Category: Identify students at risk

From the Chronicle, August 2016:

Jeremy J. Reed knows what it’s like to wear work boots on a campus. As an undergraduate at Loras College, where he was a first-generation student heavily dependent on federal aid, he labored as a painter for the Iowa campus’s maintenance department.

With fond memories of the support and encouragement he had received from other blue-collar workers on the campus, he later decided to study custodians as a doctoral student in higher education and student affairs at the University of Iowa. For his dissertation, completed last year, he shadowed four long-serving custodians on their rounds at a large Midwestern public university, which his research protocol precludes him from naming.

The Chronicle caught up with Mr. Reed this week at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, where he is now director of admissions, to ask him about his custodian study. Following is an edited and condensed transcript of that interview.

Click here to read the full article and interview through your institution’s access to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Co-authored by The Jed Foundation (JED) and Kognito, this whitepaper highlights data findings from a survey of 65,177 faculty, staff, and students in 100+ colleges and universities to answer:

1. How prepared are faculty, staff, and students to refer students to the appropriate resources?
2. Is it part of the role of faculty, staff, or students to connect students experiencing signs of distress with mental health services?
3. Are they already connecting students at sufficient levels?

Click here to view the whitepaper.

Although the severity of psychological problems among college students and the demand for campus counseling services has increased, many students who could benefit from mental health services still do not access them. This article describes Community Consultation and Intervention, a program designed to support students who are unlikely to access professional help despite the best efforts of traditional counseling center outreach. Community Consultation and Intervention reaches into the campus community to intervene by advising faculty and staff who may be the only contact for a distressed student, taking on a nontraditional “student support” role in direct interactions with students, offering advocacy when university systems or other environmental stressors precipitate psychological problems, and providing case management and crisis intervention services on behalf of the university when troubled students are especially concerning and disruptive to their communities. The most novel element of the program—the student support role—is distinct from conventional counseling in that it privileges problem solving, support, advice, and advocacy over focusing on emotions and other traditional mental health interventions. Case studies and programmatic challenges are described.

Click here to access the full article, published in the Journal of College Student Pyschotherapy in 2008, through your institution’s access with Taylor & Francis Online.