The student writing in to Central Piedmont Community College was frantic. Her parents, she told college administrators, had lost their jobs because of Covid-19, and the family was down to crackers and a bottle of water. She didn’t see how she could continue her studies when they couldn’t even count on their next meal.
The college, in triage mode, responded to her emergency grant application with a gift card to Walmart and a list of area food banks. Administrators know she isn’t alone. This fall, every syllabus will include a statement urging students to let their instructors or campus counselors know if they’re struggling with food, housing, or other basic needs.
Since early March, the North Carolina college has distributed roughly $25,000 in emergency aid to about 60 students, mostly to cover utilities, rent, and car expenses, said Dena Shonts, associate dean of student engagement. Working with its foundation and Single Stop USA, a nonprofit that connects needy students with public benefits and community resources, Central Piedmont has distributed hundreds of laptops and Wi-
fi hotspots.
They’re trying to figure out how to keep a roof over their heads and keep the lights on. Our job is to help triage.
Amid the chaos clouding plans for the next academic year, one thing is clear: Students will be more vulnerable than ever. Greater numbers are likely to struggle financially or academically, and those with chronic health conditions, compromised immune systems, or disabilities face unprecedented risks — to their well-being and to their education.
To return to campus and succeed, students will require extra support. But in spite of their pledges to protect vulnerable populations, few colleges have spelled out concrete plans to offer it.
When finances are tight and faculty and staff members are already working overtime, even accommodating well-resourced, healthy, and able-bodied students will be a challenge. What will colleges do about those students who are most vulnerable?
The Chronicle asked experts and administrators what high-touch support looks like in a time when public-health experts are urging people to keep their distance.
Who Returns and Who Doesn’t?
Most campus plans for reopening describe a gradual process, with an online component included in the vast majority of in-person classes, to accommodate students who, for health or personal reasons, aren’t ready to return to the classroom.
This hybrid approach, recommended in guidance from the American College Health Association, will also allow instructors to more easily convert to an online-only format if there’s another surge of Covid-19 cases. It will give students more options than they had this spring, but it will require complicated logistics as they shift between physical classrooms and remote sessions.
Say a student with a health risk starts out learning on campus but decides it’s safest to leave halfway through the semester. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, that student will be able to seamlessly transition to online learning, said Patrick O’Rourke, interim executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer. The goal, O’Rourke said during a call with reporters on Tuesday, is for all students to continue their education in whatever way makes sense for them.
“Some vulnerable individuals may need to observe ongoing physical distancing for a more prolonged period of time,” the ACHA guidance states.
Though President Mitch Daniels was one of the first to vow a return to in-person learning this fall, Purdue University is planning for the hybrid approach most colleges are taking. Daniels estimated that 80 percent of the campus community is young and faces “close to zero lethal threat” from Covid-19. As for the other 20 percent — people with underlying health conditions and older people — the university will “consider new policies and practices that keep these groups separate,” Daniels said.
Such proposals to separate groups suggest that certain students could be told to keep away from campus, said Reginald Fennell, a professor of public health emeritus at Miami University, in Ohio, and a member of the ACHA’s Covid-19 task force. But, Fennell asked, are colleges legally allowed to make such requests?
“I don’t know that we can send letters to students and say, ‘Those with certain conditions cannot return,’” he said. “As a student, I would want to know, how did you get that information?”
Scaling up online alternatives — and ensuring that the quality is roughly comparable to the in-person courses — will take a lot of effort. At Pepperdine University, with an enrollment of 7,600 students, officials say they’ll be adding cameras and recording technology to every classroom on all of its
campuses.
Colleges will also need to pay closer attention to students with disabilities, to be sure that revamped courses include the accommodations they’re entitled to, according to Jamie Axelrod, director of disability resources at Northern Arizona University.
A Zoom class that breaks off into group discussions might include an interpreter, for instance, so a deaf student can participate. Instructors who give timed tests to cut down on cheating might need to be reminded to allow extra time for students with attention deficit and other disorders, he said.
Faculty members should also consider alternative ways to test students when online accommodations aren’t possible and should watch out for unintended consequences, Axelrod said. Some online proctoring services that configure students’ computers so that all they see is the test can knock out a blind student’s screen-reader software, for instance.
Despite college leaders’ commitments to supporting at-risk populations, Lee Burdette Williams, senior director for mental-health initiatives at Naspa: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, worries that it’ll be difficult for colleges to assign a top priority to high-need students this fall, given grim financial realities.
As institutions focus on stabilizing enrollment, she’s concerned that some colleges will adopt a flawed mind-set, that “if you have 50 students without disabilities and 10 students with disabilities, you have to focus on the 50 and whatever it takes to get them to campus,” she said. To ensure that doesn’t happen, Williams suggested, disability-services offices should be given a place at the decision-making table.
A New Kind of Campus Life
For residential-life staff, preparing for medically vulnerable students is tricky. It remains unclear how many will return to campus, their plans often depending on local guidance.
