When Supporters Struggle
As administrators and faculty prepare to support students arriving on campus this new school year, they have a rising concern of their own: mental health issues stemming from the stressors of their jobs. In this month’s LearningWell magazine, Nichole Bernier writes about the wellbeing hazards inherent in both the college helping fields and in academia amid funding pressures, shifting rules and responsibilities, and the added stress of supporting vulnerable students in a post-COVID era.
“There’s an old saying, ‘A good teacher is like a candle—it consumes itself to light the way for others,’” said a sociology professor in Washington, D.C. “I don’t think whoever coined that phrase had this kind of ‘consuming’ in mind.”
Mental and Behavioral Health
Inside Higher Ed (IHE) is concluding its coverage of the Student Voice survey on health and wellness, which included 3,000 two- and four-year college respondents at 158 institutions. Highlighting the survey’s biggest takeaways, IHE notes the negative impact of chronic stress on college students and their wellbeing. According to the survey, 56% of students have experienced chronic stress in college, with better mental health correlating with less chronic stress. Additionally, three quarters report that stress is negatively impacting their ability to learn, focus and do well academically. Exams are students’ top academic stressor, but respondents also list pressure to do well, balancing school and other obligations, essays or papers, and getting a bad grade—in that order. Further, students largely believe that professors bear responsibility for helping them ease their stress (42% say they have some responsibility), placing them ahead of campus counselors, advisers, peers, administrators and others.
According to a new study published in the scientific journal The Lancet Psychiatry, about half of the world’s population “can expect to develop” at least one type of mental disorder by the time they are 75 years old. Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia and Harvard Medical School analyzed data from the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health surveys.
A recent analysis of emergency department records showed that young people who experience disrupted or disordered sleep have an increased risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The authors suggest that adolescents are particularly susceptible to sleep-related suicidal thougts and behaviors, attributing this vulnerability in part to age-related circadian delays that conflict with sociocultural structures like school days.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Inside Higher Ed spotlights the difficult choice facing LGBTQ+ students in Florida: whether to stay or leave for college amid recent hostility to sexual and gender minorities from legislators in the state. The state passed the Parental Rights in Education Act, often called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, limited classroom instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation topics, a bill requiring individuals to use the bathroom that aligns with their sex at birth, a ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender people, and a bill that “allows health-care providers to deny patients medical care based on religious or moral beliefs.” Research shows that growing numbers of LGBTQ+ Floridians and allies are considering leaving the state. One study showed that over half of the state’s LGBTQ+ parents report that they’ve considered moving their families to another state. And another study showed that one in eight high school seniors said that they were not planning to attend a public in-state university due to Governor DeSantis’ policies.
A working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research reports that Asian American students are 28% less likely to be accepted at selective colleges than their White counterparts with similar academic qualifications. The gap was widest for students of South Asian descent, who were 49% less likely to gain admission than their White peers with comparable applications.
In a Presidents’ Speaks column in Higher Ed Dive, Dr. Nathan Long, president of Saybrook University in California, writes about the importance of diversity of perspectives in higher education. He argues that, “Every facet of campus life that can help expand a student’s or community’s perspective on difference—race-conscious curriculum, diversity training, equity-focused initiatives highlighting systemic inequalities—is under siege from political leaders with an agenda to advance.” He goes on to say that if state institutions are muzzled by these political forces, private colleges must step in to “serve the public, leveraging different perspectives and backgrounds to advance these conversations.”
Florida officials and the College Board, which runs the AP classes program nationally, publicly went back and forth last week over the AP Psychology course. According to the College Board, in the middle of last week, Florida officials “effectively banned” the course from being taught in the state as long as it includes discussion of gender and sexual orientation. However, by late last week, statements from both sides seemed to reverse course. Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. said the state believed the psychology course could be taught “in its entirety,” and The College Board said it hoped Florida teachers now will be able “to teach the full course, including content on gender and sexual orientation, without fear of punishment in the upcoming school year.” Earlier this year, Florida barred schools from offering a newly created AP African American Studies course.
Students for Fair Admissions, the group behind the successful lawsuit eliminating affirmative action in college admissions, is now preparing for another potential lawsuit, this time to ban affirmative action at U.S. military academies, which was not addressed by the Supreme Court ruling in June. Military academies were pulled out because Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, in a footnote, that they had “potentially distinct interests.” The federal government argued in its brief to the court that race-conscious admissions practices in the military were needed to create a pipeline of Black and Hispanic officers, and maintain morale among the troops. The government argues that racial integration in the military is a matter of national security. In a statement, Students for Fair Admissions said, “the culture of the armed services requires that each warfighter see fellow warfighters as totally committed teammates, where race, ethnicity and heritage, while respected, do not matter.”
Student Success
WBUR reports on the admissions surge at trade schools in upstate New York, pointing to job availability, rising college costs and student debt as causes for the rise in interest.
The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed Eric Maguire, vice president for enrollment at Wake Forest University, about their new, nonbinding, early-action option exclusively for first-generation students. Lower-income students are often less likely to engage in binding early-decision programs, because of financial concerns. Early decision programs tend to benefit White, affluent students who can more easily commit to a college without comparing financial-aid offers. The initiative at Wake Forest is a way to attract first-generation applicants while giving them flexibility to consider other admission and financial-aid offers.
College Affordability and Free College
The Hechinger Report describes the problem of “scholarship displacement,” dubbed the “August surprise,” by advocates for students and families, explaining that often, as students receive outside scholarships, universities will substitute those funds for already-promised institutional financial aid. This results “in a zero net gain for recipients and leav[es] them scrambling to cover balances they didn’t think they’d have to pay—often without even telling them the reason.” Some states have already passed restrictions on the practice, including California, Maryland, New Jersey, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Similar legislation is pending in Arizona and Wisconsin.
An appeals court temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s new regulation that cleared the debt of students whose colleges defrauded them. Consumer advocates praised the regulation, while for-profit college representatives said they deprive institutions of due process rights.
In Fortune, the authors of a new study published in the Journal of American College Health discuss their research showing a correlation between taking out loans and poor mental health. According to Arielle Kuperberg, professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina–Greensboro and Joan Maya Mazelis, associate professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, “Students who took out loans to pay for college rated their overall health and mental health as being worse than those who didn’t take out student loans. They also reported more major medical problems and were more likely to report delaying medical, dental, and mental health care and using less medication than the amount prescribed to save money.”
Basic Needs
For the first time, the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics, a federal body dedicated to collecting data related to education, tracked and published information about student food insecurity and homelessness for college students. The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), which was released in July and features data from spring 2020—during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—surveyed over 100,000 students on their experiences with food and housing insecurity. The findings largely corroborate something basic needs researchers have long asserted, that college students face higher rates of food and housing insecurity than the general population. According to the Hope Center’s analysis of the NCES data, 22.6% of undergraduates and 12.2% of graduate students experience food insecurity, while 8% of undergraduates and 4.6% of graduate students experience homelessness.
Campus Safety
According to an annual report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, “Explosives Incident Report,” bomb threats against colleges jumped substantially in 2022. In 2021, there were 64 threats against institutions of higher education fielded, spiking to 353 in 2022—a roughly 450% increase. More than 50 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) received threats. The Chronicle put this data in context, noting that there are 99 HBCUs in the United States and so “In other words, over half of the nation’s HBCUs received bomb threats last year, in the span of just a few months.”
