New Article: The Head of the Wily Network on Basic Needs and Belonging for Students on Their Own
MCI summer intern and rising Harvard senior Mollie Ames interviews and writes about Judi King, Ph.D., founding director of the Wily Network, a safety net organization that supports college students’ basic needs. Founded in 2014, the Wily Network group helps young adults with clinical coaching, financial support, and community-based assistance throughout their college trajectories. Read the full piece here.
King describes the inspiration behind the mission of her work, “It was those young people that I had worked with that had really experienced trauma, had been in foster care, had been part of failed adoptions, but had made it to college — or, and had made it to college, I should say — and they were in college largely on their own.”
Mental and Behavioral Health
The Chronicle highlights data revealing increased levels of depression and anxiety screened from this spring’s Healthy Minds Study. From the tens of thousands of students surveyed, 41% screened positive for depression and 34% screened positive for anxiety – the highest levels since the onset of the study in 2007 which has shown rising rates year over year. Sarah Ketchen Lipson, PhD, principal investigator of the study and assistant professor at the department of health law policy and management at Boston University’s School of Public Health, says, “We don’t see a massive spike that’s happened during the pandemic, but a continuation of a very troubling trend.”
U.S. News features advice from Dr. Richard Catanzaro, chief of behavioral health at Northern Westchester Hospital, on how parents of college students can distinguish mental health issues in their young adults. According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 4 young adults have considered suicide during the pandemic. Catanzaro says many college students who learned virtually and lived with their parents during the pandemic may have regressed in social skills, time-management, and emotional self-regulation. The abrupt shift to arriving in-person to a campus with 30,000 strangers may be anxiety-provoking to experience for many students coming to college for the first time.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
In an opinion piece for The Hechinger Report, Alexander Mayer, director of postsecondary education at MDRC, and Catherine Brown, senior director at The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS), write about closing the equity gap for low-income students, first-gen students, and students of color by scaling comprehensive student support programs through the use of federal funds. “Research is clear that one of the surest paths to economic mobility is a college education, and students of color, who were most impacted by Covid-19 economically and otherwise, stand to benefit most from the programs mentioned above,” the authors write.
Inside Higher Ed and Diverse Education show findings from a new report, “Stranded Credits: A Matter of Equity.” The qualitative study found that unpaid student balances (i.e., parking tickets, library fines, old tuition balances and debt) highlighted inequities in higher education and led to devastating impacts on college students’ trajectories. Students of color reported facing the most obstacles and were disproportionately affected by institutional debt.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
On Monday, the #EDActNow campaign was launched by advocacy groups demanding that the Department of Education repeal Title IX changes made by the Trump administration by October 1st. The petition calls for the department to release proposed changes prior to “the Red Zone” – the beginning period of the fall semester with the highest rates of sexual assaults at college campuses. Advocacy groups say first-year students and sophomores may be particularly vulnerable, especially with both classes soon experiencing college life for the first time this fall.
Student Success
According to new data on students entering college this fall semester, incoming freshmen reported a substantial increase in mental and emotional exhaustion. Conducted by the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University at Bloomington, the survey had over 40,000 respondents who were recent high school graduates entering four-year colleges this fall. More than 80% of students remained optimistic about going into their first year of college, 47% of which reported feeling “very optimistic.”
Diverse Education illustrates the ways community colleges in the Midwest are utilizing technology to improve student success. Oftentimes, students who are not ready to take college level courses are required to enroll in remedial, developmental, or prerequisite courses in math or English. In efforts to increase graduation rates, Ivy Tech Community Colleges partnered with Achieving the Dream and Complete College America to turn prerequisite courses into co-requisite courses to be taken concurrently with college-level classes, ultimately leading to a 20% completion rate of college-level classes within one year.
Coronavirus: Safety and Reopening
The new U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s announcement approving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has led to some colleges making vaccination mandates official for their institutions. With institutions now able to require the COVID-19 vaccine similarly to other vaccines, experts foresee even more colleges announcing mandates in the coming weeks. The College Crisis Initiative, an initiative collecting data on higher-education institutions’ responses to the pandemic, found that the majority, approximately 70%, of institutions are “requiring, encouraging, or incentivizing the vaccine.”
The Washington Post reports on faculty members across the country protesting campus reopening plans amid the news of the delta variant and rising breakthrough cases among those vaccinated. Some professors are petitioning for heightened safety measures at their universities or delayed in-person learning. For instance, 500 faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill signed a petition to begin with virtual classes for the academic year, citing the increasing number of hospitalizations and full intensive care units. Some faculty members are fearful teaching in areas with low vaccination rates and state bans of vaccine mandates. Others worry about passing the virus to their young children.
According to new polling, the majority of college students support vaccine mandates. Students were also supportive of mask mandates and only 38% said they would feel comfortable at a party held indoors. Gerri Taylor, co-chair of the American College Health Association’s COVID-19 task force, says students’ attitudes toward safety measures is “heartening.” “We’re very hopeful that this new FDA full approval of the Pfizer vaccine will allow more colleges to feel comfortable putting that mandate in place, and it will help more students and families to feel that the vaccine is safe enough for them to take,” said Taylor.
