Quadcast hosts Dana Humphrey and Marjorie Malpiede discuss new content in LearningWell magazine, including “Bringing Wellbeing into the Classroom,” a profile on the Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning at Georgetown University. The hosts talk about how and why they wrote the stories, bringing insights and information about their subjects that may not have made it into the magazine.
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As distress reverberates across college campuses following the recent shooting at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, students, faculty, and staff in the UNC System navigate new and existing approaches to managing trauma on campus. The UNC System offers a variety of mental health programs for students, including Mental Health First Aid, which trains participants to recognize warning signs of mental and emotional distress. Outreach and prevention varies across schools in the UNC System, with UNC Pembroke offering dedicated meditation spaces and UNC Charlotte looking to implement restorative yoga classes in the new academic year. UNC Chapel Hill will now offer QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer) suicide prevention training, an intervention program that teaches students, faculty, and staff to ask their peers about possible suicidality and refer them to an appropriate specialist for help.
Some students, faculty, and experts in higher education have expressed concerns that new mental health policies on college campuses are largely preventative rather than proactive. In an op-ed for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Temple University professors urge colleges and universities to take a trauma-informed, proactive approach to student mental health. “Imagine a trauma-informed campus,” they write, “where signs of trauma are recognized early, the impacts of trauma are understood, and parents can trust that their children will be attending an institution that is equipped to support them.”
Yale University’s recent settlement in a lawsuit brought by students and alumni has prompted changes to the university’s mental health leave policies. One Yale student and member of Elis for Rachael told NPR that students “felt like they were facing consequences for being honest about how their mental health was on campus and being treated more as a liability rather than someone who Yale was invested in taking care of.” While Yale’s new leave policies will offer increased flexibility for students taking mental health leaves, some experts say these changes are reactive rather than preventative.
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As students embark on the new school year, colleges and universities hoping to address mental health stigma may need to prioritize dismantling stigma among student athletes. Research in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues shows that while college athletes and non-athletes have similar levels of mental health literacy, athletes report greater stigma around seeking help and are more likely to view mental and emotional distress in a negative light.
Forbes contributor Scott White highlights the college admissions process as a source of profound mental and emotional distress for many high school students. As standards for admission to elite universities appear increasingly difficult to meet, students take on more demanding schedules, enrolling in AP classes and filling their time with extracurriculars, often at the expense of sleep and social relationships. Students describe being “out of control, of unrealistic expectations, of fear that any setback, from a bad grade to a poor athletic performance, will be indelibly etched in their future aspirations and ambitions,” White writes.
The Los Angeles Times reports on the push by California legislators for a bill that would “audit social media platforms to ensure they are not using algorithms or features that knowingly harm children, such as fostering addiction or causing youths to develop eating disorders.” Teens, the LA Times reports, are aware of the negative impacts of social media use on their mental health. The Los Angeles Public Library’s Teens Leading Change initiative, a teen advocacy group, provides peer education about healthy, mindful habits for social media use and screen time.
Florida has approved the Classic Learning Test, which focuses on the Western Canon and Christianity, as an alternative to the SAT and ACT in college admissions. Florida’s state universities will now accept the CLT, the latest addition to Governor Ron DeSantis’ fight against “woke indoctrination.” Jeremy Tate, the founder of the CLT, told the New York Times that the test is “apolitical,” though its opponents state that the test “privileges one religion and one culture above all others.”
UCLA declined to hire Yoel Inbar, a psychology professor, after more than 50 graduate students signed a letter opposing his candidacy due to remarks that Dr. Inbar made denouncing diversity statements on his podcast, “Two Psychologists, Four Beers,” in which he described the statements as “value signaling” by universities. Diversity statements require job applicants to “describe how they would contribute to campus diversity, often seeking examples of how the faculty member has fostered an inclusive or antiracist learning environment,” the New York Times reports, adding that nearly half of American colleges and universities require them. Opponents feel that the required statements are prescriptive in what faculty can teach, violating their First Amendment rights. Proponents of diversity statements, however, argue that they ensure that job candidates have an awareness of the challenges that underrepresented minority students face, both in and out of the classroom.
A study by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that two-thirds of university faculty surveyed in Florida, Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina said that they “would not recommend their state to colleagues as a desirable place to work,” Higher Ed Dive reports. One-third of these faculty members reported that they were actively seeking employment in another state, with 300 of 642 professors surveyed in Florida saying that they intend to seek employment out of state in the next year. Many faculty members have raised concerns around new and ongoing efforts to shut down DEI offices and programs in their states, opposing political interference in higher education. State faculty groups told the AAUP that this interference could result in “significant brain drain and a decline in the quality of higher education in these states.”
