Young, Gifted & Advancing
Young, Gifted & Advancing: Promoting Mental Health and Well-being Among Students of Color, an event hosted by The Steve Fund and Georgetown University on November 1st, will explore the relationship between mental health and well-being, and student achievement and graduation-across stakeholder groups such as students, families, university administrators, faculty, and mental health professionals. Attendees of the convening will examine a wide range of psychological, social, institutional, and systemic factors that undergird the campus experience of college students of color and seek to identify the levers to academic success in higher education for college students of color. Admission is free but space is limited.
Mental and Behavioral Health
The Wall Street Journal reports on the campus response to the recent death by suicide of a high-profile mental-health administrator, Gregory Eells, executive director of University of Pennslyvania’s Counseling and Psychological Services. According to the Journal, the tragedy has hlighted the complexity of the school’s continuing battle against suicide which has included an increase in mental health resources in recent years. The school created an administrative position dedicated to wellness in 2018, expanded staff of Counseling and Psychological Services, developed 24-hour access to counseling services, and shortened waiting periods for appointments with clinicians. Students have formed wellness groups, offering peer-to-peer counseling services, teaching active-listening techniques and funding more student-led wellness events. But many resources often go underutilized, students say. Sometimes the student groups aren’t taken seriously by their peers, and it can be hard to attract them to their services, said Rachel Pak, a junior and the new-member training director of Penn Benjamins, a peer-to-peer counseling group formed after a student suicide in 2014. The Daily Pennsylvanian reports that the Undergraduate Assembly is focusing on the distribution of a wellness guide that informs Penn students of resources on campus. The student governing body is also planning to launch a study to learn more about the struggles Penn students face, and continue working to integrate Counseling and Psychological Services clinicians in more undergraduate schools. Kerri Nickerson, director of grantee and state initiatives at the Suicide Prevention Resource Center said, “It used to be that we thought suicide prevention was the responsibility of the counseling center. But as we understand all of the different risks and protective factors that influence suicide, it’s clear that we really need to look at this as a frame of, everyone on campus has a role to play.”
The Chronicle reports that the student mental health crisis is taking a toll on college mental health counselors. “While all of us have chosen this profession because we have a passion for helping others, avoiding the risk of vicarious trauma and burnout is not easy,” said Melissa Boston, associate dean of student health and counseling at Manhattanville College, in Purchase, N.Y. “The pressures that counseling-center clinicians face are at an all-time high,” wrote David Onestak, director of the Counseling Center at James Madison University. At his center, time to assess and treat students has shrunk while cases have grown more complex. The number of crisis clients, those with immediate safety issues at stake, has grown 900 percent since 2004. Rising rates of depression and burnout are, according to Onestak, “the lived experience of most counseling-center clinicians.”
The Undergraduate Executive Branch of the University of North Carolina Student Government is launching a new peer mental health support network. Nikhil Rao co-chair of the executive branch’s Mental Health Committee, said he hopes the peer support network will help students find an outlet to discuss mental health issues. “There is a unique perspective that can be gained in a student-to-student group,” he said. “I also hope that this group helps to de-stigmatize mental illness and support asking for help.”
Students at the University of Virginia have started a petition demanding more resources and awareness about mental health. The petition calls for UVA to take several actions, including starting mandatory mental health classes, free mental health first aid classes, and more funding for resources and education.
Harvard University Health Services Director Paul J. Barreira will stay involved at the University as the director of the Graduate Student Mental Health Initiative after he steps down from his current role next month. The initiative is a collaborative effort between Barreira and Harvard graduate students and faculty. Its goal is to assess the prevalence of mental health issues among graduate students and to identify specific factors that contribute to their general well-being.
To address the rising mental health needs of college students, a bipartisan group of senators and state representatives, including sponsor Republican Senator John Kennedy and co-sponsors Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator John Cornyn, introduced the Improving Mental Health Access for Students Act. The bill would require public and nonprofit private colleges and universities to put the Crisis Text Line, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and the number for a campus mental health center on the back of every student ID. The bill has the potential to impact the health of 20 million college students on campuses nationwide.
A forum at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health examined the mental health impact of racism and discrimination, and the difficulty in addressing mental health issues among minority students on campus. According to the events’ panelists, while college is a time of transition for all students, the challenge is tougher for students of color, particularly first generation college students, and those from low-income families. These students deal with everyday stresses unfamiliar to more privileged classmates, and can often feel alienated by the norms and traditions of institutions whose student body is mostly white. Exacerbating a feeling of alienation are incidents of discrimination and racism, large and small, intended or unconscious. Together, these stressors create a scenario ripe for the emergence of depression and anxiety at a rate higher than their peers.
