about those issues. Specifically, they mentioned cultural differences that may make it more difficult for individuals to speak out about their mental health and to connect with resources.

To address increased demand for mental-health services, colleges are looking to preventive measures, which at some schools includes incorporating mental-health and wellness training into the curriculum. On some campuses, mental health trainingis now introduced at freshman orientation and applied in residential programs, alongside sexual-assault prevention and substance-abuse education. At the University of Southern California, student leaders have long advocated for a mandatory wellness course. The one-credit course piloted in the fall and is continuing this spring. The Tuesday lectures, which are presented by a different guest professor each time, encourage silent self-reflection and curiosity.

CogWell @ Penn, a student-run organization that promotes mental health, held its biannual active listening training on Sunday to inform students on how to better support their peers who are struggling with their mental health. Through interactive exercises and group discussions, attendees learned skills such as how to start difficult conversations and how to connect peers to mental health resources.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Chronicle profiles Anthony Abraham Jack, whose new book, The Privileged Poor, examines how elite institutions  -like Harvard, where he teaches – fail low-income students. According to Jack, elite colleges not only fail to admit enough low-income students; they also fail to care for the ones they let in. And, he argues, in many cases, elite colleges widen rather than narrow the gulf between the wealthy and the poor by making low-income students feel like outsiders who don’t actually belong on campus.

The California State University system, the nation’s largest public-university system, this year eliminated all freestanding remedial courses. Next year, the state’s entire community-college system will do the same. The moves, which are being watched by reformers and instructors nationwide, will have especially far-reaching consequences for open-access colleges and those that accept the vast majority of students who apply. Those who favor a shift toward corequisite remediation, in which students start out in college-level classes with support on the side, describe California’s move as a turning point. But skeptics worry that reformers may end up harming many of the students they’re trying to help. They say it’s unrealistic to expect nearly everyone to succeed right off the bat in a college-level class – no matter how much advising, tutoring, and nonacademic support they receive. However, newly released data support the new system. Last fall, nearly 7,800 Cal State students were able to pass those higher-level math classes, compared to just 950 the previous year. About the same number of first-year students were unprepared for college-level math courses in both years. About two-thirds of those who enrolled in one anyway succeeded under both the old and new systems.

The New York Times reports that there has been a noticeable increase in students applying to and enrolling in historically black colleges and universities and women’s colleges over the past several years. According to the Times, few doubt that increased interest is related to the current political climate. Research from the Gallup organization shows that graduates of H.B.C.U.s tend to report better college experiences than African-American students at mostly white colleges and are almost twice as likely to agree that their university prepared them well for life outside of college. And other research found that women’s institutions – more so than coed ones – have created a climate “where women are encouraged to realize their potential and to become involved in various facets of campus life, inside and outside the classroom.”

Eight players on the University of Mississippi men’s basketball team knelt on Saturday while the national anthem played and Confederate sympathizers rallied outside. The demonstration has prompted the question of whether administrators have done enough to distance the university from Confederate iconography. Kermit Davis, the head coach, said in a written statement that his players had made an “emotional decision to show these people they’re not welcome on our campus. We respect our players’ freedom and ability to choose that.”

Sexual Assault and Title IX

According to a new survey conducted by RTI International, an independent, nonprofit institute, nearly half of Duke University‘s female undergraduates say they have been sexually assaulted since enrolling at the university, a sharp increase from the proportion in 2016. Complaints of both sexual assault and sexual harassment increased from 2016 to 2018. It was unclear, the report says, whether that reflected more incidents or a greater awareness of and willingness to report sexual misconduct, given the national attention the problem has received over the past few years. The report also says that “a sizable percentage of undergraduate women in particular continue to feel that university leadership could be doing more to protect the safety of students generally, and more than half of undergraduate women continue to feel that Duke is not doing a good job of preventing sexual assault in particular.”

Substance Use

According to an analysis of Minnesota student survey data, students who use marijuana regularly have lower grades. Mean grade-point averages dropped from 3.33 to 3.01, comparing male students who didn’t use marijuana at all with students who used it daily. The comparable gap for female students was 3.4 to 3.18. Researchers at Boynton Health, the student health clinic at the University of Minnesota, conducted the analysis after seeing a significant increase in marijuana use in initial data from a 2018 student survey. The share of U students who consider themselves current users – meaning they had consumed marijuana in the month before the survey – increased from 13.5 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2018.

College Affordability

According to The Atlantic, the field of Democratic presidential candidates has reached a consensus on the college debt crisis; A free-college proposal-or an answer about why they don’t have one-is something of a prerequisite for Democratic primary candidates. Bernie Sanders has called for tuition-free college. Julián Castro has signaled support for it as well. Elizabeth Warren has pushed for “debt-free” college. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand have signed on to legislation that could make college debt-free. Amy Klobuchar, who shirked “free college for all” during a CNN town hall, signed on to a metered free-college proposal last year.