Mental and Behavioral Health
An article in The Week describes the sense of guilt some college students feel about reaching out for help with their mental health. These students report that coming from privilege or having access to privilege makes them feel like they should not be “allowed” to claim the diagnosis of depression because they have not “earned” it.
Malcolm Jenkins, the Philadelphia Eagles safety, spoke at Michelle Obama’s Beating the Odds Summit at Howard University, talking to a crowd of first-generation college-bound students about the pressures they face and how to deal with them. “I know for me, mental health wasn’t anything we talked about when I was in school. But . . . I am in therapy once a week at this point in my life because I recognize that I’m somebody who’s responsible for a lot of things, and I put a lot of pressure on myself, and so with that comes stress and a little anxiety,” Jenkins said. “A lot of you, if you’re a first-generation college student, you’re the first one to do it. You feel like your family is counting on you, depending on you. You have these outside pressures that are on top of being a college student. You have to find ways to recognize that and deal with that in a healthy manner.”
Last month, Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed a bill into law that expanded excused absences to include those taken for mental and behavioral health. While the bill does not apply to college students, experts say it could positively impact students when they reach their higher education institution. Dr. Ludmila De Faria, co-chair of the College Mental Health Caucus of the American Psychiatric Association told Newsweek, “Improving mental health care and awareness early in life will result in students coming into college more resilient and less burned out because they sought care early in the process and can advocate for appropriate changes in their colleges.” De Faria called the bill a “small step that may generate huge future gains” and credited it with both destigmatizing mental health and promoting self-awareness at an early age. Laura Horne, chief program officer at Active Minds, a nonprofit organization dedicated to mental health awareness and education, told Newsweek that establishing institutional validation for high school students could go a long way.
In the wake of an international student’s suicide at University of Florida in June, representatives from Florida’s largest public universities – UF, the University of South Florida, Florida State, and the University Central Florida – expressed the difficulty in getting international students to seek help for their mental health. “From day one it’s difficult for international students to feel like home or feel welcome,” said Chun-Chung Choi, a counselor at UF who started the UF Gator International Focus Team, also known as UFGIFT, a group focused on international student outreach and mental health. Many international students come from backgrounds where mental health is not talked about, and often feel stigmatized about coming forward and seeking counseling. Adding to the problem is the persistent language and cultural gap as counseling in other languages depends on staff available.
Diversity and Inclusion
Earlier this year, a member of the University of Mississippi’s Kappa Alpha Order fraternity posted a photo of himself and two other fraternity members holding guns and posing before a bullet-riddled Emmett Till memorial sign. The roadside plaque commemorates the site where Till’s body was recovered after being brutally tortured and lynched in 1955, accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store. The photo was deemed “offensive and hurtful” by a campus official, but the university declined to suspend or punish the students. Kappa Alpha Order, which cites the Confederate general Robert E. Lee as a “spiritual founder,” suspended the three fraternity members, and a spokesman for the university, Rod Guajardo, wrote that the university was “ready to assist the fraternity with educational opportunities for those members and the chapter.”
In Diverse Education, Donte Bernard, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Tracie Lowe, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis, discuss imposter syndrome among black college students — the tendency of high-achieving individuals to discount and question the validity of their success. According to Bernard and Lowe, it is essential that administrators implement strategies to proactively combat impostor syndrome among Black college students and suggest that administrators evaluate how their respective campuses are proactively working to minimize gaps in treating students of color. These include providing educational spaces where Black students feel they have appropriate levels of challenge and support, prioritizing developing culturally-engaging campus environments, and establishing a welcoming and supportive climate for diverse student groups.
In an op-ed in Diverse Education, Dr. David Steele Figueredo, president of Woodbury University and a Venezuela native, points out the obvious value in the US to attracting and retaining more international students. He writes, “I would submit that the political climate in the U.S. regarding immigration and international graduate policy needs urgent attention before we shoot ourselves in the foot by losing our competitive advantage in the global economy for science and technology talent.”
Student Success
Higher education researchers and student success advocates have long criticized no-credit remedial or developmental education in community colleges as an unintentional barrier to student success, particularly for its impact on low-income and minority students’ persistence and completion outcomes. A growing body of research has shown that many students placed into remedial courses are less likely to graduate than if they were placed in college-level courses from the start. Colleges across the country are beginning to explore and implement multiple placement alternatives, transition to co-requisite models of remediation or eliminate developmental education all together.
At a Vera Institute event, presenters discussed the challenges facing efforts to expand the Second Chance Pell program, a federal initiative to allow prisoners to receive funding for college. Officials at colleges offering the programs, and the corrections officers that are involved with them, cautioned about the difficulties of setting up programs in prisons without internet access, shepherding students through onerous FAFSA applications to get a Pell Grant and then getting course materials approved by the corrections departments. Other issues endemic in the prison system can push education down on facilities’ priority lists. Michael Fletcher, an assistant director with Arkansas Community Correction, detailed how inmates at his maximum-security prison need to travel three and a half hours by bus to get dental care. “We don’t have the fundamental foundation to do this,” he said at the event. “I’m worried about [sending] guys going home with a driver’s license and no mental health issues.” Still, Michael Budke, the corrections education program coordinator at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon, and others said that the opportunity to attend college while incarcerated is changing prisoners’ lives for the better.
College Affordability
A new collaborative, The College Affordability Coalition, has formed to advocate for needed federal investments and protections to promote more equitable outcomes within the U.S. higher education system as federal lawmakers work on reauthorizing the Higher Education Act. The group of 25 organizations – representing the voices of students, families, consumers, institutions and civil rights groups – calls on Congress to protect and strengthen the Pell Grant program, create a federal-state partnership that invests in college affordability and create a federal loan system that improves borrowers’ pathways out of debt.
Early reports from Tennessee and Oregon – two states with some of the longest-running free college plans – show these programs’ first year can lead to lower enrollment at state four-year schools. That effect, however, seems to flatten out almost entirely by the second year. Expanded access to free community college across California has stressed many of its four-year institutions. That’s caused California State University, Fresno to dramatically raise the bar for acceptance.
According to a new report from the Center for Responsible Lending and the NAACP, the need to finance colleges with loans is widening racial and ethnic wealth and income gaps, with a notable impact on black borrowers. Black students borrow at higher rates and take out more loans than most other groups to earn a bachelor’s degree. About 85% of black students took out loans in 2016, compared to 45% of Asian students, 66% of Hispanic/Latino students and 69% of white students. And black students borrowed nearly 15% more than the average student, at $33,993. Default rates were also high for this group. The report makes several recommendations to reduce these disparities, including better oversight of loan servicers and more funding for minority-serving institutions.
Nearly 20 states have some kind of program that covers the cost of tuition at two-year and/or four-year public colleges after a student exhausts grants, financial aid and any other financial resources. Washington is the latest state to create such a program. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Rep. Drew Hansen (D), the prime sponsor of the legislation that created the program, and Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University and the founding director of the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice, discuss Washington’s program, how it will work, and how it will be financed. The state will provide full-tuition scholarships to any Washington public college or university student for families earning up to approximately $50,000 a year. Partial scholarships will be available to families who earn the state’s median family income, about $88,000 a year.
