WASHINGTON (CN) — When students swarm back to colleges and universities this fall, things cannot return back to normal, lawmakers and university officials said during a Senate hearing on Thursday. They must improve.
“Normal left too many students hungry and homeless and hanging by a thread,” said Senator Patty Murray, chairwoman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “It left them with historic amounts of student loan debt and empty promises from predatory for-profit colleges. Normal was system racial and economic inequalities in higher ed and an epidemic of sexual assault, harassment and bullying on campuses.
“If this pandemic has taught us anything, it's that we have to do better than normal.”
During the pandemic, more than half of students experienced food insecurity or housing insecurity, according to the Association of American Colleges & Universities. But a lack of basic needs is nothing new for college students. Affordable housing and costs of living have been out of reach of students — minority and low-income students, especially — for years.
More than $76 billion in higher education emergency funding has been given to colleges and universities around the country to help students address basic and academic needs since colleges and universities transitioned to online learning.
“We said that students are safer at home and that they could study from home,” said Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, vice provost of enrollment management at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But that wasn’t true for a lot of our students so we spent a lot of money on computers and other technologies.”
Additionally, Copeland-Morgan said, a good portion of the emergency federal funding was put into food, housing and mental health services.
“Mental health has been a growing concern in higher education for the past 20 years,” Copeland-Morgan said. “And we are seeing more and more of our students coming to us needing services.”
According to a study done by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the prevalence of anxiety in the first year college students increased by 40% during the pandemic, and the prevalence of depression increased by 48%. Depression among Black students increased by 89%.
“Mental health needs have increased in Covid, but before Covid we were dealing with increasing need,” said Reynold Verret, president of Xavier University.
Verret said that Xavier has established student-risk committees to ensure that the university is meeting student needs, with trained academic staffing and increased reliance on telehealth services.
“Much that we have learned during the pandemic, we will keep,” Verret said.
Madeline Pumariega, president of Miami Dade College in Florida, said that they also have increased their mental health services, including telehealth services.
“This pandemic has disrupted classrooms, housing security, mental health, and the economy. It has upended those who are already struggling,” Murray said. “The pandemic shows us how much college students are hanging on by a thread — and also, the power of supporting communities.”
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