Karen Gross: Good things have happened in higher education during the pandemic

From Wikipedia

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

It would not be the least bit unusual to feel pessimistic about education in general and higher education in particular. Enrollments have been declining at many institutions across the education landscape. Budgets are tight at many. Shootings on campuses or unexpected deaths of students are far too frequent. So too are hazing and harassment. Discrimination is on the rise. The equity gap is widening. Faculty and staff are disenchanted and stressed; so are students. Mental wellness is a challenge for many. In short, the future doesn’t look bright. And the media are having a heyday sharing all the negative news.

Yet, I still have hope.

What alternative is there? If we don’t have hope, we stagnate and fail to make forward progress. Add to this that, philosophically speaking, hope is an attitude we hold that enables us to navigate difficult times with a forward-focused approach and a belief in the possibility of a better future.

Pandemic positives

There is a third reason that I see hope in education. It has to do with what we experienced and how we responded to the pandemic. It may seem counterintuitive to many, but we need to shift the lens through which we view the pandemic’s impact on education.

Most people have been focused on the pandemic’s negatives and how we eradicate or lessen all that has happened to students. There is an embedded assumption that we need to move “back to normal” to restore what the pandemic stole.

But this assumes that education was, pre-pandemic, in good shape, which is far from the truth. Even pre-pandemic, there were deficits in education that led to student failures in college and lack of access to quality postsecondary education for far too many low-income students. Pedagogy was suboptimal in many classrooms; lecturing was too common.

Demographics also impacted educational enrollment in a period before the pandemic started. And though there were approaches being researched and tried before the pandemic to improve higher education, many of these ideas were not implemented widely or fully. For example, social and emotional learning was gaining traction as were community schools and trauma-sensitive schools. Studies showing the value of enhancing the student-teacher relationship as it improves learning and self-control were available and used by some academic institutions.

But we have ignored the positives that occurred within the education landscape, As part of a book we are co-authoring, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of psychology Edward K. S. Wang and I have gathered a wide range of positives that actually occurred during the pandemic in terms of learning and psychosocial development. Yes, there were positives although they have often not been named or recognized. And these positives have not been replicated or scaled.

Here are just a few examples of these positives. With educators working online, they were able to see students engaging with their families and that often disclosed dysfunction that, but for online learning, would not have been observed. So, in a real way, educators had an opportunity to understand more fully who their students were/are. Consider too the fact that some students who did not engage in classroom discussion when learning was in-person, were able to participate more fully and more easily online; for these students, it is likely that the absence of teasing or peer pressure were eased online. With both in-person masked and socially distant learning and in the online environment, educators exercised increased strategies to engage and connect with students as well as connecting them to each other; the absence of the “normal” engagement approaches allowed for new avenues for connection. This prompted more project-based learning, pod learning and interactive activities, all educational positives.

What if we try to identify as many of these positives as possible and reflect on how did they come about? Then we can look at how to replicate and scale these positives for the betterment of higher education moving forward.

Begin with how the positives came to pass. Think about this phrase and its applicability: Necessity is the mother of invention. We know that in times of crisis, we develop strategies to cope and deal with what is before us. We may not know why what we develop during a crisis works, but there is no question but that crises create opportunities to change the status quo. Crises force us to act quickly too, because change is afoot and will not await the traditional timetables for change.

And, that happened in education at all levels. Educators figured out–not systemically to be sure–how to teach online (some for the first time). These educators wrestled with new ways to present materials. These educators struggled to engage students who were not all in the same room–engage them with the material, engage them with one another and engage them with the educator.

Take this example. Some college students were signing into classes, but were not engaging with learning. Their names, not faces, appeared. They muted themselves. In reality, some professors did not even know if the students were “there” in terms of paying attention. Some professors realized that “teaching as usual” was not an option. There needed to be different incentives, different approaches, different forms of engagement.

While new to online platforms and learning with their colleagues, professors tried new pedagogies. Some professors tried using polling to measure learning and class engagement. Some tried using breakout rooms, allowing students to process information and solve problems. Some turned to videos within the online environment and then encouraged discussion. Some used the chat room and other writing tools, recognizing that different students had different learning styles in the online world (something that was true pre-pandemic). Some had efforts to get students to “tune” in by having true/false questions, the answers to which involved showing or not showing faces on screen. Some professors came online early and left late to enable students to ask questions. Some professors used email and online platforms to message students between classes and make connections. Some had virtual office hours. Some had phone calls with students. The ways professors made online learning work, when they were previously unaccustomed to this learning modality, was remarkable.

These are all approaches which, absent the sudden crisis and need to move online or into hybrid mode, would not have happened. Yes, online learning did exist pre-pandemic, but it was not deployed in many traditional academic environments. And, in the process of changing how they taught their students, professors experienced changes too in how they viewed their roles and responsibilities as educators. In a sense, the shared Pandemic experience allowed students and educators to engage more fully and with greater understanding of each other.

Reflect on these examples.

Some students expressed frustration with their learning through online behavior like noticeably demonstrating disinterest; they multitasked or used their cell phones or were eating and drinking, suggesting the need for a professor to engage with them offline. And, seeing this behavior encouraged some professors to pause, take note and reach out, likely because they themselves were struggling to remain engaged.

Some students were unable to connect to the materials or the class and farmed off the work to outsiders. Recognizing this risk made professors create assignments that were unique and unavailable to purchase; they also designed engagement and its impact on class grading to operate differently so that students were unable disregard in-class participation.

Some students were dysregulated or disassociated, whether online or in-person; this means they were unable to concentrate and learn as a consequence of their traumatic pandemic (or other) experience. Some of these students were angry over the change in their educational experience and wanted no part of the new offerings. Some simply checked out even though they were present. Some acted out by stomping around, throwing paper, banging on their phone, being loud and argumentative and this could be witnessed online or in person. Professors and staff had to intervene and engage differently with these students, including through interventions with staff with experience in mental wellness.

The pandemic also brought policy flexibility with experimental efforts, pilot initiatives and changes in grading and discipline. Addressing NEBHE’s fall 2022 board meeting, Inside Higher Ed’s Doug Lederman noted that after trillions of dollars in federal aid helped higher education make faster adaptations during the pandemic, now, sadly, institutions and educators are returning to the old ways. In some ways, we can see parallels to the speed with which Covid vaccines were created; federal funding, collaboration and need were compelling forces.

Here’s the point: Educators teaching during the pandemic made changes to what they did and how they did it–even if they would not have made changes but for the Pandemic’s intervention. What they did not realize or understand is that the changes they made should not be limited to the Pandemic world. They employed approaches that are valuable still: engagement; connection and communication. And these changed learning strategies are trauma-responsive, even though they likely were not used with trauma amelioration at the forefront of professors’ minds. Indeed, the trauma literature abounds with references to the need for trusted individuals, ongoing connection and increased communication.

One strategy was to visualize this change in the midst of a crisis is to reflect on the following illustration. Pre-pandemic, things were like the lower left corner of this painting, largely ordered although certainly not homogeneous. During the pandemic, things changed, and the usual rules and formats and engagement changed and we became disordered in a sense. The order pre-pandemic was disrupted. We needed professors to change; we needed students to change; we needed institutions to change. And the changes were made as we went. We built the education plane as it was flying.

What does this all mean?

We need to identify the positives that occurred in education during the pandemic. Then we need to find ways to share these positives so they can be replicated and scaled. And we need to develop stickiness— how to make change last and endure so that we can see long-term improvement. Now, stickiness is tricky; how we can make social change is a topic worthy of future discussion.

