In her inaugural address as Dartmouth College’s new president Sept. 22, Sian Leah Beilock vowed to make student mental health a central part of her leadership agenda.

“Fortunately, understanding how anxiety and stress play out in the brain and body has been the focus of my research for the past 20 years,” said Beilock, a leading scholar and former psychology professor at the University of Chicago who was president of Barnard College the last six years.

“The single greatest service we can do for our students, our faculty, and our staff is to support them on their wellness journeys,” she added.

Choosing a cognitive scientist to lead the Ivy League school reflects a broader trend across higher education in the U.S. College presidents nationwide say they are committed to making mental health an institutional priority amid what public health researchers call a national college student mental health crisis.

In fact, when the American Council on Education asked presidents in late 2021 about the issues they consider most pressing, they cited “mental health of students” most frequently.

College student mental health has worsened over time, as has the mental health of high school students, researchers find. During the 2022-23 academic year, an estimated 41% of college students had symptoms of depression and 36% had symptoms of anxiety disorder, according to a national survey conducted by the Healthy Minds Network, a group of scholars who study mental health among U.S. adolescents and young adults.

Of the 76,406 college students who participated, 14% said they had seriously considered suicide during the previous 12 months. The same proportion had symptoms of an eating disorder.

When the organization surveyed college students back in 2018-19, 21% reported symptoms of depression and 22% had symptoms of anxiety disorder. Meanwhile, 10% of students said they had seriously considered suicide and 7% had symptoms of an eating disorder.

Mental health problems more common among minority, LGBTQ students

Published studies indicate some groups of students fare worse than others. For example, racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to experience mental health problems than white students. Likewise, LGBTQ students tend to have poorer mental health than those who aren’t sexual or gender minorities.

Another group that college administrators worry about: first-generation college students — those who are the first in their families to go to college and often must navigate their higher education careers with little to no guidance from parents and other family members.

When researchers compared first-generation students and students whose parents went to college from 2018 to 2021, they learned that symptoms of depression and anxiety disorder were common in both. However, first-generation college students were much less likely to get help from professionals.

“Just 32.8% of first-generation students with symptoms received therapy in the past year, relative to 42.8% among continuing-generation students, and this disparity widened during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers write in the paper, published in June.

In December, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public health advisory calling attention to the rising number of youth attempting suicide. Last week, Murthy and seven former surgeons general traveled to Dartmouth for a historic meeting about the country’s mental health crisis.

Tips for journalists

Considering the urgency and importance of this issue, we asked two mental health experts for advice on how journalists can improve their coverage.

In the five tips we outline below, you’ll find suggestions and insights from Gino Aisenberg, an associate professor of social work and co-director of the Latino Center for Health at the University of Washington, and Tony Walker, senior vice president of academic programs for The Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that helps higher education institutions, high schools and school districts implement strategies to prevent suicide and protect emotional health.

1. Make it clear to your audiences that the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t cause this crisis. Student mental health had been declining for years before the virus reached the U.S.

Several research studies and reports chronicle this trend, including a paper published last year that finds the proportion of college students with symptoms of depression and anxiety disorder nearly doubled between 2013 and 2019. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the first laboratory-confirmed case of COVID-19 in America in January 2020.

However, the pandemic has exacerbated the problem, especially among the most marginalized students, researchers find.

“College students now face increasing housing and food insecurity, financial hardships, a lack of social connectedness and sense of belonging, uncertainty about the future, and access issues that impede their academic performance and well-being,” researchers write in the 2021 paper, “More Than Inconvenienced: The Unique Needs of U.S. College Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

Psychiatrist Annelle Primm and other mental health professions have spoken out about the mental health impacts of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ban on affirmative action in higher education admissions. Higher education leaders expect it to reduce the number of underrepresented minorities attending the nation’s most competitive colleges and universities.

