Mental and Behavioral Health
The Daily Camera reports that the University of Colorado Boulder Police Department and campus therapists are working together to help students in crisis with a new telehealth program. When the CBPD responds to a student in crisis during off-hours of the counseling center, a therapist is now on-call to talk to students by video or phone call. The CBPD usually receives the most mental-health-related calls on nights and weekends.
Dr. Marty Swanbrow Becker, an Associate Professor of Psychological and Counseling Services at Florida State University, wrote about ways to address the mental health crises for the Good Men Project. She writes, “by being more proactive and equipping students to deal with mental health issues before they become too large to manage, fewer students will need crisis services – and those that need them will be able to get them sooner – because more students will have the tools to work through their problems earlier on their own.” Becker suggests that, to improve the health of students, colleges should work to empower students, provide stress-management resources, take preventive measures, and launch wellness campaigns.
The University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel and the Board of Regents examine the preliminary results of a comprehensive scan of programs and services that aim to address the mental health needs of students systemwide. The scan found that individual units and colleges continue to make “significant efforts” to invest in student mental health support, but that some efforts could be more efficiently centralized and scaled to meet the needs of the student body. Additionally, the results showed that faculty and staff training about student mental health yielded benefits and showed that there are ways to support students outside of clinical services.
To expand its efforts to improve the mental health of law students, the University of Buffalo will station a new in-house counselor at the School of Law to act as a front-line resource for students seeking help. “We’ve known for a long, long time that these issues are present in law school and the larger legal community,” says Bernadette Gargano, vice dean for student affairs and director of the Law, Legal Analysis, Writing and Research Program. “And a lot of people in practice are becoming more aware that by taking care of themselves, they can be more productive in life and at work. It’s about finding the correct type of balance.”
The Daily Illini reports that the University of Illinois administration and student activists are joining forces to tackle mental health care shortcomings and debunk student misconceptions about campus counseling Ananya Cleetus, a student on the Counseling Center’s student advisory group is developing a new ad campaign that targets common myths about their services. “A lot of students really vilify the Counseling Center,” Cleetus said. “They think everything sucks, the Counseling Center hates us, they don’t care about students. I think the Counseling Center, in some sense, has become a scapegoat.” Through Active Minds UIUC, a student-led mental health advocacy group, Cleetus is also spearheading two initiatives: getting the suicide hotline number on the back of i-cards and putting mental health crisis information on student syllabi. According to Cleetus, the initiatives have garnered support from the i-card office, Illinois Student Government and the Counseling Center, which approved an official statement in support of her hotline idea.
University of Pennsylvania’s Counseling and Psychological Services will launch a new behavioral health consultant program next week to bridge CAPS and Student Health Service resources. The program will feature one behavioral health consultant, who will work to streamline communication between CAPS and SHS and better serve students’ specific needs. Chief Wellness Officer Benoit Dubé said the behavioral health consultant program is the second of CAPS’ two initiatives adopted this academic year to better “meet students where they are.” The first program, Let’s Talk, was introduced in October 2019; it features five CAPS counselors who circulate between several locations including the LGBT Center, the library, the intercultural center, and the Graduate Student Center.
According to the Editorial Board of the Daily Campus, two student suicides at the University of Connecticut have sparked a necessary conversation about UConn’s culture and mental health resources on campus. The Editorial Board writes in support of the newly created Mental Health Coalition, which aims to expand mental health services to all students. “The Daily Campus Editorial Board stands behind this coalition in their efforts,” the board writes. “UConn has many competing priorities, but it must find space and resources for the mental health of its students. Beyond funding CMHS, UConn must take a long, hard look at the culture of isolation and hyper-competition that our current model of education fosters.”
In an op-ed in the Daily Pennsylvanian, Jackson Maxwell argues that while the University of Pennsylvania’s administration has made important strides in promoting wellness on campus in recent years, wellness initiatives must be integrated into the curriculum to have impact. According to Maxwell, the effect of the current efforts is limited because they do not address the most prominent culprit of stress and mental health issues on campus – the culture of competition among students. He believes that as long as students remain incentivized to compete with each other academically, they will not take advantage of wellness activities, as it represents time that could’ve been spent maximizing their GPA or applying to internships.
A recent Yale College Council report sheds light on how often students use the Good Life Center and how they perceive its impact on student wellness, according to the Yale Daily News. The report, which was published at the beginning of the spring 2020 semester, found that 48.58 percent of survey respondents said they had utilized the Good Life Center since its opening in September 2018. “I think it’s fantastic that in barely over a year, we’ve had almost 50 percent of students surveyed report that they’ve visited and used the Good Life Center,” said GLC founder and Head of Silliman College Laurie Santos. “This is an incredible success for a new resource on campus and speaks to the fact that students want more resources related to mental health and well-being.”
Diversity and Inclusion
A federal judge struck down a Trump administration policy that made it easier to impose reentry bans on international students studying in the U.S. The order marks a victory for colleges that argued the policy made it harder to recruit international students and put them at risk of being barred from the country.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s pending rules on sexual misconduct will include provisions to shore up protections for victims of stalking and dating violence. The rules will define domestic violence, dating violence and stalking as forms of gender discrimination that schools must address under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education programs that receive government funding.