As I reflect on the positive changes engendered by the pandemic, I am struck by the statement that accompanies an ancient Japanese form of pottery repair named Kintsugi. The broken shards are pieced together with gold and then it is said, “More Beautiful for Being Broken.”

In a very real way, inspired by Kintsugi, we need to make peace with the pieces the pandemic left behind and gather the positive shards and allow them to be part of education moving forward. This following illustration that I created is an effort to speak to the beauty that can be found if we piece together what is broken. And, by analogy, so it is with education.

With the Kintsugi philosophy in mind, here is what I see. I see that positive change happened in higher education during the pandemic, and for complex reasons, we have largely ignored it. Instead, we are enamored with the negatives the pandemic produced, which are plentiful to be sure.

We would be wise to look at the positives, some of which were detailed above, that occurred–within and outside individual classrooms and within the higher education community. And we can then name what happened during the pandemic us to move forward. If we do this, we can use what we did to better education for our students today and tomorrow.

A crisis created opportunity for change. Let’s not let that opportunity go to waste to play off a hackneyed phrase. That, at the end of the day, is my hope. And it is not chimerical hope. It is hope grounded in this reality: if we are willing to work to acknowledge and then use the positive change we created, we can improve higher education.

Karen Gross is a former president of Southern Vermont College and a senior policy adviser to the U.S. Department of Education. She specializes in student success and trauma across the educational landscape and teaches at the Rutgers University School of Social Work. Her most recent book, Trauma Doesn’t Stop at the School Door: Solutions and Strategies for Educators, PreK-College, was released in June 2020 by Columbia Teachers College Press and was the winner of the Delta Kappa Gamma Educator’s Book of the Year award.

Karen Gross: Role-modeling by adults too often lacking in COVID-19 crisis

The Rev. John Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame. Did he not wear a mask at a reception in order to suck up to Donald Trump?

BOSTON

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Sadly, the number of COVID-19 cases across the globe is rising. And while vaccines are in the offing, we may have many weeks between now and their availability, time in which more individuals can become infected and too many will die. In absolute terms, the numbers are staggering in the U.S. and around the world.

It is against this background that we should be concerned about super-spreader events. One category of such events includes college and high school students gathering and partying in ways that violate the COVID-19 protective measures (mask wearing, social distancing, avoiding large indoor get-togethers). Some of these problematic events occur off campus, others occur on campus. Wherever they happen, they have produced varying outcomes: quarantines; stoppage of athletic events; elimination of on-campus in-person learning (for a short or long period); changes in scheduling to eradicate vacations or campus departures; and students contracting COVID.

It is easy to blame students (whether in college or high school) and parents (in the context of high schoolers and even some college students who are now at home taking online classes). Can you hear adults within families and educational institutions saying: “How stupid can these young people be? They aren’t complying with the three simple rules.”

But the failure of compliance among young people must be contextualized. We are not living in “normal” times and behaviors need to be understood in light of the impact of the pandemic constraints as well as the age of students and their developmental stage.

Lack of physical connection, risk-taking, brain development

Start with this obvious observation: The wearing of masks, social distancing and school closures have left many young people without quality means of connecting. As much as they can use technology and we are certainly doing that (Zoom fatigue is a known phenomenon, as is online oversharing), there is something that youth are missing: real, hands-on human engagement. They are missing contact; they are missing touch. They are without smiles and hugs and physicality.

The absence of physical contact for an extended period (and what still seems like an indefinite period) is difficult and frustrating for young people. It makes them want to rebel against the constraints and ignore the accompanying risks that often are known to them. In short, students disobey COVID-19 rules because they have real needs for in-person connectivity that are unmet.

Brain science supports this conclusion: Most young people cannot fully control their behavior on their own and they discard the COVID-19 rules because of the stage of their brain development. Risk-taking is common among young people; it goes hand and hand with their psychosocial development. We know that young people underestimate risk: think about fast cars and drunk driving, texting while driving and physical challenges that seem likely to cause serious physical injury. Also, we know that quality judgment and decision-making do not occur until the mid to late 20s. (There are also upsides to this stage of development but that’s the subject of another article.)

Our expectation of strict compliance misses the biological reality of why students are disobeying. The parts of their brain that manage and measure risks are not fully developed. Youth are not trying to be disobedient (well, some are as a form of rebellion that is also age-appropriate). Many simply are not able to make quality decisions—at least not without adult intervention, and therein lie some answers as to what we can do to move toward greater compliance.

Two concrete examples

Before turning to solutions, let’s look at two actual scenarios that inform a pathway forward.

In late October, more than 20 high schoolers attended a party at a private home in Marblehead, Mass. Not only was there an absence of mask wearing, there was an absence of social distancing and there was shared drinking out of cups. The police were called. The students scattered. No one was prosecuted. The superintendent in a remarkably astute letter recognized student needs to connect, but then closed the high school as a precaution and decried that they can and must do better.

A few months earlier, Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., suspended some students for participating in off-campus parties and later, when the non-compliance continued, had to shut down the campus physically. Before moving to online learning, the college president was quoted as saying: “Please don’t be a knucklehead who disregards the safety of others and puts our ability to remain on campus at risk.”

Pathways forward

We know that student risky behavior can be modified, and there are a variety of strategies that enable change. The problem is that we have not deployed them in the context of this pandemic for reasons that aren’t at all clear to me.

We would be wise to spend more time recognizing the psychological reasons for student behavior and, based on that science, create new strategies that mitigate the reasons noted above for non-compliance. And since the stage of student development also opens the door to creativity, why not use creativity as part of the solution?

Consider these approaches: Social-norming campaigns can show compliance or willingness to comply by many students to norms despite peer perceptions. Detailed discussions with students can lead to an understanding of the risks (based on science) to others and themselves with concrete examples and data points. Youth empathy engines can be activated such that students are engaged in doing activities that help others in their communities. These can be conducted by parents and educators alike. Consider a version of this “rock” project in Texas. Students could all get and paint rocks and then they and other students can place the rocks around school buildings or a college campus.

For the record, let’s eliminate one approach: student punishment and suspension as the first line of defense. We should be punishing when there is intent. Absent intent, we should not rush into suspending students. Yes, based on parties, we need to quarantine; yes, based on parties, we need to shut down campus residential life or in-person learning for a period of time. But calling people “knuckleheads” is not helpful.

Instead, let’s think about preemptive things that could be done to prevent the non-compliant risky behavior. We can do better, as the superintendent suggested, but we need to get ahead of the problem and not be reactive to it.

Role models

From my perspective, perhaps one of the best strategies for enabling students to shift behavioral patterns and avoid risky and unwise behavior is role modeling. We know that role modeling is critically important to youth. And role models can come from a variety of locations: family, older friends and peers, educators (including administrators and coaches), religious figures and community leaders. We also know that role models can be individuals whom students do not know personally: politicians, actors, athletes.

We know, too, that an antidote to trauma is a non-familial figure who knows you and genuinely cares about your well-being and believes in you. And we know that positive role models can and do counteract negative childhood and adult experiences. Our adults need to step it up—engage with one another and their children and peers in new ways.

Despite these truths, we aren’t doing a good job of role modeling locally or nationally. Consider the absence of good role modeling in the two concrete examples given earlier involving Marblehead and Marist and similar communities, schools and colleges.

