A Message from Dr. Annelle Primm, Senior Medical Advisor at the Steve Fund
There are two crises plaguing America right now – coronavirus and racial injustice – and both are adding a perilous layer of stress and distress, especially for young people of color. It is imperative that campus leaders keep in mind the emotional impact that students of color might be facing with their awareness of health disparities, xenophobia and bias-motivated attacks in their communities. Leaders must identify and address gaps in services by enlisting campus partners representing areas that support student success. They should also designate point people to serve as contacts for faculty and students and develop a system for anyone to share updates about students who may be struggling.
For students of color who have experienced direct loss or trauma as the result of COVID-19, death of a loved one, severe financial hardship or racial violence, it will be crucial to build the immediate capacity to address student mental health needs. Campus leaders must also equip and support faculty and staff to ensure they have the necessary tools to provide assistance and referral. It may also be beneficial to enlist knowledgeable organizations like The Steve Fund which can provide information, programs and technical assistance to fill internal gaps.
The Equity in Mental Health Framework
The Equity in Mental Health Framework provides a set of recommendations that assist colleges and universities in promoting the emotional well-being and mental health of students of color. The strategies delineated above which are aimed at assisting students experiencing disparities related to coronavirus and racial injustice in these trying times, draw upon EMHF recommendations that underscore actionable approaches including, but not limited to the following: making the mental health and well-being of students of color a campus-wide priority; engaging around national and international issues that profoundly affect the campus community; and creating dedicated roles to support well-being and success of students of color.
Dr. Annelle Primm, Senior Medical Advisor at the Steve Fund
George Floyd and Racial Injustice
Amid countrywide protests against racism, police brutality and the senseless killing of George Floyd, college leaders are calling for change, and continued work to address systemic racial inequity. Education Dive reports that many higher education leaders published statements acknowledging the racist acts that have gained national attention in recent weeks and the trauma their community may be experiencing. A few leaders were criticized for the lack of specificity in their statements, while other leaders were quite explicit, calling out the brutal actions of police and expressing solidarity with protesters. The UCLA leaders, which include the president of the Undergraduate Students Association wrote, “What was so chilling was the relaxed demeanor of a police officer – sworn to protect and to serve – his hands calmly in his pockets, kneeling on the neck of a fellow human being, indifferent to his cries of pain and the fear for his life.” In the article, Georgetown President John D. Degioia noted that deaths related to the coronavirus have been disproportionately in the black community. “There are other structures – economic, educational, housing, criminal justice – that sustain inequity and inequality that are the enduring legacy of our American history,” he wrote.
Inside Higher Ed published a sampling of college leaders’ statements. Wayne Frederick, President of Howard University wrote, “We must remember the names of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Atatiana Jefferson, Breonna Taylor and the countless other lives gone too soon. We can honor their memories through a life of purpose in confronting and correcting those skewed systems until they respect the humanity and inherent dignity in each of us.”
The Chronicle‘s Jack Stripling spoke with three college leaders, Carmen Twillie Ambar, president of Oberlin College; Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington; and Timothy P. White, chancellor of the California State University system, about the challenges of this moment, the role of higher education, and where hope might be found, President Cauce said, “Our job is to reach out to our students and faculty, particularly our students of color, and in this case particularly our black students and our black faculty, because they can so readily identify with what’s happening out there. Our students are terrified to go out if just jogging could lead to death. They’re also angry.” After urging that it is not the time to avert your eyes, President Ambar, said, “And I’ll speak as a mom of color. I’m one of these college presidents that have triplets; they’re 13 years old. I have two sons, and for black families thinking about all of their children, but black men in particular, it feels like they are unprotected in a world that should protect them. The conversations that black families have with their children about their interactions with police are very different than the conversations that white families have with their children.”
In Atlanta, two police officers were fired after they were shown on video dragging a student at Morehouse College and a student at Spelman College from a car after breaking the car windows, and hitting one with a taser. In response, Mary Schmidt Campbell, president of HBCU Spelman College wrote, “What the protesters are protesting is exactly this kind of unacceptable behavior — and that is the disregard, disrespect and aggression that seems to make stalking Black citizens, rather than protecting them, the goal of law enforcement. To say, ‘this has got to stop’ would be tantamount to shouting into the wind. We have said ‘this has got to stop’ too many times. We need to take steps in the coming days, weeks, months and years to change.”
Diverse Education reports on the excessive use force against Black students in the nationwide protests. “This is the exact kind of policing behavior thousands have been protesting,” tweeted the Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, comparing the incidents to the police actions that resulted in Floyd’s death.
