Coronavirus Impact
The Haven at College, a private recovery center that partners with colleges and universities, is offering their outpatient services virtually. During the pandemic, they have continued operating their sober living communities, while providing virtual counseling, group counseling, family therapy, educational sessions, case management and life skills training. In some cases, the relaxed telehealth regulations have allowed them to continue providing services across state lines. Haven’s student-led free resources include online recovery meetings and social engagement activities like game night and fitness Fridays.
The Chronicle delves into the fine line that colleges and universities are walking in their efforts to help students maintain their mental wellbeing during the COVID-19 era. While grit and resilience have become salient ideas in the response to the campus mental health crisis that had already taken hold before the pandemic, campus leaders recognize that the message of resilience, to push through hardship and bounce back from failure, may be inappropriate now. Mental health experts say that colleges must be careful about the messages they send, offering resilience strategies while recognizing students’ grief.
Former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama will give multiple commencement addresses this spring, appearing virtually with celebrities, athletes and national leaders. Barack Obama will take part in a two-hour virtual commencement event for graduates of 74 historically black colleges and universities, with multiple sponsors, including the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the National Basketball Association and Howard University.
The Wall Street Journal reports on a dramatic shift in the balance of power in college admissions due to the coronavirus pandemic with students finding they have increased leverage in a process that has gotten increasingly competitive in recent years. As institutions expect drops in enrollment, many students are being released from wait lists at “reach” schools, and those admitted are being allowed more time to make their final decisions. Even so, many students are finding it difficult to commit until they know whether the fall term will take place on campus or online.
Fewer students are applying for financial aid for the 20-21 academic year, despite the expectation that more students will need it. According to an analysis of federal data from the nonprofit National College Attainment Network, by late April, federal aid applications were tracking 2.8% behind last year, with 55,582 fewer high-school seniors submitting applications. The decline is concerning colleges administrators who worry that some may have decided college is out of reach during the crisis.
The American College Health Association announces the release of its new guidelines for reopening institutions amid the pandemic. The guidelines provide recommendations to minimize the risk of COVID-19 infection and a recurrent surge of infections as social distancing measures are relaxed on campuses and as plans are made for the physical return of large numbers of students, faculty, and staff. Considerations for Reopening Institutions of Higher Education in the COVID-19 Era addresses preparations that will need to be made to campus life, including at the student health service, mental health services, housing and dining services and athletics.
Forbes reports on the ACHA’s guidance for reopening college sports. The guidelines include modifications to facility, practice, personnel, emergency care and planning to assist in deciding if a college can safely bring back athletes and students to campus. Recommendations include assembling a COVID-19 Action Team, ramping up education and training for sports medicine staff, providing Personal Protective Equipment for all medical staff and custodial staff, and assessing the potential for COVID-19 transmission in each sport. The last recommendation involves taking into account whether a sport is: team vs individual; contact vs non-contact; major spectator vs non-spectator; has unavoidable physical distancing practices in certain sports like soccer, basketball, wrestling, football.
The University of California at San Diego released a detailed and ambitious plan to bring students back to campus. This week, the university began conducting a dry run of a monitoring regime that would offer a coronavirus test to every single one of the 5,000 students currently on campus. Ultimately the university hopes to run tens of thousands of tests a month and to allow the 65,000-person campus to resume operations in the fall. Also included in a fall-reopening plan would be increased cleaning, requirements in some cases that people wear masks, and tests of the wastewater system for the virus in an attempt to detect outbreaks early.
NPR reports that most of the money set aside by Congress for colleges with “significant unmet needs,” has now been allotted by the Department of Education to small, private colleges that serve a small fraction of U.S. college students. Meanwhile, public colleges – which serve more than 70% of all college students – are facing a steep drop in state funding. The 20 institutions that received the most amount of money from the unmet-need fund serve less than 3,000 students combined. About half are religious schools – including Bible colleges and seminaries – several of which serve less than 100 students. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was given the discretion to choose which schools would benefit from the fund, and by how much. Some schools were baffled when they learned they had been allotted hundreds of thousands of dollars in relief, and many weren’t aware they were even eligible for the money. Ben Miller, the vice president for postsecondary education at the left-leaning Center for American Progress argues that larger public colleges, including community colleges, should be getting more financial support.
In the Washington Post, Robert Anderson, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, a nonprofit organization that represents the chief executives of statewide governing, policy and coordinating boards of postsecondary education, writes that public colleges need help from the federal government, as the economic downturn has already led to midyear budget cuts for higher education, and will likely lead to continued cuts to public education. “Institutions with the least resources will probably feel the most pain,” Anderson writes. “These same institutions, consequently, also educate a disproportionate share of low-income students, first-generation students and students of color.”
