Mental and Behavioral Health
The newly formed organization “Born This Way Student Fund at Penn State” aims to create a safe space for students as well as raise awareness about mental health. The group also plans to raise funds for the Born this Way Foundation created by Lady Gaga. Though it is currently a small group of roughly 10 students, the group’s founder, Penn State student Cole Shusted, expressed hope for growth in the fall semester. He said, “If I can make it so that there’s a community where people feel like… they can fully be themselves whether it’s your gender or sexual identity or mental health-specific issues, I want there to be a place for that.” Shusted and his colleagues acknowledged the importance of campus mental health resources, such as Counseling and Psychological Services, but the pair emphasized the need to have a space that was run by students versus adult staff.
Melissa Dawson, director of student-athlete academic support services at Northern Illinois University, said the athletic department has focused on making sure student athletes are mentally healthy. Dawson said in the fall the school will offer online support from a company called Game Plan, designed to help students navigate everything from career development to mental health. She also said she wants the coaching staff trained through Mental Health First Aid, an eight-hour online course that “teaches you how to identify, understand and respond to signs of mental illnesses and substance-use disorders.”
According to a federal lawsuit filed last week, Jerusha Sanjeevia, a Malaysian graduate student at Utah State University, suffered through eight months of racist bullying by classmates before ending her life in 2017. The lawsuit, filed by Sanjeevi’s boyfriend, Matthew Bick, names as defendants Utah State University, the head of the psychology department, some of the students who were in her cohort, and professors. The complaint alleges negligence, wrongful death, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It contends that the university’s lack of action-even after Sanjeevi complained about the alleged bullying to professors and a department chairperson-violated her civil rights. The lawsuit claims that the department “knowingly allowed one of its students to be verbally abused, intimidated and subjected to cultural and racist discrimination by favored students over the course of eight months, when she was rendered so emotionally devastated and hopeless that she committed suicide.”
Diversity and Inclusion
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris proposed a policy to dedicate $60 billion to STEM programs and infrastructure for historically black colleges and universities. Howard University’s president, Wayne A.I. Frederick, told The Chronicle that Harris’ plan to focus on STEM shows her knowledge of the outsize role that HBCUs play in producing black graduates in those fields. But not every HBCU president is happy about the proposal. Kevin D. Rome, the president of Fisk University, said that Harris’ focus on STEM ignored the much greater needs of smaller, private HBCUs: replacing crumbling infrastructure and increasing financial aid for low-income students.
This fall, women are projected to make up 57 percent of college students and Department of Education data show they’re expected to outnumber men at colleges for the near-term future. Some schools are working to attract more men to enroll, using strategies like adding majors to their curriculum and including more males among the ambassadors who speak with prospective students. But recruitment is not the only issues. The freshman-to-sophomore retention is also lower for males. To that end, some colleges have created programs designed specifically to retain men, especially African-Americans and Latinos. North Carolina Central and Texas State Universities, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham are among them. The initiatives typically include some mix of mentoring, academic advising, professional development, study-skills training and opportunities for students to bond with their male peers from similar backgrounds.
The Chronicle analyzed undergraduate enrollment data from more than 1,700 four-year colleges to find out which institutions had undergraduate male enrollment of 50 percent or more. The analysis showed that military academies and colleges, institutions that specialize in male-dominated STEM fields, faith-related institutions, and, of course, those that admit men only, were leaders in enrolling a greater percentage of male students.
The University of Virginia is now extending financial aid benefits to in-state students with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) status. “Students with DACA status are here legally and are considered in-state students for purposes of admissions if they live in Virginia,” university President Jim Ryan said. “Our view is that they should also be eligible for financial aid, just like other students. It seems to us the right and smart thing to do. Our community is stronger when more students can afford to study here, and this change will help make a difference.”
Nationwide, the percentage of Hispanic or Latino adults ages 25 or over with a high school diploma has risen from 53 percent in 1995 to 72 percent last year, says the advocacy and research group Excelencia in Education. According to the Hechinger Report, the improvement is an important step at a time when Hispanics are the fastest-growing group of people nearing college age across the country, and when there’s concern about the effect on the economy of failing to produce enough college graduates for industries that need them.