With respect to Marblehead and similar communities where parties have occurred, I would ask (in a non-accusatory way): Where were the parents who lived in the home where the party was held? Were they home? Were they aware of the party in advance? Did they buy the items for the party? Where were the parents of the other students who attended the party? Did they know where their children were going that evening? What had the parents done in anticipation of the needs of their children to plan events that would be safe? What had the high school done in advance to recognize the need for students to engage but to construct initiatives that were safe for each student and the collective of students?

With respect to Marist and similar colleges, I would ask (again, in a non-accusatory way): Where were the student life personnel? Were they aware of particular off-campus sites that might present risks? What did they do in advance to provide for the engagement needs of students in safe ways? What messaging was coming from the administration in advance? And was the reference to the students as knuckleheads wise? By way of contrast, the superintendent in Marblehead overtly recognized the student need to engage in person in these difficult times, although for safety reasons, he closed in-person learning.

For me, Lesson One is that the institutions (both high school and postsecondary) and parents need to anticipate what activities could have meet student needs. And they should involve students in planning these events. There are a myriad of possibilities: art-installation projects; distant dancing; car get-togethers (remember “car hops?) with limited numbers in cars where students listen to live music or watch a movie together? What about wrapping all the trees in crepe paper to create a “Christo-esque” artwork and even, teaching about Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s amazing and startling work involving wrapping buildings and bridges and parks?

We can be creative in seeing what the needs are and then developing approaches that meet the needs.

Lesson Two is that the parents (of the party home) and the parents of other teenagers were not (it appears) actively aware of their own child’s behavior. Had they been, I think one can rightly ask whether they would have intervened. And we can rightly ask whether they themselves, in their engagement with others, were role modeling the needed protective behavior (masks, social distancing and outdoor events). Or perhaps they did not believe in the science and thus were noncompliant.

At the college level, I’d suggest there were staff who could have guessed where problems off-campus were likely, especially if they knew their students and had their ears to the ground. Even if this was not their role before and seems interventionist or paternalistic (maternalistic), that non-interference calculus has changed when there are abundant and growing health risks not just to students but to communities. Stated differently, why did staff not act on what they learned, knew and anticipated?

Both examples showcase the absence of role modeling by adults in terms of actual behavior and anticipatory thinking.

Negative role modeling is way too common right now

Apart from role modeling by parents and educators whom students know, we have had far too many examples of failed role modeling in ways that have received national attention. And, make no mistake about this, students are well aware when public figures fail to comply with the COVID mandates and rightly ask: If they can flaunt the rules, why can’t I?

Here are several well-known examples (and I am avoiding the obvious one of our current president) that demonstrate what students are seeing in the media day-in and day-out.

Start with the Dodgers Justin Turner’s behavior following his team winning the World Series. I get the excitement but having just tested positive, he went out onto the field maskless for at least some of the time. What message does that send to young people? When you win, the rules don’t apply even though the coach was among people who were immune-compromised? And then the player went unsanctioned by Major League Baseball as if the incident should just be forgotten as a lapse in a moment of glory and because the player issued an apology.

Turn then to Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, a state struggling with COVID outbreaks (among other disasters). It turns out that he attended a birthday party with more than 10 unrelated family members at an elite restaurant in Napa and wasn’t wearing a mask apparently. Top doctors attended, too. All of this was directly in contradiction to the mandates he was issuing to his constituencies.

But perhaps the most offensive examples come from college presidents. Think about it. If our educational leaders, who have a bully pulpit and are preaching compliance to their institutions, don’t comply, why would their students or students on other campuses? A prime example is Notre Dame’s president, the Rev. John Jenkins. He attended a ceremony in honor of the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. To be sure, for his institution, this was a big deal as the nominee was a professor at Notre Dame’s Law School. But please, no mask? No social distancing? Was he afraid that the president (of the U.S) would see a mask as a sign of disrespect? The photographs of the non-compliance are chilling.

Students were rightfully angry as were faculty. An apology isn’t enough in the context of the virus; words don’t stop disease spread, especially when you are so forcefully asking for campus compliance with COVID protections. And Father Jenkins got COVID.

Lesson Three is obvious: Hypocrisy doesn’t fly in the COVID-19 world. Public high-profile leaders need to role model compliance all the time; their messaging is seen and heard and it matters. Negative role modeling is catching.

Now what?

The contents of this article and the examples given and lessons proffered boil down to this: We need to ramp up positive role modeling. Role modeling isn’t a part-time activity. It is a full-time obligation.

To that end, parents and educators: 1) need to come up with strategies in advance that recognize that young people need ways to engage safely; 2) must involve students in the planning of these activities that are COVID-safe; 3) need to question where students are and anticipate their behavior by offering alternatives; 4) need to talk more to students about risks and about solutions and about feelings and double standards; and 5) shouldn’t make punishment the best solution as it doesn’t work; instead, provide alternatives.

These aren’t impossible solutions. They are doable if we focus on them. And we should, for the well-being of our young people, our families and our communities.

Karen Gross is former president of Southern Vermont College and a senior policy adviser to the U.S. Department of Education. She specializes in student success and trauma across the educational landscape. Her book, Trauma Doesn’t Stop at the School Door: Solutions and Strategies for Educators, PreK-College, was released in June 2020 by Columbia Teachers College Press.

Karen Gross: How small private colleges can adapt to pandemic

The dining hall and Mather Building at Vermont’s Marlboro College, whose campus may be repurposed into a new kind of higher-education facility.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Pre-pandemic, a good number of us lamented the demise of small colleges. Let’s define these here as non-elite colleges with enrollment of fewer than 1,500 full-time undergraduate students. For the most part, these institutions have few graduate programs, a handful at most.

Some of these colleges have closed; some have merged; some have partnered. Whatever the structure, it feels to me still like small colleges are failing and closing in droves. Just look at the recent debacle in Vermont concerning its fiscally fragile state college system.

For some small institutions, it certainly seemed like a premature and even unnecessary death. The four main causes for closure (or its equivalent) proffered publicly by campus personnel were straightforward: changing demographics with accompanying declining enrollment; high tuition costs leading to steep discounting and concerns regarding rising student debt loads; campus personnel costs (think tenure or long-term contracts) and accompanying retirement benefits; and absence of a large endowments to withstand and be buffered from shifting and changing tides.

Some of us saw other deficiencies that the colleges and their boards were less keen on referencing or addressing out loud: poor presidential leadership (as in really poor judgment and decision-making or failure to decide anything); lack of institutional vision and innovation, particularly in a fashion that anticipated trends and currents that were on the horizon; weak board oversight and failure to ask the tough questions; board fear of litigation (think Mount Ida College, in Newton, Mass.); and growth in administrative personnel leading to bloat and higher-than-needed costs.

Some folks are fighting back and some are wondering why others aren’t fighting harder to save colleges, not just for the students, faculty, staff and alums but for the local communities where these colleges are located and who depend on them for revenue. There’s been no shortage of suggestions for how to save the many small colleges that dot our landscape, especially in New England.

And we can and should continue these conversations about these failures and the wasted salvation efforts; they are instructive for future thinking and reflection. They offer clues and insights for the remaining small colleges.

Along came the pandemic

Then along came COVID-19 and with it, institutional closures due and a quick shift to online learning (which might be a misnomer in some instances in terms of whether learning actually occurred). The higher education landscape changed in a nanosecond. More closures are expected.

Admissions and retention for fall 2020 has become a guessing game as it remains unclear if existing students will return to campus and whether new students will enroll. Deposited new students can and might well melt in substantial numbers. We just don’t know.