The Chronicle reports students across the country have joined protests and pushed their leaders to enact change. University of Minnesota President Joan T. Gavel announced the university would cut some of its ties with the city’s police department following a demand by the student-body president, Jael Kerandi, that the university sever its partnership with the force. The university will no longer contract with them to provide support for athletics, concerts and other large university events, as well as for specialized services such as K-9 explosive-detection units. At a rally on Friday, students called for further action by the university’s administration. At the University of Missouri at Columbia, students marched on the quad, covering the head of a statue of Thomas Jefferson with a plastic bag. At the University of Mississippi, someone spray-painted the words “Spiritual Genocide” on a Confederate monument.
In an op-ed in Inside Higher Ed, Charles H. F. Davis III, an assistant professor of clinical education at the University of Southern California and founder of the Scholars for Black Lives collective and Jude Paul Matias Dizon, a Provost Fellow and doctoral candidate in urban education policy at the University of Southern California, argue that, given the ongoing public visibility of police violence and demands from minority students, colleges and universities should “critically interrogate their role in sustaining such an unjust institution. Further, postsecondary institutions must seriously consider divesting from police altogether.”
Calls to limit ties between colleges and local police spread, with student leaders from at least three more universities demanding that they follow the University of Minnesota’s lead. In a letter to Ohio State University officials, leaders of three student organizations called on the university’s police department to cut its contractual ties to the Columbus Police Department for all on-campus investigations, services, and events. The students also urged Ohio State to cut back on the amount of local patrolling at off-campus housing and to restrict money being spent on “further militarization” of the college’s own police force. “We, the student representatives of the Ohio State University, firmly and without hesitation, condemn the violent and inexcusable actions of the Columbus Police Department during these protests and harm the department has caused black and marginalized communities for decades,” said the letter, signed by the Undergraduate Student Government, the Council of Graduate Students, and the Inter-Professional Council. It went on, “Our city is burning, our students are hurting, the safety and well-being of the black community is at inherent risk, and there is no other time to act than now.” The Black Student Alliance at the University of Virginia on Monday also released a statement calling on the university to keep outside law-enforcement agencies off the campus.
Sirry Alang, an associate professor of sociology and health, medicine, and society at Lehigh University spoke with the Chronicle about how academe can address this moment, offering recommendations for leaders on how to respond to racial bias on and off campus. She outlined what it would look like for colleges to take greater responsibility. “The responses we would see from college presidents would be: These are the exact actions that we are taking. We are making sure that our students of color are protected,” she said. “We are making sure that our campus police operate under these principles. If this were to happen on campus, these are the actions that we would take.”
Coronavirus Impact
In an op-ed in Inside Higher Ed, John MacPhee, executive director and CEO of the Jed Foundation, offers advice on promoting student mental health during a pandemic. He writes that “it is important to deploy additional ways to implement a comprehensive approach during this period.” His recommendations include supporting the development of life skills, promoting social connectedness, identifying at-risk students, and increasing help-seeking behaviors. According to MacPhee, “Taking a wide-ranging systems approach to mental health creates a protective environment for students who may be struggling with mental health challenges.”
The New York Times highlights the stress college students are feeling during the pandemic. While colleges are offering mental health counseling remotely, requests at many schools have decreased rather than increased. Many students have expressed that they do not have the privacy at home that they need to engage in counseling. Joshua Osvaldo Arrayales, a New York University student, had a therapist and a nutritionist at school, where he went through a gender transition. He’s no longer consulting with them while he’s home. “They did tell us we were allowed to videoconference,” he said. “I thought it was best to maybe not openly talk about how my parents have made a lot of my life difficult.” Colleges are well-aware of the link between mental health and the academic performance of students, and have tried to provide academic as well as psychological help remotely. Kim Coplin, Provost at Denison University said, “We continued to provide free tutoring, academic advising, virtual study tables and library support and resources.”
University of Texas at Austin researchers are seeking to understand how people are thinking and talking about the current pandemic through surveys and analyses of conversations on the social media site, Reddit. The situation’s prolonged unpredictability could have grave implications for mental health, the researchers said. The researchers observed that early conversations in late February, when the stock market dropped and an outbreak emerged in Washington state, tended to be future-oriented and anxiety-ridden. As stay-at-home orders were rolled out in mid-March, people continued to express high levels of anxiety but began connecting with their families.
The University of South Florida is launching a new research study that will examine the effects of loneliness during social distancing. The “Social Closeness Despite Social Distance: A Study of Strategies to Fight Loneliness During the COVID-19 Pandemic” will look into how the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic’s effects on society will affect individuals and their mental health, especially those who suffer from depression and anxiety.