Tufts University announced a change to the drop and withdrawal class deadlines, prompted by a recommendation from the Mental Health Task Force. The process of moving the drop and withdrawal deadlines forward began when the Working Group within the Mental Health Task Force conducted a review of Tufts’ policies to gauge their impact on student mental health, according to a statement from Jennifer Stephan, senior associate dean of undergraduate advising in the School of Engineering and co-chair of the Undergraduate Working Group. Stephan emphasized that taking stress away from students was central to the decision. “The intent of moving the withdraw deadline forward is to encourage students to seek help sooner, while there are more options for completing some of their courses, and also to provide stress relief sooner,” Stephan wrote in the statement provided to the Daily in an email.
Temple University’s Athletics Department announced this week that it plans to offer the Headspace meditation app for free to all student athletes and coaches. Headspace offers many guided tutorials for meditation and mindfulness and is available for phone or computer with a focus on meditation on-the-go. It offers over 1,200 hours of content spread over 60 topics, ranging from “One-Minute Meditation” to “Meditation for Walking” to “Sleep by Headspace,” which features nature sounds and music to promote relaxation and healthy sleep.
In Thrive Global, Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University, argues for destigmatizing the notion of “safe spaces,” or as he defines it, the attempt to make sure all students are made to feel welcome in or outside the classroom. According to Roth, the idea has become a favorite target of critics who claim to worry about the preservation of free speech on campus. To be sure, Roth writes, there are examples of sanctimonious “safetyism” – counterproductive coddling of students who feel fragile, infantilizing students by overprotecting them, or just treating them as consumers who have to be kept happy at all costs. However, he writes that the outright dismissal of safe spaces can amount to a harmful disregard for the well-being of students and can perpetuate environments where the entitled continue to dominate those around them and students never learn how to build a more equitable, inclusive community. Roth concludes that, with the emerging mental health crisis on campus, the idea of universities taking conscious steps to protect and nurture students emotionally as well as physically should be welcome.
Diversity and Inclusion
A judge has ruled in favor of Harvard University in a high-profile court case centered on whether the school’s admissions process forces Asian Americans to clear a higher bar to get in. Federal District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs issued her decision Tuesday, saying “the Court finds no persuasive documentary evidence of any racial animus or conscious prejudice against Asian Americans.” In the decision, Burroughs said that while Harvard’s admissions program is “not perfect,” “ensuring diversity at Harvard relies, in part, on race conscious admissions.” In a statement, Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow said, “Today we reaffirm the importance of diversity – and everything it represents to the world.” The plaintiff, advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), accused Harvard of overly considering race and discriminating against Asian American applicants. SFFA President Edward Blum said in a statement that he was disappointed by the ruling and, “SFFA will appeal this decision to the 1st Court of Appeals and, if necessary, to the U.S Supreme Court.” Supporters of affirmative action fear that if this case makes it to the nation’s highest court, race-conscious admissions could be eliminated.
The New York Times reports that at least a dozen Iranian students who were set to begin graduate programs in engineering and computer science say their visas were abruptly canceled and they were barred from their flights to the United States. The State Department said that there had been no change in policy regarding student visas, and higher education officials say that visa problems arise every fall for some of the hundreds of thousands of international students who travel to attend American colleges and universities. But the students, most of whom were headed to schools in the University of California system, say their visas were revoked at the last minute, without any warning or explanation. Most were prevented from boarding flights in Iran, and others from boarding connecting flights in the Persian Gulf.
Jamie Riley, a dean at the University of Alabama resigned in what the university called a “mutual agreement” after a conservative news website published an article about his tweets from 2017 in which Riley, who is black, described the police and the American flag as fixtures of a “systemic history of racism.” Since his resignation, university officials have remained silent, prompting faculty, staff and students to accuse administrators of failing to support Riley and his freedom of speech. But what began as a backlash over a black administrator’s departure has led to a reckoning over race on a campus that is predominantly white and remains haunted by its racial past. In a letter to Stuart R. Bell, the university president, the Black Faculty and Staff Association wrote, “Your silence on this matter is troubling as it presumes agreement with these external parties and instills fearfulness within those who do work in this area.” The letter urges him to bolster the university’s diversity efforts, adding that the circumstances could make recruiting and retaining minorities even more challenging. Students have staged a sit-in at the president’s office, marched on campus and passed a resolution in the Student Senate “reaffirming” the university’s commitment to “protecting the freedom of speech and academic freedom.” The outrage ignited over Riley’s departure and the university’s silence has become a galvanizing moment for black students, with many of them now mobilized and ready to more directly tackle the university’s past.