”We believe that the discontinuation of affirmative action will increase isolation and decrease a sense of belonging among students of color, both of which pose risks to mental health,” Primm, the senior medical director of the Steve Fund, a nonprofit organization that focuses on the mental health of young people of color, writes in Diverse Issues of Higher Education.

She cites a 2019 report from the University of Michigan, which stopped practicing affirmative action in 2006, as evidence. One-fourth of its Black, Latino and Native American students said they did not feel they belonged at the school — a 66% increase over 10 years, she notes.

2. Familiarize yourself with two ongoing studies of college student mental health: the Healthy Minds Study, which focuses on U.S. college students, and the World Mental Health International College Student Initiative, which collects data from college students across the globe.

Academic researchers affiliated with these two projects conduct regular surveys of college students to track the prevalence of mental health problems and better understand the factors that affect their mental health and discourage them from seeking help. These researchers also publish studies examining and interpreting the data they collect through annual, web-based surveys.

The Healthy Minds Study, launched in 2007, has been fielded at more than 530 U.S. colleges and universities. Tens of thousands of undergraduate and graduate students complete the survey each year.

Four university faculty members lead the project: Sarah Lipson, an associate professor in Boston University’s department of health law policy and management; Daniel Eisenberg, a professor of health policy of management at the University of California, Los Angeles; Justin Heinze, an associate professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan; and Sasha Zhou, an assistant professor of public health at Wayne State University.

In 2019, the World Health Organization started the World Mental Health International College Student Initiative. The project, commonly referred to as WMH-ICS, aims to collect data from college students worldwide. But as of early October 2023, only the U.S. and 17 other countries, eight of which are in Europe, participate.

The two lead U.S. researchers on that project are Randy Auerbach, an associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, and Ronald Kessler, the McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

3. Emphasize that improving student mental health will require much more than hiring additional campus counselors.

The Jed Foundation advises administrators to focus on the wellness of the entire student body, not just students experiencing distress and those with a diagnosed mental illness. It also encourages schools to invest in programs aimed at preventing mental health issues and detecting them earlier. 

That guidance falls in line with recommendations that a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine made in 2021, following an 18-month investigation into how campus culture affects college student mental health and well-being. Committee members stressed the need for a comprehensive approach — one in which everyone on campus, including faculty and staff across departments, pitch in to change campus culture.

Walker, The Jed Foundation’s senior vice president of academic programs, urges journalists to take a broader look at the problem as well.

“When we talk about mental health — and sometimes the media is inadvertently guilty of this — we tend to just focus on therapists and we tend to focus on access to mental health care,” Walker tells The Journalist’s Resource. “Mental health is not just counseling.”

Interventions that show promise, according to research studies, include peer counseling, mindfulness training and activities that connect students with similar backgrounds, such as students who are the first in their families to go to college.

4. Explain that all college students face a range of stressors, but certain groups, including racial minorities and LGBTQ students, grapple with additional ones.

College can be stressful, requiring students to juggle class assignments, work and personal relationships while preparing for careers and making sure there’s enough money for food, housing, tuition and other basic needs. A lot of students worry about shootings and other forms of violence on college campuses.

Some student groups face additional stressors, such as racism and discrimination — topics that news stories about college mental health often overlook or gloss over. Many racial and ethnic minorities experience racism throughout their lives, including at their institutions, notes Aisenberg, who co-founded the Latino Center for Health, a research center at the University of Washington focused on improving the health of Latino people across Washington and the U.S.

Sometimes, racism is blatant, he adds. Sometimes, it comes in the form of microaggressions, offensive or insensitive remarks or questions aimed at some aspect of a person’s identity, such as their race, physical appearance, immigration status or cultural traditions.

“For some individuals, one microaggression might not throw them off,” says Aisenberg, who is Mexican American. “Another microaggression I experience the same day and another one and another one — over time, it can weigh [a person] down.”