In the Vanderbilt Hustler, Del Daylami praises her professors for their support during the pandemic. “My positive experience with professors’ increased support during the pandemic was not the case for all students, but my professors handled the change incredibly well,” she wrote. “My communications professor stood out among the chaos, answering my late-night emails, rolling out a no-questions-asked extensions policy and developing alternative assignments for students who couldn’t Zoom in. Across the board, offers of accommodations and reassurances that professors were there for us flooded my inbox.”
According to a new Education Trust poll, most of California’s college students are concerned the coronavirus pandemic will prevent them from graduating. The poll showed that 77% of college students nationally and 75% of California students had concerns about staying on track to graduate due to the coronavirus. Nationally, 84% of black and 81% of Latino students said they were worried. Students also said they were struggling to meet basic food, housing and financial needs because of the pandemic, with about half saying they fear not being able to afford basic needs in the coming months. Roughly a third of students reported skipping a meal or reducing how much they eat as a result of the pandemic. For low-income students, that percentage rose to 43%. Additionally, only 32% of students nationwide indicated that their college or university was offering accessible mental health services during the pandemic. For Black students, that percentage dropped to 24%.
Leaders of community colleges are saying that the aid from the federal CARES Act relief package was not enough, and that federal guidance on how to distribute the funds made it difficult to move quickly. The formula used in the CARES Act to send funds to colleges relied heavily on the number of full-time Pell Grant recipients institutions serve. About one-third of community college students are eligible for Pell Grants, but many also attend part-time, which reduced how much aid the colleges received. “We’re thankful for the dollars that were provided,” said Monty Sullivan, president of the Louisiana Community & Technical College system. “But without a doubt, the amount of need that is out there far outstrips the aid.” Ashanti Hands, vice president of student services at San Diego Mesa College said, “The lack of clarity between the CARES Act and the Department of Education’s restrictive eligibility requirements excluding vulnerable members of our communities made it difficult to quickly establish processes and get money out in a timely manner.”
About half of college presidents say it’s “very likely” they will resume in-person classes for the coming term, according to a new American Council on Education (ACE) survey of 310 college leaders. In order to restart operations, about two-thirds of presidents with on-campus housing say they plan to set up a space to quarantine students. More than half said they will require masks to be worn on campus.
A Chronicle series examines the complex decision-making and realities being faced in the process of reopening colleges for the fall. One article in the series examined what campuses might look like in the fall, through a review of proposals at various institutions and interviews with administrators about their plans to re-engineer campus spaces. University of Miami’s President Julio Frenk said the school may hold some classes outdoors once Florida’s temperatures cool in the fall. Kevin E. Kirby, vice president for administration at Rice University, said that tents are an option. “Large temporary structures,” he said, could be used as classrooms or overflow study space. Purdue University President Mitch Daniels said that faculty members may be teaching behind plexiglass. Many campuses are considering reconfiguring their class schedules, lengthening the time between course sessions, to give the custodial staff time to deep-clean. Michigan Technological University and the University of California at San Diego are considering eliminating triple dorm rooms, and administrators at Texas A&M in San Antonio have said they definitely will. Some campuses are proposing to welcome back only certain swaths of students to maintain low residency levels, such as housing only first-year students and seniors on campus.
In an op-ed for Politico, Robert Hecht, president of Pharos Global Health Advisors and a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, and Shan Soe-Lin, managing director of Pharos Global Health Advisors and a lecturer in global health at Yale University, argue that university openings should be strictly regulated by state public health officials, with plans approved only once they meet criteria for adequate hospitalization capacity, low rates of new infections, and testing capabilities for all universities in the state.
Students who are part of vulnerable populations will require extra support in the fall, but even accommodating well-resourced, healthy, and able-bodied students will be a challenge for most schools. The Chronicle asked experts and administrators what high-touch support will look like. Most campus plans for reopening include an online component to accommodate students who, for health or personal reasons, aren’t ready to return to the classroom. Jamie Axelrod, director of disability resources at Northern Arizona University, said that colleges will need to pay closer attention to students with disabilities, to be sure that revamped courses include the accommodations they’re entitled to. Lee Burdette Williams, senior director for mental-health initiatives at Naspa: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, worries that it’ll be difficult for colleges to assign a top priority to high-need students this fall, given grim financial realities. “Getting students connected with things that matter to them,” Burdette Williams said, “that’s the retention tool for the ages.”