According to a study to be released by the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions, historically black colleges and universities have far smaller endowments and a far larger share of low-income students than predominantly white institutions do, but raise students up the ladder of economic success at rates comparable to white colleges. A report on the study compared the trajectories of students who attended 50 HBCUs against those who went to mostly white institutions in the same regions. Two-thirds of HBCU students from low-income families, meaning those with household incomes of roughly $25,000 or less, ended up earning at least middle-class incomes by their early to mid-30s. Seventy percent of low-income students at mostly white colleges reached the middle class or higher by that age, according to the report, “Moving Upward and Onward: Income Mobility at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”
Hispanic-serving institutions are rapidly growing in number, but the federal aid available to them is shrinking. A section of the Higher Education Act has reserved $100 million annually in competitive grants for HSIs to increase the number of Latino students with bachelor’s degrees in science, technology, engineering or math. Hispanic-serving institutions, defined as those that have a full-time Latino enrollment of at least 25 percent, had access to this money from fiscal years 2008 through 2019. On Monday, that portion of the HEA – Title III, Part F – expired. This law also allocates mandatory funding to historically black colleges and universities and to tribal colleges and Asian American and Native American/Pacific Islander-serving institutions. Congressional leaders proposed the FUTURE Act in May, to extend the funding for two years for all of these institutions. It passed in the House but has not yet passed in the Senate.
Sexual Assault and Title IX
Rice University has apologized for not pursuing consequences for a student accused of sexual assault after a survivor called out the university in a recent op-ed in the student newspaper. The anonymous op-ed outlined how a student had reported a sexual assault to authorities and then watched as the male perpetrator graduated in fall 2018 without any repercussions. Late Friday evening Rice president David Leebron and the dean of undergraduates, Bridget Gorman, sent out an apology for the handling of the case. Gorman also told the staff of the student newspaper that the administrators had not accurately told the student who filed the sexual assault complaint of the full outcome of the investigation.
Sexual Health and Reproductive Rights
Op-eds in the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Diego State University’s independent student newspaper, the Daily Aztec, argue in favor of the College Student Right to Access Act that would require California’s public university students to provide medication abortion – widely known as the “abortion pill”- at their on-campus student health centers. SB 24 passed the State Assembly and needs Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature to become law.
Student Success
A company called RaiseMe is pitching a new approach to encourage student behaviors known to be associated with retention. RaiseMe’s platform offer students “microscholarships,” or relatively small credits toward their bill, in return for completing tasks like going to office hours, meeting with an academic advisor, or getting involved on campus. RaiseMe announced that it is conducting a pilot project on student-success microscholarships with Wayne State University, a public institution in Detroit. Participating freshmen at Wayne State can earn $10 to $50 for activities like attending a campus arts or athletics event or taking a study-skills workshop. The total they earn – capped at $500 – will be subtracted from their college bill next fall. The thinking behind the initiative is that both the additional financial support and the effort students put in to earn it will increase the chances that they will stay enrolled.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, fewer than one in five students who enroll part time from the start at a four-year college have earned a degree eight years later, and part-time students at community college fare even worse, as reported in the Hechinger Report. The reasons these students take so long to finish college, or drop out altogether, often come down to two factors: money and scheduling. And at many institutions, part-time students remain an afterthought, even though they now make up more than a quarter of students at four-year colleges, and close to two-thirds at community colleges. But, as federal forecasts show part-time enrollment outpacing full-time enrollment through at least 2027, some colleges and states are realizing that they won’t meet their enrollment targets if they don’t pay more attention to this part of the student population. More institutions are scheduling courses at the times when part-time students need them, rather than when it’s convenient for faculty. They’re extending support programs to part-time students that have been proven to improve results. Some states are opening up financial aid programs to part-time students who haven’t previously been eligible for them.