When Gallup Inc., a company known for its public opinion polls, interviewed 1,106 Black college students last fall, about 1 in 5 reported feeling “frequently” or “occasionally” discriminated against at school. Almost 1 in 3 Black students attending schools where there’s little racial or ethnic diversity among the student body indicated they feel discriminated against “frequently” or “occasionally.”

Nearly one-third of Black students enrolled at such institutions also said they feel physically unsafe, disrespected and psychologically unsafe, according to an analysis released early this year by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, a private foundation working to increase the share of Americans who continue their education past high school.

Aisenberg says it’s important journalists understand the role racism and discrimination play in student mental health. He’d like to see colleges invest more heavily in culturally responsive counseling, hiring mental health professionals who recognize and draw on the cultural strengths of students from minoritized backgrounds to help them.

Such counselors will understand why some student groups tend to resist therapy more than others.

“Latinos might be going to an indigenous healer, a priest, a minister long before seeking mental health services,” Aisenberg says.

5. Consult style guides that mental health experts have created specifically to help journalists use correct language and avoid perpetuating stereotypes about people with mental illness.

Several U.S. and international organizations have created style guides and tip sheets to help journalists provide a more complete and more accurate picture of mental health. They often offer guidance on word choices and point out common errors.

The California Mental Health Services Authority, for instance, warns journalists to be careful not to insinuate mental illness drove someone to commit a crime.

“Most people with a mental illness don’t commit crimes; most people who commit crimes don’t have a mental illness,” according to the government agency’s style guide. “People with psychiatric issues are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence.”

Some other recommendations: Consider whether someone’s mental illness is relevant to a news story before including that information. Also, don’t rely on hearsay about a person’s mental health diagnosis.

Check out these resources, too:

• The Disability Language Style Guide, created by the National Center on Disability and Journalism at Arizona State University.
• The Mental Health Media Guide, an interactive guide developed by a coalition of mental health and entertainment industry professionals.
• Safe and Effective Messaging, which features phrasing recommendations from The Jed Foundation.
• Improving College Student Mental Health: Research on Promising Campus Interventions, a roundup of research from The Journalist’s Resource on interventions that scholars have found successful.
• Trauma-Informed Journalism: What It Is, Why It’s Important and Tips for Practicing It, a tip sheet and explainer from The Journalist’s Resource that features advice from two experts.
• The Journalism Resource Guide on Behavioral Health, written by the Carter Center, a charity that focuses on issues such as public health, human rights and democracy. It also offers Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism.
• Preventing Suicide: Information for Journalists and Others Writing About Suicide is a tip sheet from the World Health Organization that outlines what journalists should and should not do when reporting on suicide.
• Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide, developed by experts across multiple fields and based on the findings of more than 50 international studies of suicide contagion.
• Covering Suicide is a guide the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at Columbia Journalism School created for college media organizations and student journalists.

The post 5 tips to help you cover the college mental health crisis appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

If you’re a journalist covering higher education in the U.S., you’ll likely be reporting this fall on what many healthcare professionals and researchers are calling a college student mental health crisis.

An estimated 49% of college students have symptoms of depression or anxiety disorder and 14% seriously considered committing suicide during the past year, according to a national survey of college students conducted during the 2022-23 school year. Nearly one-third of the 76,406 students who participated said they had intentionally injured themselves in recent months.

In December, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a rare public health advisory calling attention to the rising number of youth attempting suicide, noting the COVID-19 pandemic has “exacerbated the unprecedented stresses young people already faced.”

Meanwhile, colleges and universities of all sizes are struggling to meet the need for mental health care among undergraduate and graduate students. Many schools have hired more counselors and expanded services but continue to fall short.

Hundreds of University of Houston students held a protest earlier this year, demanding the administration increase the number of counselors and make other changes after two students died by suicide during the spring semester, the online publication Chron reported.

In an essay in the student-run newspaper, The Cougar, last week, student journalist Malachi Key blasts the university for having one mental health counselor for every 2,122 students, a ratio higher than recommended by the International Accreditation of Counseling Services, which accredits higher education counseling services.