In the New York Times, Kevin Carey, vice president for education policy at New America, warns of the privatization of public colleges in light of financial worries brought on by COVID-19 disruptions and the worsening economy. As public colleges budgets are slashed, their only recourse will be to increase tuition and compete for customers in the free market, which Carey says could fundamentally alter the character of public institutions. “A university that is public in name only will make different decisions about which students matter and why,” he writes. Carey suggests that one solution would be for Congress to give states immediate financial relief in exchange for strengthening their long-term financial commitment to public higher education.
According to WGME, Bates College’s formal planning process for how to cope with COVID-19 for the upcoming academic year did not originally include students’ voices. The Bates student newspaper ran an informal poll that found more than 90% of students felt they should be represented on the two working groups established by the college to examine the financial and practical issues involved in reopening. The College reached out to students and held a Zoom session with the fall planning committee and student government leaders. Bates President Clayton Spencer said in a Friday letter to students and families that the dean of students, members of the fall planning team and others are “in communication with a number of different constituencies, including parents and the executive board of student government.” Spencer said there could be “possible changes to the academic calendar, including modifications to break schedules to limit travel, changes to teaching models, and working with our faculty on remote teaching and learning.”
In the UD Review, the student newspaper of the University of Delaware, Olivia Feldman writes of the mental health challenges brought about by the coronavirus. One graduating senior said, “I am most concerned about how my graduating class will perform in the ‘real world. We are going to be entering the workforce during a recession, making it much harder for everyone to find jobs. I think that this is going to affect us for years down the line.”
The Daily Bruin reports that at the University of California Los Angeles student use of the Counseling and Psychological Services has more than halved. Nicole Green, executive director of CAPS said “It makes sense to me that people have not been thinking about mental health so much, because they’ve been trying to manage basic needs,” Green said.
University of Georgia graduate student Brandon Weiss led a team of fellow graduate students in clinical psychology in creating the COVID-19 Well-Being Guide for the UGA community. The guide includes evidence-based ways to improve mental health and sense of well-being, tips on how to talk to children during the COVID-19 pandemic, and resources for the community and beyond. “When we started this project, it was when people were starting to grow concerned and stressed about the ramifications of it,” said Weiss. “We felt really motivated to do this work, and I think it’s because we sympathize with what other people are going through.”
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Lynn Mahoney, president of San Francisco State University, advised against most students taking a gap year amid the pandemic. “This is not the time to pause or decline an opportunity to attend a four-year university,” she wrote. “This is the moment to persist, to take that very important first step to a degree that promises upward mobility for students, for their families and for their communities.”
The UC Berkeley COVID-19 Student Relief Circle, a coalition of staff, students and faculty from a broad array of campus units, offices and programs, has pooled individual relief efforts at Berkeley into one coordinated endeavor to help students. A new online hub will help enrolled students with housing, food, health and technology needs. Aid from various funds is available for undergraduate, graduate, undocumented and international students. The UC Berkeley Basic Needs Center COVID-19 Living Guide lists additional types of support, including emergency housing, COVID-19 testing for uninsured, undocumented or homeless students, and academic and mental health counseling.
In recent posts to Education Dive‘s President Speaks series, college presidents have written about how uncertain times are affecting their campuses, and how higher ed can weather the pandemic.
A new bill by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) proposes to help frontline health care workers with their student loans by cancelling their debt. The legislation, titled ‘Student Loan Forgiveness for Frontline Health Workers Act,’ would establish both a federal and a private loan forgiveness program for student loans taken out to fund tuition to medical and professional training programs. Health care workers who “made significant contributions to COVID-19 patient care, medical research, testing and enhancing the capacity of the health care system to respond to this urgent crisis” would be eligible.
The Washington Post reports that the University of California President Janet Napolitano is urging a suspension of admission testing requirements until 2024.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Sadie Bograd, a 16 year old in a math-science magnet program in Kentucky, writes about college admissions in the midst of the crisis, and why she believes ACT or SAT score requirements for admissions in these times should be dropped. “It’s unfair and unreasonable to expect students to take an hours-long virtual test when many can’t even find a quiet study space,” she writes. “Students are confronting enough challenges already – now is not the time for them to stress about their SAT score.”
In the New York Times, Karen Strassler, who teaches anthropology at Queens College, writes about what is lost in the transition to zoom classrooms, namely the illusion of equity. “Glimpses into my students’ homes violate the implicit contract of the classroom, where students have some measure of control over what parts of their lives outside of school come into view,” she writes. The pandemic has both revealed and worsened the inequities in our country, rendering lower-income people of color – the majority of CUNY students – more vulnerable. “That’s exactly why the classroom is so crucial,” she writes. “It is not a space apart from the damaged and unfair world in which we live, but it is a place where students meet each other, first and foremost, as fellow learners.”