And each passing month, using metrics from the past (as if they have continued applicability), we fail to reliably predict the future. For some small colleges, a loss of 10 or 20 students can make the difference between a balanced and unbalanced budget. And accreditors are watching fiscal stability like hawks. (The reasons for that need their own article.)

The debate has raged about reopening and if it happens, how it can be done safely, thoughtfully and wisely. New models and schedules are being considered; institutions are hedging their bets as if they foresee when a second “wave” (assuming we even characterize new cases as a wave) of the pandemic could hit. Scheduling courses of limited size and ensuring social distancing in residential halls, dining halls and activities are subjects for planning. The CDC has offered some guidance (quite generalized) as have others—individuals and organizations alike.

Despite these resources, everyone seemed to be fumbling around for reopening solutions for students, faculty and staff. What institutions are saying publicly and what they are feeling in privacy about the reality of reopening is not in concert. For example, some colleges still are running two-track planning: planning for online and planning for brick-and-mortar learning. And the idea here is that as the date for reopening approaches, both approaches will be ready to launch, depending on which is most suited to the moment.

And racial tensions ….

And then, racial tensions boiled over and as of this writing, have not ceased. Street protests—peaceful and non-peaceful—highlight anger, centuries in the making, at the lack of equality in our nation. With police gunning down or kneeing down minority men, police departments almost everywhere are coming under fire, including campus police forces. Folks are asking if we should even have police forces (on and off campus) as we knew them or should we defund and restart with new structures, new goals, new training, new personnel? All of these issues are boiling over as reopening plans are being crafted.

For some students, already worried about starting college online or in some newly designed format with no track record, a gap year seems like an idea with credibility. With the protests and racial tensions, the idea of using a gap year to focus on advocating for racial justice becomes increasingly appealing and, in fact, a worthy alternative to a bumpy college start. This happened in the 1960s too.

For colleges, the responses to racial tension are a critical issue for the fall, with or without brick-and-mortar reopening. Consider how campuses will need to adjust to and handle protests and ensure both freedom of speech and safety? What changes will campuses make to recognize their own histories of racism and some of their current approaches that fail to reflect the need for racial equality?

In this context, I am reminded of the disconcerting encounters (via email and then in person) of house masters at Yale and students residents about types of Halloween costumes that passed muster even if offensive to some. The net result was that the master and his wife ceased being house masters at the time and stopped teaching the next semester. We can debate how the story got such traction and how it ended; some of us still can’t quite believe that a valued and respected faculty member, with deep experience, behaved in such a disrespectful manner.

A salvation strategy

In reflecting on the myriad of issues just described in all their complexities, I read a recent tweet from Prof. Susan Dynarski, a well-respected professor who regularly comments insightfully on issues in higher education. In the context of her concerns about campuses reopening and the reasons higher education institutions may be so keen on brick-and-mortar courses (they want the money), she suggested that perhaps the only places where COVID safety and education can coexist are rural small college campuses.

Bells went off in my head. She is largely right and those of us who have spent time thinking about these campuses can attest to their ability, with innovative thinking and bold leadership, to respond to COVID and offer in-person education. Here are some concrete approaches, including references to the plans of Degrees of Freedom to open on the Marlboro (Vt.) College campus in September 2020. Yes, a new college opening during the pandemic.

Three important notes before turning to concrete ways small campuses can operate effectively and safely and with deep change:

First, some larger campuses can try some or even the majority of the ideas proffered here. And they may be able to do so with success but their efforts will not be easy or cheap or natural extensions of prior approaches. What small colleges offer is experience.

Second, the items identified are not in order of importance and there is some inevitable overlap in solutions and approaches. For many, starting with academics seems right. For me, focusing on land and what can be done on it and with it is a better starting point. And don’t misunderstand me; land is not more important than learning. Land (and its use) is what in a COVID-19 era makes real learning (broadly defined) possible.

Third, the ambiguity in the title to this article is intended: The pandemic will be a savior for small colleges because small colleges may be the only safe places in which quality in-person education can happen.

A sampling of how small rural colleges could adapt

Land. The pandemic has struck both urban and rural environments and the idea that rural communities are immune from COVID-19 is just not accurate. And the impact on rural places—with their lack of resources—can be worse for patients than urban sites. So just reopening in rural environments is not the answer.

To be sure, we seem to know less each day as new information and data surface. But rural small college campuses often sit on hundreds of acres, meaning there is a legitimate way to create a COVID-free bubble-like environment. Note that the NBA is trying a similar bubble approach in Orlando. It is too early to know whether this approach will create herd immunity.

To add to the benefits of new ways to use large plots of rural land, we now have community-by-community data on COVID-19 cases; and, when we plumb the data, there are small towns where the pandemic has not invaded or has invaded minimally. If you eliminate nursing homes from the calculations and people who were affected over the age of 75, there are communities with low incidence of COVID.

For this article, let’s focus on campuses with at least 25 acres of open land that is usable—land without buildings or sports fields or parking lots.

Access to healthcare. Now, an immediate reopening concern and question with the idea of remote/rural environments: Were the pandemic to come to campus, how would the students get healthcare? We need to focus, then, on reopening campuses that have hospitals within close proximity and ways nearby smaller hospitals connect to larger hospital networks. Take, for instance, a college in or near Bennington, Vermont. The town has an established hospital that has partnered with Dartmouth’s well-known medical facilities; there is even a helipad to transport ill patients from Bennington to Hanover in minutes. Literally.

Small colleges reopening in rural settings need a partnership with the nearest and best medical facility, ideally one with transport and easy access to larger health facilities. This will matter to the families of students who may think rural means absence of access to quality medical care. Based on conversations with Seth Andrew, the founder of Degrees of Freedom, this is the precise approach they are planning when they open on the Marlboro campus. And we are talking here not about reopening an existing college, but rather opening a new college in the era of COVID.

One critical and too often-ignored part of healthcare is mental health, a critically important topic in our COVID and race-tense world. Trauma and its symptomology abound and campuses need to become trauma responsive, something in which they have little or no training and experience. The social distancing, the omnipresence of death and dying, experienced discrimination and harassment, separation based on going off to college for the first time and in uncertain times—these are all tough issues.

We need to question whether our current campus mental health personnel are sufficient and how we can meet the inevitable needs of students. (Faculty and staff will have their own needs in this regard with respect to primary and secondary and vicarious trauma.)

Several solutions emerge: faculty and staff development in trauma responsiveness before students arrive on campus and thereafter; telemental health opportunities for all campus personnel; and added hiring of social workers or counselors. We need trauma-informed orientations for all returning and new students; these should not be one-off events but ongoing efforts to process the transition to college and the world around us.

These are not all cost-free solutions but they are critical to student academic and psychosocial success. It is not enough for students to survive; they need to thrive.

Activities. A rural environment also allows for a series of non-academic activities that can be done safely and provide important avenues for student engagement with social distancing well in place. Hikes in the woods, classes held outdoors (during certain seasons), activities on outdoor fields. Learning about nature, the environment, drawing and painting and writing outdoors could all happen with ease and social distancing.

Imagine an outdoor movie theater or outdoor concerts, with music blasting across the acreage. And picture an artistic way of creating social distancing that builds off the “wrapping” approaches of the recently deceased installation artist Christo. Picture many brightly colored mats, each 6 –8 feet apart, placed across a huge lawn. If one took a drone photo of the area, it would like painted spots on an enormous lawn—signaling color and festivity!

Then consider a return to “old-fashioned” games like bocce and croquet and even putting golf courses with 6 holes. Think about beanbag tosses done with teams. Picture single person ping-pong and tennis. These can all be done in wide-open spaces, created at little cost.