The Chronicle published an analysis of the Pell Grant graduation rates at colleges that receive the most Pell Money. Four public, one private nonprofit, and three for-profit four-year colleges received more than $75 million in Pell Grant aid for their undergraduate students in 2016-17. Among the 25 four-year public institutions whose students were awarded the highest total amounts in Pell Grants, the Universities of California at Irvine, Davis, and Riverside had the highest graduation rates for Pell Grant recipients. The University of Southern California, Howard University, and Syracuse University had the highest graduation rates for Pell recipients among the top 25 four-year private nonprofit institutions. All three sectors, on average, had higher graduation rates for non-Pell students than for Pell students.
WGBH On Campus Radio examined the struggles of part time students and spoke with Davis Jenkins from Teachers College at Columbia University about how colleges and states are trying to improve their outcomes.
College Affordability
New Mexico has announced a plan to make public college and university free for all residents in the state regardless of family income, a proposal considered one of the most ambitious attempts to make higher education more accessible. State officials estimate that the program, officially called the New Mexico Opportunity Scholarship, will help 55,000 students each year attend college.
Robert F. Smith, the private-equity billionaire who pledged to wipe out the student-loan debt of the class of 2019 at Morehouse College, will cover debt taken on by the students’ parents as well. The college said Mr. Smith and his family donated $34 million to a Morehouse program that will pay off students’ and parents’ loans. “With the Student Success Program in place, there is a model for all colleges and universities, starting with Morehouse and HBCUs, to receive gifts from alumni and other supporters that can offset the burden of student loans and give students the freedom to pursue their dreams, the capital to invest in the economic growth of their families and the time that they can give back meaningfully to strengthening their communities,” Mr. Smith said in a statement.
According to a new report from the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University, the current system of higher-education financing exacerbates inequality, with black students facing the greatest challenges when it comes to funding their education through student loans. The report, “Stalling Dreams,” found that twenty years after enrolling in college, the median white student-loan borrower will have paid off 94 percent of the debt he or she accumulated in that period. But the median black borrower for the same period will still owe 95 percent of his or her student-loan debt. Students of color don’t just take on more loans; they also have greater difficulty paying them off, meaning they’re much more likely to experience long-term financial insecurity. The institute’s study tracked national data on a cohort of students who began college in the 1995-96 academic year. When they started college, 43 percent of white students in the cohort financed their education without student loans, compared with just a quarter of black students.
A new analysis from the nonprofit group the Institute for College Access & Success found that America’s student debt is growing more slowly, but has stagnated at a high level. The average burden for indebted college graduates is now nearly $30,000. Two in three students who earned bachelor’s degrees from private nonprofit or public colleges in 2018 had student loans – roughly the same as the year before. Borrowers owed $29,200 on average, an increase of 2 percent over the previous year’s graduating class. Student debt grew by an average of 4 percent a year between 1996 and 2012, the report noted. Persis Yu, director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project at the National Consumer Law Center, said the current level of student debt was too high, even with the slowed growth. “The numbers are still going up, and that’s concerning,” she said. “$30,000 is not sustainable.”
The share of people not making payments on their federal student loans within three years of leaving college is at the lowest level in seven years, the Education Department announced. About 10.1 percent of borrowers who began repayment Oct. 1, 2015, defaulted by Sept. 30, 2018, a 6.5 percent decline from the prior cycle.
Free Speech
A federal appeals court ruled that the “bias response” team at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor that helps students who feel they’ve been harassed or bullied uses “implicit threat of punishment and intimidation to quell speech.” The court vacated a federal district court’s ruling that had supported Michigan’s right to refer students to the bias-response team. It bounced the case back to the U.S. District Court that had earlier agreed with the university that the team is not a disciplinary body and that its role is to support and educate students who agree to participate. Speech First, a membership association in Washington, D.C., that advocates for free speech on college campuses, sued the university last year, seeking to force it to discontinue its bias-response team. It also challenged the university’s student-disciplinary code, which prohibits harassment and bullying in ways the group finds overly broad and potentially discriminatory.
The Chronicle compiled an interactive resource on Diversity of Thought on campus that includes articles about campus political debates and whether ideological diversity is a problem.
Greek Life
University of Mississippi implemented new mandated diversity training for every potential Greek student prompted by continued racial tensions on campus. Provost Noel Wilkin committed to providing diversity training for all students going through Greek recruitment after a photo circulated that depicted UM fraternity members posing with firearms in front of a bullet riddled Emmett Till memorial. “We’ve had convocations previously, but this year … we had a pre-recruitment education where (potential new members) learned about various topics that are hot in the Greek community such as hazing, diversity and inclusion, a drugs and alcohol seminar and a sexual harassment seminar,” Colton Terrell, IFC Vice President of Recruitment said.