The New York Times published its College-Access Index, a qualitative report on economic diversity among colleges and universities. The index examines the share of students at 286 highly selective institutions who received Pell Grants, which typically represent students in the bottom half of a school’s income distribution. The report found that while some schools with large endowments have enrolled higher numbers of low-income students in the last decade, the majority of institutions have seen enrollment of low-income students decrease in that time. The average share of students receiving Pell Grants was 21%. At Berea College in Kentucky, a private institution focusing on low-income students, 94% of incoming students received Pell Grants; at Harvard University, 22% of students received Pell Grants, up 4% since 2011; the smallest shares of students with Pell Grants were seen at Bates College, Oberlin College, and Tulane University, all at 8%.
While some schools made immense progress toward socioeconomic diversity in the last decade, many fell back, Inside Higher Ed reports. At Washington University in St. Louis, only 6% of students received Pell Grants ten years ago, which was “the worst in the country,” according to WashU Chancellor Andrew D. Martin. That number is now 16%. But at Fairfield University in Connecticut, the percentage of students with Pell Grants fell from 20% to 8% in the last decade, joining Bates, Oberlin, and Tulane at the bottom of the list.
According to the Hechinger Report, the number of student loan borrowers aged 60 and over who still have debt is six times that number in 2004, and the average amount they owe is up 19-fold. As the Covid-19 pause on student loan repayments comes to an end and the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration’s debt forgiveness plan, the outlook for older borrowers is bleak. Thomas Gokey, co-founder of activist group The Debt Collective, told the Hechinger Report that “a lot of people think of student debt as being a young people’s issue. But when you segment the population by age, the people with the fastest-growing debt are older.”
Fisk University, a historically Black university in Nashville, Tennessee, will now drop students from classes if they owe more than $1,500 and have not set up a payment plan, Inside Higher Ed reports. Students who did not meet the deadline were required to move out of their campus housing this past Sunday, September 10th. University officials say the school was flexible with students who had outstanding debt in the past few years with help from federal Covid-19 relief funds, but the university can no longer afford to provide campus services to students with more than $1,500 in debt.
On Sunday, Michigan State University (MSU) suspended head football coach Mel Tucker following an article in USA Today detailing a sexual harassment complaint against him. For some, the case raises concerns about the culture at MSU, which has a history of sexual harassment cases, including the Larry Nassar case.
Ongoing delays in the Biden administration’s plans to update Title IX policies have caused unrest among some student survivors and advocates, Inside Higher Ed reports. Changes to Title IX made by the Trump administration narrowed the definition of sexual harassment and implemented additional measures to protect the due process rights of students accused of sexual misconduct. One advocate told Inside Higher Ed that “the current rules aren’t accessible and make it really impossible for us to get the support we need.”
Following a recent survey that found that 52% of hiring managers consider experience as the most important factor when hiring recent graduates, Inside Higher Ed reports on the value of both curricular and experiential learning in college. Leading the charge is the University of Iowa, which offers the GROW program to foster regular communication between student employees and their supervisors. Students who have participated in the program say that it improved their communication skills, as well as teaching them time management and conflict resolution.
Wheaton College in Massachusetts will now offer study abroad opportunities for students in their first year of college. The program is designed to offer students who display a strong interest in global studies to “jump into intellectual and cultural adventure” at academically rigorous institutions abroad, Wheaton President Michaele Whelan told Inside Higher Ed. Wheaton joins a growing number of institutions who now offer study abroad experiences to first-year students.
In an op-ed for The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan’s student-run newspaper, one student criticizes the increased rate at which psychiatric medications are prescribed to college students struggling with their mental health. The opinion piece argues that these medications may be over-prescribed and that “consulting other treatment methods first, such as the various types of therapy, can allow an individual to discover the potential root causes of their struggles.”
In the University of Houston’s (UH) student newspaper The Daily Cougar, one student writes that university leaders are “failing when it comes to students’ mental health,” following two student suicides in the spring semester. The student argues that UH’s mental health and wellbeing initiatives—which include installing balcony screens in Agnes Arnold Hall, the open-concept building from which two students jumped to their deaths last spring—have been preventative rather than proactive, and that the university lacks “a comprehensive mental health support system.”