In terms of more “formal” and traditional sports (and one hopes the NCAA will see the light and allow for fewer official sports in DI, DII and DIII during this time without colleges risking eligibility), think about track and field, with staggered race starts. Think about golf. Think about tennis. In some rural communities, these resources are available and could be cleaned and dedicated to a college’s use.

Think about swimming or sailing or kayaking (instead of more expensive sculling) if a campus has access to water close by. Indeed, many rural campuses have their own ponds, often not used in the past for student activities. But they could be converted to student use. I am thinking about the pond at Smith College (to be sure, not a small rural college as defined here); the pond was once the place where Smith students got engaged. Now, it could be populated with small single person pedal boats.

Housing. Consider residential halls that can provide only single rooms with toilets shared among very small numbers of students. Yes, there is some risk in common areas (more on that in a minute) but small campuses can function with only single-room occupancy. For example, Southern Vermont College, were it still in existence, could have housed well over 300 students in single rooms.

An added option, well worthy of consideration, is building yurts to install on a campus for housing. Imagine small yurts dotting the campus landscape. And the creation of toilet facilities would come at a cost but not excessive (there are even portable toilet/shower trailers). And the facilities could be limited to small numbers of students accessing them. Some students would find living in a yurt or pod appealing and adventurous.

Another option to consider is motels that dot rural college communities and must currently be struggling with occupancy. These can be single-occupancy units with individual bathrooms, something that may appeal to parents and caregivers who think their students would be safer at home or in off-campus housing with one roommate. One can only assume that motels would be more than willing to partner for these purposes; indeed, Southern Vermont College partnered with such a motel close to campus during a short-term housing shortage.

One additional option to consider and one being used by Degrees of Freedom: short stints on a campus (say two weeks) several times a year rather than a semester-long session (even if compressed). The idea is that while on campus during these residential stays, no one goes on or off campus. Students would be tested pre-arrival and then “bubbled” thereafter. Others are pondering even shorter stays on campus with hybrid learning using the same faculty to do the in person and online learning—all options worth considering.

Food Service. Large dining halls and buffets are out. So are crowded dining tables. But on a small campus, especially one with several cooking facilities, there could be dining areas and shifts. Consider different eating times or outdoor eating or take out, just the way some restaurants are now doing now.

Imagine food service delivery carts driving around a campus. Add in an ice cream truck that goes from area to area within the campus boundaries.

There could be food cooking that is then shared consistent with social distancing. Several students could prepare a meal with a recipe from a particular culture and distribute the meals across campus. Then another group would cook something from another nationality. In some communities, different families make enough food to share on a designated weeknight; then, they talk about the different meals they are receiving and sharing online. Call it once-a-week dining together, so to speak. There could be baking contests and tastings of various sorts. There are many variations on these themes.

In the right environment, there could be food gardens. We have edible schools; why not create edible colleges? And unused grown food or food prepared in the just described manner could be distributed (safely) to low-income families to seniors who are housebound or unable to cook.

All of this can be boiled down to this notion: Campus Meals on Wheels.

One added idea to deal with seating that complies with social distancing, picture Adirondack chairs, perhaps painted in the college colors, that are linked together by rope that knots them at seven-foot intervals. Having abundant space makes this possible. Imagine 12 connected chairs. They could be configured into the circle or a “U” shape or a line. These Adirondack chairs could be brought inside when the weather shifts with dining in large open indoor spaces like gyms. See this image for a sense of the vitality of these chairs. This idea that can be used in academic settings as well.)

Academics. Small campuses regularly have small classes. Having class sizes under 15 is the norm. And it would be possible to break larger classes on a small campus into sections, perhaps with an online lecture/discussion and then breakout groups without any change. Classrooms are right-sized for this now without any adjustments.

Support services, if needed, could be provided with individualized online access to meet these needs. Think the support equivalent of telehealth appointments.

Materials used in courses could be open-access resources so students wouldn’t need to buy books in a store or online. As such, there would not be concerns about sharing materials and viral transmission on surfaces. Colleges would not need to run a bookstore (often not a money maker). Other course materials could all be purchased or available online for free through the web. Faculty assignments could be tailored to online free resources.

Faculty (since most small colleges do not use teaching assistants other than more advanced students to serve as tutors or mentors) could meet individually with students in open environments, not closed-in offices. These could be in open spaces with few people nearby. On a rural campus with huge open spaces and places, this approach is feasible.

Two added academic-related ideas to test out during this period.

First, students (and faculty and staff) could document the entire range of campus COVID responses. They could photograph activities and classes; they could tape interviews; they could write stories and reports. In other words, the COVID responsiveness would, in and of itself, be an academic activity. What is gathered could be used to help other campuses; it could document history; it could engage students in what is truly an extraordinary period in American history; students could get copies of some document/report/visual product that they could have for decades to come. Like the academic equivalent of a home run ball from Babe Ruth.

Second, efforts to help the local community could be front and center of a campus’s focus. Courses could be designed to provide assistance to those within the community, whether that is food or tutoring or conversation. Consider these empathy-generating courses. There could also be appropriate campus-community activities where the community virtually engages with students, say, a musical performance or a shared movie.

One final idea within the academic arena: What if faculty and students took a free online course together? Picture a course not offered by the small college but credit worthy and available from another institution and, critically, of considerable interest. Suppose it was a course on pandemics through time or public health approaches to disease spread and control or a course on the history of protest movements in the U.S. and abroad. (Yes, these could be offered on campus if there are experts in these fields with the courses ready for fall 2020.) Then faculty and students could do the work together; call it collaborative learning where the learners are teachers and the teachers are learners. In-person discussions would accompany the online course. On-campus faculty could design assignments and do grading.

Maintaining the bubble. Instead of cars on campuses (which would be disallowed), there could be daily runs by the college personnel to food stores, drug stores and Walmart-like places. Students could submit lists of what they want and need. Then, these items could arrive back on campus and students could retrieve (and pay for) what they ordered. This would work with privacy respected.

Picture a car lot off campus so that students could access in emergencies or at the end of short semesters. But the key is that the cars could not come to campus and students could not exit campus. In many rural communities, there is actually no place to go within easy walking distance. So the campus has to create the access to needed products (in addition to online resources) and the engagement options.

Students, faculty, staff and administrators would all be required to wear masks, even though some might question their necessity. The idea is that they are needed because faculty and staff and administrators likely live off campus and need health checks daily to return to campus. Or, for willing employees, there could be on-campus housing provided for them and their families.

The life outside the bubble of faculty, staff and administrators does present risk. They may have children or partners who become infected from schools and workplaces and other types of engagement. I think we have to rely here on responsibility and decency and the collective, shared effort to enable safety coupled with innovation and creative learning and engagement.

Input channels. This article is a sampling of the initiatives a rural small college could advance if it reopened in fall 2020 or January 2021. But there are critical ways to generate further ideas, namely getting input from faculty, staff, students and alums. These could be in response to particular COVID issues that arise or they could be ideas that individuals have. This is a call for innovation and creativity and engagement.

Ponder shared solutions to hygiene. Ponder germ lotion distribution at set locations in creatively designed stands. Ponder rules for what happens if students do not social distance (or faculty/staff and administrators for that matter). Ponder new ways to engage across campus. Ponder courses that would have new importance in this era of COVID.

Communications. If ever there were a time for quality, transparent, truthful communications, it would be when a college prepares for and then reopens and progresses through a semester. This communication would be directed to those on campus. It would also need to include outreach to alums, parents/caregivers and the community. Communication with other campuses, accreditors and employers would also be needed.