The Louisiana Board of Regents announced that students can return to campus in the fall if the state’s colleges and universities follow guidance from public health officials on how to safely conduct in-person activities. Schools are already preparing policies such as requiring all campus members to wear masks, cutting off in-person instruction before Thanksgiving and dividing up large classes on a rotating schedule.
In an op-ed in The Hill, Katie Scofield who teaches Federal and Texas Government at Blinn College, urges community colleges to take low income students’ unique challenges into account in order to keep them enrolled. To retain low-income students, she suggests offering different course modalities, including pared-down, low-tech versions of a limited number of their general education classes on a pass/fail basis.
The New York Times reports on the choice that many high school seniors now face: to attend college, potentially virtually, or opt for a gap year during a period with limited opportunities for travel and work outside the house. “I’ve had gap year conversations with most of my seniors, which is unheard-of,” said Phoebe Keyes, the senior college admission adviser at Empire Edge, a tutoring company in New York City. “They are all waiting to pull the trigger until they know what is going to happen in the fall.” One student, Marco Tonda, 17, who lives in Sonoma County, Calif., considered doing a gap year at an anthropological site in Spain. But now he has decided to attend Reed College. “I think at this point I would rather just get it over with and go for the online classes,” he said. “Maybe they will come up with a cool way of doing them.”
The Washington Post highlights the long-term impact of students choosing to delay enrolling in college, opt for community college or shift to part-time, which can derail their paths to graduation. “We’re so focused on the now and on the short-term future,” said Laura Perna, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. “But there are serious long-term consequences to this.” Those most affected are already behind their peers in completing higher education: first generation students and those from low-income families. “This could add a year or two, easily, to a student’s time to degree,” said Renn.
Mental and Behavioral Health
Syracuse alumnus Daniel Fridliand created Awning Anxiety Relief, an app that provides its users with immediate mental health solutions. Awning reviews user feedback to suggest individualized stress relief techniques, including meditation, journaling and listening to music. “It all includes some physical aspect of being there,” Fridliand said. “Although there are different programs that provide resources on a teletherapy scale, there needs to be a focus on customized activities based on the nature of stress students are dealing with.” Awning has helped counselors provide mental health treatment remotely during the coronavirus pandemic. Counselors can check in virtually on their patients’ meditation and journaling exercises.
Former Ohio State women’s rowing head coach Andy Teitelbaum was fired in March for dismissing mental health concerns among the team’s student-athletes. According to a March investigation report, Teitelbaum “violated the university’s commitment to students’ well-being and Athletic’s value of keeping the well-being of student-athletes at the core of every decision.” The university interviewed 35 witnesses who reported Teitelbaum made negative comments regarding mental health in both small and large team meetings.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
A new policy brief released by the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center and the Institute for Higher Education Policy asserts that higher education institutions lump together Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students “in ways that mask inequities in outcomes.” For instance, Southeast Asian Americans – including those from Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese backgrounds – are far less likely to have attended college than other Asian Americans. About one-quarter of Southeast Asian American adults did not graduate from high school, compared with 12 percent of all Asian Americans. Anna Byon, the author of the brief, “Everyone Deserves to Be Seen: Recommendations for Improved Federal Data on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI),” says that combining AAPI students into one or two subgroups obscures cultural and historical differences that shape students’ experiences and opportunities, and without crucial context, policy makers “are essentially flying blind.”
Student Success
The Hechinger Report explores why so few community college students complete a bachelor’s degree. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, only 13 percent of the students who start at a community college get a bachelor’s degree six years later. According to the Hechinger Report, only 30 percent of community college students are successful in transferring to a four-year institution. A survey of 800 California community college students looked at why some students were able to transfer and others were not. Their report showed that obstacles include: Lack of money and knowledge about the financial aid and subsidized loans available at four-year institutions; competing responsibilities of family and work along with academics including problems with class schedules; inability to move within commuting distance to a four-year school; and frustrating requirements and procedures.
According to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, students who enroll in public universities have higher household incomes by around age 30 than do those who were largely unable to access these institutions. Education Dive reports on the paper, which compared students who barely met the standardized test score threshold for attendance at one of 17 public, four-year institutions in the University System of Georgia they studied, to students who narrowly missed it. The former group was much more likely to attend a Georgia public university and complete a bachelor’s degree.
In the Hechinger Report, Liza Mejia, a 36-year-old single mother and first-generation college student, tells a story of overcoming adversity to graduate community college and enroll in the University of California, Los Angeles, which she’ll be attending this fall. She wrote to “encourage other nontraditional learners to seek out a four-year college degree” and advises others to pursue connections at school to succeed. “Find your people,” she writes.