In an effort to address low graduation rates, a growing number of schools have turned to big data to help them identify students who might be struggling academically, so that the school can provide support before students drop out. Predictive analytics find trends and patterns in huge amounts of historical data and use those patterns to intervene towards different outcomes. There are indications that analytics may be having an impact. In 2016, after years of declines, national college graduation rates started ticking back up again and have continued rising for the past three years. But critics say there are potential downsides to monitoring student data so closely, including invasion of privacy and surveillance of students. And they say that the algorithms might be reinforcing historical inequities, funneling low-income students or students of color into easier majors.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
Dartmouth College has reached a preliminary settlement with nine women who accused the institution of failing to protect them after they reported sexual harassment and assault by three psychology and brain-science professors. Dartmouth will pay $14 million and will fund efforts “to identify and rectify current problems and prevent future issues” if the proposed agreement is approved by a federal judge, according to a joint statement released by the college and the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs’ lawsuit included allegations of rape, groping and invitations to use cocaine during class.
A federal appeals court found that a former University of Massachusetts at Amherststudent accused of assaulting and harassing his girlfriend was deprived of due process rights when university administrators suspended him without first holding an official hearing. The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit also represents a split from a significant opinion last year by the Sixth Circuit’s appeals court on the due process rights of students accused of sexual misconduct. It ruled in that decision that students or their representatives must be allowed to directly question their accusers in sexual violence cases.
Admissions Scandal: Financial Aid
The Education Department is looking into a tactic that has been used in some Chicago suburbs, in which affluent and middle-class parents transfer legal guardianship of their college-bound children to relatives or friends so the teens can claim financial aid. The strategy caught the department’s attention amid a spate of guardianship transfers in the area. It means that only the children’s earnings were considered in their financial-aid applications, not the family income or savings. That has led to awards of scholarships and access to federal financial aid designed for low income students. The Education Department is recommending steps to prevent this type of attempted fraud in college financial aid. “The laws and regulations governing dependency status were created to help students who legitimately need assistance to attend college,” Education Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Hill said in a statement Tuesday. “Those who break the rules should be held accountable, and the Department is committed to assessing what changes can be made – either independently or in concert with Congress – to protect taxpayers from those who seek to game the system for their own financial gain.” Illinois lawmakers have scheduled a hearing to investigate the financial-aid loophole. An op-ed in The Hill argues that the overcorrection to this fraud could hurt more students, by encouraging other states to more closely scrutinize students who desperately need financial aid. According to the Atlantic, financial aid scams hurt low income students who really do need to separate from their parents-or who have been separated from their parents by the state. They could be regarded with more skepticism by financial-aid officers, and have a more difficult time receiving funds.
Disability
The New York Times reports that the demand for disability accommodations for schoolwork and testing has swelled but access to them is unequal and the process is vulnerable to abuse. In the country’s richest enclaves, where students already have greater access to private tutors and admissions coaches, the share of high school students with a federal disability designation is double the national average. In some communities, more than one in 10 students have one – up to seven times the rate nationwide, according to the Times analysis of federal data.
College Affordability
A number of large employers, like Starbucks and Walmart, have garnered praise recently for creating higher education benefits for their employees in partnership with one or more universities. However, in an op-ed in the Chronicle, Geoffrey M. Cox, a senior associate dean for administration and finance in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, argues that while it is easy to appreciate the good intentions and opportunities represented by these arrangements, they could lead to even more increased costs for higher education. Colleges may limit or reduce their commitments to financial aid, preferring instead to attract students who are subsidized by their employers. And furthermore, Cox asserts, these programs reduce the pressure on states and the federal government to support higher education, and it will become increasingly difficult to claim that higher education is a public good that deserves sustained support.
Student Success
The Chronicle excerpted an essay from author and UC Berkeley professor David Kirp’s book, The College Dropout Scandal in which Kirp writes that the “contention that college is the engine of social mobility is false advertising for the 34 million Americans over 25 – that’s more than 10 percent of the entire U.S. population – who have some college credits but dropped out before receiving a diploma. Many of them are actually worse off economically than if they hadn’t started college. While they earn a little more than those who never went beyond high school, they leave college with a pile of debt but without the chance to secure the high-paying jobs to pay it off that a degree would open up.”
The Chronicle reports on the increased dropout risk among students who are balancing school with caregiving responsibilities. An AARP report found that, in 2015, about 10 million people aged 18 to 34 were providing care for an elderly or disabled loved one. More than a third of those caregivers were younger than 25. Their ranks are growing due to a national caregiver shortage that is expected to intensify as baby boomers age. Advocates say that the risk of delaying school or dropping out is particularly acute for Hispanic and African-American students, who are far more likely than white students to become family caregivers. According to the Chronicle, this challenge also affects student wellness. A 2017 study from the University of Southern Florida found that students who were caregivers exhibited symptoms of depression and anxiety at higher levels than a control group of students who were not caregivers.