We need to use different channels: emails; social media; phone (as in talking); webinars and call-in numbers. A hotline makes sense too.

For this to work, the communicators need to wear a different headset from that to which they are accustomed. Words, tone, style, content matter more than ever. Trauma-responsive terminology, psychological sensitivity, cultural sensitivity are all critical components of a COVID-era communications plan.

When the world is filled with confusion and uncertainty and instability and frequent events that rattle even the most stable individuals, we need outreach that is calming, accurate and forthright. No dancing around issues; no avoidance of hard topics; no pretending all is as it was.

Just imagine the inverse of communications now and one can get a sense of what is needed.

Creativity, innovation and risk modulation

For those of us who care about education, small colleges and student success, the pandemic may be the needed opening for enabling these institutions to remain a part of the educational landscape.

We are living in times where the old ways can’t and don’t and won’t work. Being small, with quality leadership, enables fast, nimble and creative approaches. The risk of reopening for small colleges isn’t all that great given that their very livelihood is in question.

Change in education is notoriously slow. We are wed to what we have done and what has gone on for decades or centuries before the world changed. It would be absurd to suggest that small colleges needed the pandemic and racial tensions to survive. But it is fair to say that we shouldn’t let a crisis (actually many crises) go to waste. They may just be a way to save some of our small colleges and enable in-person education to proceed in fall 2020. It might be a way to enable student success and implement changes that actually stick because they work.

The risk is in not doing anything. We can’t afford that now. In a world of uncertainty, of this I am sure: Education needs to change, and small colleges can be a big part of the solution.

Karen Gross is former president of Southern Vermont College and senior policy advisor to the U.S. Department of Education. She specializes in student success and trauma across the educational landscape. Her new book, Trauma Doesn’t Stop at the School Door: Solutions and Strategies for Educators, PreK-College, was just released in June 2020 by Columbia Teachers College Press.

Karen Gross: As school shootings continue, college students must ask if they're next

Scene at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, when heavily armed 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot to death 26 people, including 20 children between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members. Before driving to the school, he shot to death his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

In a matter of seconds, a student at a high school in Santa Clarita, Calif., injured and killed a handful of his fellow students and then shot himself. He died shortly thereafter. We read about such incidents and lament their happening. We see television footage and peruse articles and social media postings. We mourn for the students injured and killed and worry about their families and friends.

And we wonder why this shooting happened. And we wonder why so many shootings happen.

Despite the usual outpouring of support for survivors and displays of empathy, those of us in higher education often don’t reflect on how all these K-12 shootings can and likely will affect us directly. We don’t consider how high school shootings will impact the college students we now have and the students we will have in the future—especially if we are geographically separated. It is as if we see the K-12 shootings as something that happens “over there” with “younger” students; meanwhile, we worry about a myriad of issues on our own campuses including potential shootings on campus, but also drug overdoses and sexual harassment.

The story that struck a chord

One particular story in the Los Angeles Times that got my attention. It was about how the shooting at the high school in Santa Clarita affected the students at a nearby elementary school. These younger students were preparing for a Thanksgiving pageant. The image of youngsters in their Pilgrim costumes crying upon learning of the shooting and being held in place at their school is fraught with irony: a supposed celebration of freedom and togetherness (even if sanitized by a retelling of our history with Native Americans) is disturbed by violence. No “Thanks” in this planned Thanksgiving pageant. While the emotions differed among the younger and somewhat older students at the elementary school, they were affected, as were their parents, according to the article and other reports.

Thinking about that story made me realize that many in higher education (with some exceptions of course) do not realize that trauma travels with a student forward in time. And it is as if trauma were in a suitcase and with the passage of time, that suitcase grows. As and when new traumas occur or there are new triggering events, the trauma suitcase expands and the holder of the suitcase experiences their autonomic nervous system on high alert.

As one author quoted in a recent article on student mental health stated, trauma sits in an invisible backpack that a student carries. What is in that suitcase/backpack affects not just the student him or herself; it affects those around the student, including those who teach them. That’s where secondary and vicarious trauma occur.

In sum, the reach of shootings is wide and deep and continuous.

Trauma and college students

The students who have experienced shootings will, one hopes, someday enter postsecondary education. But the institutions that will be serving them need to know that the trauma of the applicants, and later of enrolled students, does not get parked at the proverbial gate to higher education. And for those entering a residential college, with the transition into a dorm, the challenges are even greater: new roommate, new living situation, new location. For all new college students, there is a sense of disquiet when the new collegiate experience starts, and they are the “newbies,” even if they are enthusiastic, engaged and willing to learn.

We often use orientations at the start of college to inform students on a wide range of matters, including sexual policies, drug use, alcohol and mental health. We provide IDs, and paperwork is completed. We give out swipe cards. There are financial aid or bursar meetings. Residential assistants hold get-togethers. There are often placement tests.

And, sadly, we think students are absorbing all this, even when tempered with “get-to-know-you games.”

What is happening for many students is that their autonomic nervous systems are on high alert. They cannot really hear, absorb and process what they are being told. They are trying to find their way to the bathroom and are worried about their interpersonal and academic success. They may think they flunked the placement test. They didn’t really understand the financial aid repayment options. They wonder if there were people there who would like them. They may be lonely or feel separation anxiety.

While student life personnel may deal effectively with some of these issues, faculty tend to just launch right into their subjects as if being in college is anticipated, expected and everyone is ready to roll ahead in the disciplines of the courses they select. Then students receive a syllabus, which is often long and the name itself is off-putting for some. We assign massive reading and ask questions to which students don’t know the answers or are reluctant to answer.

And that’s just the first week.

Transitions are not our strong suit

Here’s my point: Going to college is a transition and if you have ever been traumatized in your past, that event was your first transition. You transitioned from not being traumatized to being traumatized. And, once traumatized, other transitions kick off negative signals since the first transition was bad, and tell the autonomic nervous system to be on high alert.

For students who have been traumatized in the past, who have experienced attachment disorders or other trauma symptomology, there is unease. Whether or not students recognize what is happening to them, something is happening inside of them. And those adults within the college (not the new students who are adults of which there are a growing number) are often unaware of or unable to recognize trauma symptomology. They attribute what they see to a myriad of other factors, including that the quality of students is declining with the need to have better high school preparation and the decline of values in a generation. Perhaps the students are too “snowflaky” and their parents too involved.

One shooting, many consequences for students

The students in Santa Clarita have been traumatized by the shooting; the impact of the shooting on each student will differ depending on their background in terms of family stability and family dysfunction, prior trauma from other events including death, illness, accidents and injuries. The degree of closeness to the deceased and injured and the shooter are all issues that will affect these students. How the trauma and its symptoms are handled by their school and within their community are issues too, particularly when the school reopens and the details of the events are disclosed.

And anniversaries will occur and recur. Those are inevitabilities.

I worry a lot about those students who will head off to college soon, whether from Santa Clarita or elsewhere. Will this tragedy change where they apply? Will it change how they feel about leaving home? And once they choose a school, how easy will it be to adjust? Do they need a year off to work and reflect and process? Will they feel safe in a new place and space? Will they feel cared about by some adult? Will they have an outlet in which to share how the memories of the shooting keep flooding back at different times of day and night? Will they want a seat at orientation near a door? Will they want a dorm room on a high floor or a low floor?