In many states, governors are still recommending that people with certain health conditions stay home. For those students, campus housing might be too risky, said Pam Schreiber, assistant vice president for student life and executive director of housing and food services at the University of Washington.
Perhaps her office won’t see an increase in housing-accommodation requests. On the other hand, Schreiber said, Covid-19 has exacerbated psychological distress for some students. Will more students ask to bring support animals to their dorms? If so, residence-life staff will have to consider whether there is a scientific reason not to allow them, to try to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.
Schreiber, who’s also vice president of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International,
said her office is accustomed to handling many accommodations, like visual fire alarms and accessible showers. At Washington, students with disabilities apply for campus housing and then register with the disability-services office, which reviews and approves requests.
In the time of Covid-19, though, medically at-risk students who don’t have a disability — a severely asthmatic student, for instance — might also need an accommodation, like a single room. Schreiber isn’t yet sure how Washington will handle those cases, though she noted that students can include preferred dorm assignments on their applications.
It’s hard to conceive of a disruption that operates on so many levels.
On many campuses, changes in campus dining are in the works, too. Guidance on shared housing and dining spaces from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that people who might be at risk of contracting Covid-19 “should eat or be fed in their room, if possible.”
The reopening plans devised by the University of Colorado at Boulder and Indiana University call for retrofitting campus dining halls for delivery and takeout, a move that could make it safer for medically vulnerable people to live on campus. At Pepperdine, university officials say they are working to expand delivery options via third parties like DoorDash and Uber Eats.
Embedding Support Systems
As colleges scramble to protect students with health conditions, they’ll have to contend with growing numbers who are struggling for other reasons.
“It’s unclear who will show up in the summer and fall,” said Nikki Edgecombe, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “When you then try to map out the various vulnerabilities students may be subject to,” planning for the semester “becomes pretty complex,” she said. “It’s hard to conceive of a disruption that operates on so many levels.”
The emergency pivot to online courses this spring proved especially stressful for disadvantaged students who need more counseling and advising to stay on track. Many low-income and first-generation students struggled when the structure they needed to stay on course was shattered, said DeRionne P. Pollard, president of Montgomery College, a two-year institution in Maryland.
A campus taking the “hybrid” approach to reopening could head off those problems with different scheduling options. At Montgomery, which has announced plans to start the fall semester online, synchronous classes that require students and instructors to be online at the same time will offer a more structured schedule for those who need it. Asynchronous classes, which can be accessed any time, will provide more flexibility for students whose jobs and families make it impossible to show up, say, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9 a.m.
Breaking semesters into quarters or other short modules could also make the term less daunting for students struggling to balance child care, work, and studying, Pollard said. Those with school-age children could once again be home schooling if another wave of the pandemic hits.
“Colleges were able to pull off Herculean efforts to get students through the last seven weeks of the spring term,” said Shauna Davis, executive director of holistic student supports for Achieving The Dream, a nonprofit network of community colleges working on student success. “The equity gaps we uncovered are only going to get broader.”
Many campuses plan to rely more on early-alert systems that ping advisers when students’ grades slip or they miss a few classes. The advisers can then connect students with tutors, share time-management tips, and, when needed, steer them toward emergency financial aid.
Students will also need to be directed, through links embedded in courseware, to supports like career and academic advising that have proved key to motivating struggling and overwhelmed students, retention professionals say.
Tutoring, too, will need to be embedded in courses that are partially or completely online. As classes kick off, faculty members will face more than the usual uncertainty about how far behind students have fallen during this chaotic spring semester. With many of the preplacement testing centers closed over the summer because of the pandemic, professors probably won’t know which students need remedial support, and how much.
Katie Hern, an English instructor at Skyline College, in California, said the graduate student participating in her English class, which moved online this spring, continued to take the class remotely, where she helped identify and teach students who showed signs of struggling. When classes were in person, some of that help would have taken place in campus tutoring centers or in person after class.
Even as students begin returning to campuses, many will continue to need laptops and Wi-Fi hotspots, or at least parking lots where they can tap into expanded campus Wi-Fi , according to a survey conducted by Educause. Under social-distancing rules, computer labs will accommodate fewer students than they did before.
San Juan College, in New Mexico, posted a map of places, including campus parking lots and outside local businesses and churches, where students can tap into Wi-Fi. It even lists locations where students living in remote parts of nearby Native American reservations can log on. The college has also lent students hundreds of laptops and mobile hotspots, and plans to expand that effort in the fall.
Stretching the Safety Net
When the pandemic tanked the economy, a wave of college students suddenly faced new financial uncertainties. As a result, the safety nets designed for the low-income students that colleges already knew about are expanding. Pollard, of Montgomery College, said she expects more students to appeal their financial-aid awards using a new online tool called Swift, which helps them craft their pleas.