But adding staff to a campus counseling center won’t be enough to improve college student mental health and well-being, scholars and health care practitioners warn.

“Counseling centers cannot and should not be expected to solve these problems alone, given that the factors and forces affecting student well-being go well beyond the purview and resources that counseling centers can bring to bear,” a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine writes in a 2021 report examining the issue.

Advice from prominent scholars

The report is the culmination of an 18-month investigation the National Academies launched in 2019, at the request of the federal government, to better understand how campus culture affects college student mental health and well-being. Committee members examined data, studied research articles and met with higher education leaders, mental health practitioners, researchers and students.

The committee’s key recommendation: that schools take a more comprehensive approach to student mental health, implementing a wide range of policies and programs aimed at preventing mental health problems and improving the well-being of all students — in addition to providing services and treatment for students in distress and those with diagnosed mental illnesses.

Everyone on campus, including faculty and staff across departments, needs to pitch in to establish a new campus culture, the committee asserts.

“An ‘all hands’ approach, one that emphasizes shared responsibility and a holistic understanding of what it means in practice to support students, is needed if institutions of higher education are to intervene from anything more than a reactive standpoint,” committee members write. “Creating this systemic change requires that institutions examine the entire culture and environment of the institution and accept more responsibility for creating learning environments where a changing student population can thrive.”

In a more recent analysis, three leading scholars in the field also stress the need for a broader plan of action.

Sara Abelson, a research assistant professor at Temple University’s medical school; Sarah Lipson, an associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health; and Daniel Eisenberg,  a professor of health policy and management at the University of California, Los Angeles’ School of Public Health, have been studying college student mental health for years.

Lipson and Eisenberg also are principal investigators for the Healthy Minds Network, which administers the Healthy Minds Study, a national survey of U.S college students conducted annually to gather information about their mental health, whether and how they receive mental health care and related issues.

Abelson, Lipson and Eisenberg review the research to date on mental health interventions for college students in the 2022 edition of Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. They note that while the evidence indicates a multi-pronged approach is best, it’s unclear which specific strategies are most effective.

Much more research needed

Abelson, Lipson and Eisenberg stress the need for more research. Many interventions in place at colleges and universities today — for instance, schoolwide initiatives aimed at reducing mental health stigma and encouraging students to seek help when in duress – should be evaluated to gauge their effectiveness, they write in their chapter, “Mental Health in College Populations: A Multidisciplinary Review of What Works, Evidence Gaps, and Paths Forward.”

They add that researchers and higher education leaders also need to look at how campus operations, including hiring practices and budgetary decisions, affect college student mental health. It would be helpful to know, for example, how students are impacted by limits on the number of campus counseling sessions they can have during a given period, Abelson, Lipson and Eisenberg suggest.

Likewise, it would be useful to know whether students are more likely to seek counseling when they must pay for their sessions or when their school charges every member of the student body a mandatory health fee that provides free counseling for all students.

“These financially-based considerations likely influence help-seeking and treatment receipt, but they have not been evaluated within higher education,” they write.

Interventions that show promise

The report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the chapter by Abelson, Lipson and Eisenberg both spotlight programs and policies shown to prevent mental health problems or improve the mental health and well-being of young people. However, many intervention studies focus on high school students, specific groups of college students or specific institutions. Because of this, it can be tough to predict how well they would work across the higher education landscape.

Scientific evaluations of these types of interventions indicate they are effective:

• Building students’ behavior management skills and having them practice new skills under expert supervision. An example: A class that teaches students how to use mindfulness to improve their mental and physical health that includes instructor-led meditation exercises.
• Training some students to offer support to others, including sharing information and organizing peer counseling groups. “Peers may be ‘the single most potent source of influence’ on student affective and cognitive growth and development during college,” Abelson, Lipson and Eisenberg write.
• Reducing students’ access to things they can use to harm themselves, including guns and lethal doses of over-the-counter medication.
• Creating feelings of belonging through activities that connect students with similar interests or backgrounds.
• Making campuses more inclusive for racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ students and students who are the first in their families to go to college. One way to do that is by hiring mental health professionals trained to recognize, support and treat students from different backgrounds. “Research has shown that the presentation of [mental health] symptoms can differ based on racial and ethnic backgrounds, as can engaging in help-seeking behaviors that differ from those of cisgender, heteronormative white men,” explain members of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee.