Then, consider these possible other reactions of the survivors. Will they not want to attend classes in the morning (around the time of the shooting)? Where will they sit in the classroom? Will they be looking for exits? How will they respond to dorm alarms and other loud sounds and future drills? Will these survivors be able to manage stress? What if a student on their new campus is injured or killed or becomes ill? When the shooting occurred, what were they doing actually and can they do whatever that was again? Will a quadrangle ever feel totally safe?

As to the elementary school students, they will proceed through the educational pipeline and hopefully, many will land in colleges at some point in the next decade or so. They will not have forgotten the shooting or if they have, they have only forgotten it in their conscious memory. What has happened to them in the decade between the shooting and entering college? Any more trauma? Yes, of course. There will be other school shootings and deaths and injuries and car accidents.

Our trauma suitcases travel with us

Here’s the point: The school shooting will eventually land on college campuses in the invisible backpacks of students. Regrettably, most colleges are not trauma-informed nor trauma-responsive. And folks will be shocked when these students struggle or barely stay in school or drop out or stop out. Their learning, their memories, their engagement can all be impacted.

It’s time to see the trauma around us and how it affects education. And we need educators who can and will be ready, willing and able to be trauma-responsive at the university level. Are you confident that will happen? I’m not. That’s why this shooting makes the need to address trauma across the educational pipeline not a luxury, but a necessity.

The time to start is now.

Karen Gross is former president of Southern Vermont College and senior policy adviser to the U.S. Department of Education. She specializes in student success and trauma across the educational landscape. Her new book, Educating for Trauma, will be released in June 2020 by Columbia Teachers College Press.

Karen Gross: About those 'certificates of failure'

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

The news is filled with stories about the admissions scandals at elite colleges and universities. And recently, some of the wrongdoers have pled guilty and await punishment. Apparently, prosecutors are seeking jail time. Apart from jail time, I have already suggested approaches to punishment that involve fines that go into a cy pres fund to be redistributed to small non-elite colleges and their students. Ironically (or not), the fake charity to which these parents “donated” was intended to serve low-income kids. Hey, make that really happen … and legally.

At the same time, there have been articles about the competitiveness of elite colleges and universities and the need to provide courses or partial courses or seminars in failure. The idea is legitimizing failure; it happens to everyone after all. But, since some college students have never experienced failure (see above), the colleges need to include instruction on how to fail. And some even provide “certificates of failure’’ at the beginning or end of the courses. (See image above.)

One of the pre-course certificates is issued, I am embarrassed to say, by my alma mater, Smith College. It is provided before the seminar begins with the suggestion that it be displayed proudly. The certificate provides, in part,

“You are hereby authorized to screw up, bomb or fail at one or more relationships, hookups, friendships, texts, exams, extracurriculars or any other choices associated with college … and still be a totally worthy, utterly excellent human.”

Apparently, students (at least those cited in the article about this in the New York Times) are delighted to hang these words in their dorm room. A recent article in The Washington Post shared similar initiatives, with some institutions replacing the word “failure” with “grit training” or “resiliency education,” although the certificates awarded for failure were noted.

I have no idea who invented this idea of certificates of failure for college students. Was it a psychology professor or a student-life professional or some consultant? Was it an expert in parent-child development? Answer that question, please.

From my perspective, this whole “accept” failure movement strikes me as what we term in other contexts “a first world problem.” In other words, learning about and dealing with failure is a problem for some students attending some elite colleges in America, where they suddenly get a low grade or struggle for the first time in their academic and personal lives.

From my experience in education, spanning early childhood education through adult education, I see the opposite experience among low-income, first-generation, minority, ethnically diverse and immigrant students. Many of these students experience failure early and often. In their schools, they are often, directly or indirectly, signaled: “You can’t make it.” Some are deprived access to gifted programs or AP courses. Surely they are not getting the level of tutoring that the wealthy can afford. There are assumptions, acknowledged or not, as to who progresses and where in education—from elementary school programs to elite public selective high schools to elite colleges (or any college actually). Just peruse the Pell Grant numbers of enrolled students at elite colleges (although the numbers are increasing).

I can’t count the number of students at Southern Vermont College (SVC), which is sadly failing now under current leadership and set to close unless miraculously saved (something for which I have been fighting), who said to me “I was told I was not college material.” Talk about not needing a certificate of failure. And many of the students we accepted back then at SVC had profiles that would have suggested that college was not in their future, let alone graduation. Indeed, the SVC Mountaineer Scholar Program, remarkable in so many respects though undermined of late sadly through mission drift at SVC, aimed to enroll students most thought would “never make it” in higher education. Some had projected graduation rates of under 9%; they too graduated.

There are many reasons that students have failed along the educational pipeline. Poor schools, poor teachers, fiscally underfunded schools, lack of parental support (or other adult support), cultural expectations and norms including few or no individuals believing in success. If you want to see this, view the movie Raising Bertie or the movie STEP. Surrounded by failure of every sort from food scarcity to parental absence, incarceration and addiction to homelessness, many of today’s college students have not experienced success. They have lived lives filled with failures.

These students don’t need lessons in failure; they need lessons in success and their capacity—remarkable capacity—to succeed.

I would add that trauma, a topic about which I have been writing regularly, has been a large contributor to low student expectations and misunderstanding of student capacities. Indeed, we know that trauma has many cognitive effects on student learning, and it is often mistaken for other student shortcomings—when actually the students did not ask for the trauma and had no choice in being on the receiving end. Children who have been traumatized and are not in trauma-sensitive environments with tools to defuse the autonomic nervous system can feel the effects for a lifetime. Trauma’s aftermath can make you feel like a failure when you are anything but. You are a survivor. But trauma and its impacts don’t disappear. Reflect on the recent suicides a year after Parkland and several years after Sandy Hook. Tragic.

Most of us don’t need certificates of failure. We have failed. We have experienced lowered expectations. We know what it is like not to succeed and to watch others around us fail with regularity.

The focus on “certificates of failure” makes me ill actually. It applies to such a narrow segment of college students. Why is it that we can’t pay more attention to the vast majority of students and put our time, our energy, our money and our focus on their successes—hard-fought successes—in a world that dealt them failure? Yet again, we focus all our attention in the media and elsewhere on the elite as if that is all that matters and as if that is somehow representative of the vast majority of the population.

So, with the elite parents bribing and certificates of failure to offset lots of success and soft shells in some children raised to always feel good, let’s shift gears immediately. Let’s help non-elite colleges and students across the educational landscape for whom failure has been a constant companion. We don’t need a certificate of failure. It is evident in lives being lived. Instead, we need folks who believe in our success.

Karen Gross is senior counsel with Finn Partners, former president of Southern Vermont College and author of Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students.

Karen Gross: Ranking colleges by percentage of students who vote

Registering young voters during the March for Our Lives in Boston on March 24.

From the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

The recent March for Our Lives at hundreds of locations around the globe rattled my cage, particularly as I stood in the middle of hundreds of thousands of protesters in Washington, D.C. Had we finally found a way to increase activism, to get more and more people of all ages and stages involved in the well-being of their communities?

As I listened to the young speakers both over the loudspeakers and later on television, I wondered: Have the voices of high schoolers (and some even younger students) been ignited such that their fire will expand? These young people from Parkland, Fla., and beyond, seem capable of spreading their energy, their eloquence and their belief that “enough is enough” in terms of gun violence.

Here’s what worries me and I assume others: Can the efforts of these students to change gun laws to increase school safety be sustained?

Some movements falter; others have stickiness. As a product of the ‘60s, I experienced the rigor of our positions on civil rights and the Vietnam War and the need for women’s voices to be heard. We achieved some remarkable successes, though our work is still far from done.

