Mental and Behavioral
University of Pennsylvania has the shortest combined mid-year breaks in the Ivy League; at the same time it is working hard to address mental health issues on campus. Penn gives students 34 days off in mid-year breaks, while almost all of the Ivy League (with the exception of Columbia) give students at least 55 days off.
In a New York Times op-ed, Amy Butcher, an assistant professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, argues that Yik Yak, a website best known for allowing anonymous communication (for hookups, gossip, news, etc.) can be used to reach out to students in distress. Ironically, the website is known more as a platform for bullying, sexual harassment, and racism, but Butcher has witnessed students going there for help in the wake of a tragedy. She uses the app to say to students, “There’s someone you can talk to. You can talk to me.”
A group of Harvard seniors recently created the “Feel Good Society,” in an effort to break the “taboo around discussing mental health struggles as a Harvard kid.”
Students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill are collaborating with the school’s Counseling and Psychological Services to create an app for mental health services. When finished, it will provide a database of literature on mental illness, self-diagnostic inventories, daily tip notifications, and information about how to support a student in distress.
Diversity and Inclusion
International applicants to Dartmouth College engineering program dropped 30 percent this year, and other top schools say they are seeing similar trends. College and university leaders are worried these decreases are indicative of changes in U.S. immigration and travel policy.
In the Washington Post, George Mason University President Ángel Cabrera argues that international students have a positive impact on local economies, and that barriers to educational exchange will inhibit these gains.
A new policy at University of Missouri included a plan to charge students for initial mental health visits at the Student Health Center. The policy, intended to generate revenue, was met with controversy and subsequently changed.
College Affordability
A new report from the nonprofit Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) shows that 95 percent of colleges are unaffordable for many young adults in the US. The research showed that students from high income families can afford about 90 percent of the more than 2,000 colleges studied, while low- and moderate-income students can afford only 1 to 5 percent of those schools.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
Fifteen percent of undergraduate female students at the University of Texas-Austin said they had been raped, according to a recent survey of sexual assault within the UT system. Seventy-two percent of students who reported being assaulted said they didn’t tell anyone, and only 8 percent told someone affiliated with the school about the assault.