There are limits, of course, to how much more money colleges will have to distribute. But if students who aren’t accustomed to asking for help just assume they can no longer afford college, the impact on the bottom line could be far worse.
“When you have a working-class family that’s getting by, and suddenly one or two members aren’t working, covering college tuition may be way down on the list,” Pollard said. “They’re trying to figure out how to keep a roof over their heads and keep the lights on. Our job is to help triage.”
Colleges should reach out to students who may need help in ways that don’t feel stigmatizing, several student-support experts noted. Calling a place where students can pick up free food a cafe, or making it part of a campus hub, can make students less reluctant to come in.
Institutions should try to keep their food pantries active, regardless of their campus operating status, because the number of students who need them is likely to grow, said Micah Griffin, director of health programs at Kingsborough Community College, which is part of the City University of New York. Kingsborough will continue to do just that, stocking its pantry with produce from its own urban farm.
With ballooning demands on campus resources, and the likelihood of shrinking tuition dollars and state support, colleges will need to expand efforts to connect students with the “low-hanging fruit” of existing campus and community resources, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University and founder of the Hope Center for College Community and Justice.
“Every college should be absolutely certain that every student knows how to access unemployment insurance, knows whether they’re eligible for a stimulus check, and how to connect with [nutrition assistance] programs like SNAP and WIC,” Goldrick-Rab said.
High-Volume Health Services
For financially struggling students, campus health centers might be their primary access to medical care. When colleges reopen, health centers will very likely see a higher volume of requests for care, as more students potentially contract the virus.
Fennell, the Miami emeritus professor, said he’s worried that student health centers won’t be prepared to contain a potential outbreak and accommodate vulnerable students. Some small colleges staff clinics with nurse practitioners and don’t even have a full-time clinician, he said. What’s more, campus health services are often funded mostly by student fees, which could decline if many students don’t return to campus in the fall.
When you have a working-class family that’s getting by, and suddenly one or two members aren’t working, covering college tuition may be way down on the list.
At CU-Boulder, the university’s student medical center already has a staff of 125, so the institution is prepared for many anticipated health needs, O’Rourke said. But officials plan to make “some targeted hires” for health-focused roles, including contact tracing, he said. The institution has set aside up to $15 million for the investments needed to prepare the campus for the fall.
Other colleges are turning to outside vendors to fill in gaps in their health coverage. Institutions like Los Rios Community College and Duke University are now forming partnerships with Timely MD to serve students virtually. With a few taps on an app or website, students can quickly connect with a doctor or therapist via video or phone, at any time of day.
Students don’t have to pay for Timely MD telehealth visits. For colleges, the cost depends on the number of students enrolled and services offered.
Telehealth options will be crucial this fall, said Alan Dennington, chief medical officer at Timely MD. Some medically vulnerable students may feel uncomfortable sitting among other people in the waiting room of the campus health center and prefer to do virtual appointments from their dorm room. Others may still be learning remotely and need access to a doctor or psychologist who’s licensed in their state. Or students may need to talk to a therapist at 2 a.m., when the counseling center is closed.
On the mental-health front, colleges should keep in mind that the pandemic is not affecting students equally, experts say. For instance, in many states, black students are significantly more likely to have family members who have contracted or died from Covid-19.
Counseling centers will need to directly reach out to students of color and other populations who are experiencing a lot of stress and yet don’t often seek out mental-health services, like international and commuter students, said Sharon Mitchell, senior director of counseling, health, and wellness at the University at Buffalo and president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors.
Creating support communities — perhaps therapy groups led by counselors, or peer-led support groups — is one option. Harvard University recently restarted its support group for students of color. At Hunter College, part of the City University of New York system, the counseling center has started a support group for students experiencing personal or academic hardship as a result of Covid-19. The American College Health Association also recommends holding virtual “Let’s Talk” sessions — brief, drop-in consultations with campus therapists — geared toward underrepresented students.
Students with existing mental-health disorders are also vulnerable. Colleges must prepare for the fact that continued social distancing could lead to worsening isolation and loneliness, Mitchell said. Anxiety — already the top reason students seek counseling — is likely to spike even more, she wrote in an email.
Beyond formal medical and mental-health care, colleges can add tips and resources for struggling students to campus websites and course syllabi. A professor of biology and biomedical ethics at Pima Community College, in Arizona, has created a webinar to help students recognize and mitigate stress.
Trading phone numbers with classmates, watching funny TV shows, deep breathing, and long walks are all useful tips to add to the syllabus, according to Mays Imad, who coordinates Pima’s Teaching and Learning Center.
Also important, for all students but particularly those questioning whether they belong in college, is creating opportunities for students to feel they’re part of a community, Imad said. Learning groups and clubs and activities that can be converted to virtual platforms can help mitigate feelings of loneliness and isolation.
“Getting students connected with things that matter to them,” Burdette Williams said, “that’s the retention tool for the ages.”