All of this brings me to college campuses and my concerns about levels of student activism. Yes, there have been more protests in the past 24 months, spurred in part by efforts to eradicate sexual harassment and abuse. But are students actually engaging in the political process that other fundamental way: by exercising their right to vote?

Yes, many campuses have voter registration drives. Yes, there are personnel on some campuses to help students get absentee ballots. Yes, there are some young people running for office, particularly local officers. Yes, there seem to be more students interested in participating in politics.

But....

The percentage of college student voting, though rising in recent years, is below 50 percent. Data from the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, at Tufts University, tells a story of which we should not be proud if we believe that our democracy depends on citizens’ exercising their right to vote.

The percentage of white students who vote increased between 2012 and 2016, as did the percentage of Hispanic and Asian students; the percentage of black students decreased. But more important than the increases/decreases per se are the actual percentages of students’ voting in any given year. In 2016, 53 percent of white students, 50 percent of black students, 46 percent of Hispanic students and 31 percent of Asian students voted. Yipes.

Who votes?

Ponder these statistics: 53 percent of students in social sciences voted, compared with 44 percent of students in STEM disciplines. Students at public four-year institutions (50 percent) vote more frequently than students at community colleges (46 percent) and private four-year colleges (47 percent). Voting at women’s colleges and minority-serving institutions colleges exceeded percentages at Hispanic-serving institutions. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) had the lowest percentage—a troubling statistic for many reasons.

Notably, the Tisch study does not include data for the percentage of voting by students at for-profit institutions.

Whether the data are complete and whether they fully capture all student voting (the data focus of the study is on presidential elections not other federal elections or state or local elections), we can still observe that there are differences in student voting rates at different colleges and universities.

What this means is that, if the data were actually available, we could compare and contrast colleges/universities on the basis of student voting rates. Indeed, students particularly interested in civic engagement and activism would be able to see which colleges/universities they were considering had very high voting rates and which had very low rates.

Now, we have many ways of rating and ranking colleges and universities. And there has been considerable debate about the quality of the existing measures used to compare one college/university to another. Assessment is a quagmire. For example, institutions with large endowments and higher admissions selectivity have higher rankings as calculated by US News than those with small endowments that also enroll high numbers of their applicants. Note that none of these are measures of educational quality unless one wants to say that big endowments and enrollment selectivity are surrogates for quality measures—assumptions I think are at once wrong and misguided.

Ratings (ostensibly different from rankings) are prepared by the U.S. Department of Education through the College Scorecard, and these data are also flawed on a myriad of levels. For starters, they look at retention and graduation rates based on first year-first time students, meaning that transfer students and their successes are not measured by the institutions that receive them or from which they departed. Odd, isn’t it?

We could wish for a day when all rankings/ratings are eliminated. But perhaps in the meantime, here’s one measure that could have meaning to a newly engaged youth population emboldened to make change and perhaps their parents and teachers: a comparison of voting rates among enrolled college/university students. I am not the first to reference the possibility of ratings based on voting rates (among other variables of civic engagement). But such ideas have not been embraced yet systematically.

For example, Northwestern University reportedly introduced voting during orientation in 2011, and voting by their enrolled students in presidential elections increased from 49 percent in 2012 to 64 percent in 2016. At East Tennessee State University, after concerted institutional and student efforts, voting in presidential elections by students increased to 47 percent from 39 percent. True, the numbers are still low but not as low as they were.

With the signs encouraging voting and political muscle at the March for Our Lives and the growing activism of high school students today, it seems that voting rates at colleges would matter to today’s K-12 students. If they had a choice of colleges—say among Harvard, Haverford, Hampton and University of Hawaii—how would they choose? Location? Price? Guidebook rankings? Programmatic offerings? Size? Reputation?

What if the voting rates among these colleges differed dramatically (a set of statistics we do not know at present across institutions)?

Local elections matter, too

If one were to create a ranking/rating system of value to students and their families, we would want to look at more than federal election voting levels. Local and state voting matter; these elections reflect how communities govern and function, and in some of these elections, there are votes that affect students and justice directly: school board elections and election of judges. The latter two elections affect how our schools function (and the dollars allocated to education) and how legal disputes, including those related to protests, permitting, free speech, civil rights and voting rights, are resolved. Election of state and federal representatives matters too because these individuals can serve on education and budget committees.

Keep in mind, too, that in some states, the outcomes of local and state elections are decided by a small number of votes, given low voter turnout.

And if one wants proof that a vote matters (an issue for some who see no value to voting), just remember Bush v. Gore, in 2000, and "hanging chads." Even if students are unaware of that electoral debacle given their ages, it is a part of history as to which much has been and should be read. For me, it is about more than politics; it is a story about our civic responsibility and how the right to have one’s vote count got trampled.

For college students, there is also the thorny issue of where they can, do and are allowed to vote and this problem should not be underestimated. And it cannot be dismissed by saying: Just vote; it does not matter where. That is not even true in presidential elections where a small number of votes can move the Electoral College one way or another.

Sadly, I have had experience with the difficulty students experience registering to vote in the town where they go to college, live, eat, study and work. I remember distinctly verbally sparring with the late and revered town clerk about the propriety of students registering to vote where they go to college. It was not pretty and was overheard by many. The counter-argument given: These students are not a part of our community; they are only here for a short period; they do not have the community interests are heart. State authorities had to be contacted.

Really? There are many people who move in and out of communities—who are not students. Even longstanding residents often do not vote; they use the schools; they work outside the locale. The students, on the other hand, are often engaged in the community, most especially those who work to help pay for their education; they perform internships in local businesses and or clinical rotations in local hospitals.

I wish I had known about the Supreme Court decision of Symm v. United States (1979), and, yes, I was a law professor for decades and clearly not cognizant of voting rights.

Improve voting rates

There are concrete steps colleges and outside organizations can take to improve voting by students on college campuses. There can be voting drives. There can be debates held on campus. There can be courses dealing with electoral outcomes and even “pop-up” courses for credit that focus on particular election issues that are timely and pressing. There can be messaging about the role of voting in a democracy and the fights in other nations for the right to vote. There can be campus readings; there can be campus speakers; there can be systematic voter registration drives.

As the demography of America’s students changes to include more “non-trads” (students over age 24) and minority students, the power of the vote is all the more important so that the voices of the many are heard. And there are efforts that could be instituted legally to ease voter registration and the location where voters can rightly vote. Misinformation is, unfortunately, often used to ban voting by students. The above-referenced town clerk was dispensing bad information in my view. Or let’s say, he discouraged local registration with such rigor that students were left discouraged from pressing forward.

A rating of “voting” percentages broadly defined speaks volumes about an institution. It bespeaks campus culture, campus involvement, campus priorities. It sends a message about how activism and political activity will be received and handled and supported. In today’s world, that’s a pretty good reflection of citizenship and the role of educational institutions in preparing the leaders of tomorrow. Surely voting percentages are more important than the size of a college’s endowment or other indicators we currently use to measure the quality of colleges.

Can you imagine students, parents and teachers saying: “Before we decide on the best schools to which to apply, let’s look at their voter rating.” It could happen. And it should happen.

Voting. What is more important to the success of our democratic processes and how important is it to teach our future leaders to take their social responsibility to vote seriously? Not much except perhaps their personal health, their mental well-being, their love of learning and their openness to change and problem-solving.

Karen Gross is senior counsel with Finn Partners, former president of Southern Vermont College and author of Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students.