Sexual Health
The University of Pennsylvania is launching a new online sexual education program to provide Penn students with information and resources about sexual health and intimate relationships. The program will send out a PDF module each week that will focus on topics such as protection, consent, and sexually transmitted infections. Associate Director of Campus Health Rebecca Huxta said, “The lessons are anywhere from two to four pages, and that way students are able to do it on their own time. “Each week they are going to get a different topic related to sexual health.”
Student Success
According to a data analysis published this month by the D.C. think tank Center for American Progress, median amount of time black students spend to obtain a bachelor’s degree is five years and four months – an entire year longer than the median for white students. Researchers examined data from the National Center for Education Statistics on nearly 20,000 college alumni who graduated between 2015 and 2016. The median time for Latinx students was four years, eight months and for Asians it was four years.
The Hechinger Report highlights the ways that institutions are taking “critical choices” away from students in an effort to help them succeed. According to the article, students arriving at college are often children of helicopter parents which can make them less independent, or first-generation students, whose parents cannot help guide them through their education in the same way. “For these and other reasons, some take courses they don’t need, pick majors they will later change and don’t know what to do when the resulting problems leave them on the brink of flunking out,” the article posits. Aaron Weiss, dean of science and math at Lorain County Community College in Ohio, said, “We have a lot of students who, whether they are helicoptered or they’re first generation, they don’t know how to college.” Some colleges have even started picking students’ first-year courses for them, monitoring them as closely as their parents might have for signs that they’re falling into trouble, and stepping in as needed to shepherd them to graduation. Richard Klein, associate dean of the undergraduate school of business at Florida International University, said “Part of what we’ve begun to do is rein back some of the choices that allow these students to get into trouble.”
In the New York Times, Dr. Friedman, the director of family engagement at Barnard College, came down on over-parenting and put forth other ways parents can support young people as they learn to speak up for themselves, solve their own problems and make important decisions. Friedman cited research that links overparenting to low self-efficacy, depression, decreased school engagement and poor academic adjustment. Dr. Friedman suggested encouraging students to take small steps to self-advocate, help them write “scripts” for conversations with professors or administrators, and encouraging follow up.
Education Dive highlights ways that community colleges are improving STEM education to teach in-demand job skills and lead more students to graduation. Student outcomes at community colleges tend to lag compared to public colleges and universities. One strategy includes increasing diversity in STEM fields. With the help of federal grants, community colleges in the Central Florida STEM Alliance are hoping to increase the number of underrepresented minority students who transfer to STEM bachelor’s degree programs as well as enhance their educational experience through the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program. Through the program, the colleges provide an array of services to participating students, including a summer bridge program, frequent meetings with advisers, and the potential to conduct undergraduate research.
Native students have the lowest college graduation rates in the nation, but according to the Hechinger Report, American Indian and Alaska Native students at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities have made impressive gains. The university has seen its six-year graduation rate for these students rise from 27 percent in 2008 to 69 percent in 2018. Students and faculty credit this progress in closing the gap for native students to the variety of academic and social supports designed to help them feel welcome on campus. The Twin Cities university has been trying to increase its outreach to tribal communities, recently opening a summer institute for indigenous high school students. These activities for indigenous students notwithstanding, students and staff said there is much more to be done, like hiring more indigenous faculty and staff. The University of Minnesota-Morris, for instance, has gone further. It waives tuition for American Indian students.
College Affordability
The annual Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) survey from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) found that the value of gifts to colleges and universities rose 6.1% in 2019 to $49.6 billion, the highest level yet. However, according to the report, without the widely publicized $1.8 billion donation to Johns Hopkins University from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, support for higher education would have grown only 3.4% for the period tracked.
The Student Borrower Protection Center, a non-profit watchdog group, says that financial firms may be discriminating against people based on where they went to college. In particular, the group found that a lender named Upstart appears to be charging higher interest rates on student loans to graduates of historically black or predominantly Hispanic colleges.
High school seniors in Washington state can receive reminders about important college financial aid deadlines from a chatbot, called Otter. The chatbot can also answer students’ questions about the financial aid process. It is the latest test of whether large-scale nudging efforts can influence college-going behavior.
Free Speech
Students at University of Louisville planned a protest in response to an anti-gay pamphleteering incident in an “Introduction to LGBTQ Studies” class, and what was perceived as a weak response by the administration. Faculty members involved in the dispute felt that the dean of students’ office was dismissive of their safety concerns. The president, Neeli Bendapudi, met with students to reassure those who expressed fear and outrage over its initial handling of the incident, effectively pre-empting the protest. The incident called into question whether the classroom is a protected space for free speech.
Education Policy
The Trump administration released its $66.6 billion budget proposal for the U.S. Department of Education, which would slash the agency’s funding by about 8%. Among its provisions, the budget plan would eliminate subsidized federal student loans and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. It would also open Pell Grants to students in nontraditional, short-term programs and to certain students who are incarcerated. Higher ed experts say the cuts have little chance of passing Congress.