Helping journalists sift through the evidence

We encourage journalists to read the full committee report and aforementioned chapter in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. We realize, though, that many journalists won’t have time to pour over the combined 304 pages of text to better understand this issue and the wide array of interventions colleges and universities have tried, with varying success.

To help, we’ve gathered and summarized meta-analyses that investigate some of the more common interventions. Researchers conduct meta-analyses — a top-tier form of scientific evidence — to systematically analyze all the numerical data that appear in academic studies on a given topic. The findings of a meta-analysis are statistically stronger than those reached in a single study, partly because pooling data from multiple, similar studies creates a larger sample to examine.

Keep reading to learn more. And please check back here occasionally because we’ll add to this list as new research on college student mental health is published.

Peer-led programs

Stigma and Peer-Led Interventions: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Jing Sun; et al. Frontiers in Psychiatry, July 2022.

When people diagnosed with a mental illness received social or emotional support from peers with similar mental health conditions, they experienced less stress about the public stigma of mental illness, this analysis suggests.

The intervention worked for people from various age groups, including college students and middle-aged adults, researchers learned after analyzing seven studies on peer-led mental health programs written or published between 1975 and 2021.

Researchers found that participants also became less likely to identify with negative stereotypes associated with mental illness.

All seven studies they examined are randomized controlled trials conducted in the U.S., Germany or Switzerland. Together, the findings represent the experiences of a total of 763 people, 193 of whom were students at universities in the U.S.

Researchers focused on interventions designed for small groups of people, with the goal of reducing self-stigma and stress associated with the public stigma of mental illness. One or two trained peer counselors led each group for activities spanning three to 10 weeks.

Five of the seven studies tested the Honest, Open, Proud program, which features role-playing exercises, self-reflection and group discussion. It encourages participants to consider disclosing their mental health issues, instead of keeping them a secret, in hopes that will help them feel more confident and empowered. The two other programs studied are PhotoVoice, based in the United Kingdom, and

“By sharing their own experiences or recovery stories, peer moderators may bring a closer relationship, reduce stereotypes, and form a positive sense of identity and group identity, thereby reducing self-stigma,” the authors of the analysis write.

Expert-led instruction

The Effects of Meditation, Yoga, and Mindfulness on Depression, Anxiety, and Stress in Tertiary Education Students: A Meta-Analysis
Josefien Breedvelt; et al. Frontiers in Psychiatry, April 2019.

Meditation-based programs help reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress among college students, researchers find after analyzing the results of 24 research studies conducted in various parts of North America, Asia and Europe.

Reductions were “moderate,” researchers write. They warn, however, that the results of their meta-analysis should be interpreted with caution considering studies varied in quality.

A total of 1,373 college students participated in the 24 studies. Students practiced meditation, yoga or mindfulness an average of 153 minutes a week for about seven weeks. Most programs were provided in a group setting.

Although the researchers do not specify which types of mindfulness, yoga or meditation training students received, they note that the most commonly offered mindfulness program is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and that a frequently practiced form of yoga is Hatha Yoga.

Meta-Analytic Evaluation of Stress Reduction Interventions for Undergraduate and Graduate Students
Miryam Yusufov; et al. International Journal of Stress Management, May 2019.

After examining six types of stress-reduction programs common on college campuses, researchers determined all were effective at reducing stress or anxiety among students — and some helped with both stress and anxiety.

Programs focusing on cognitive-behavioral therapy, coping skills and building social support networks were more effective in reducing stress. Meanwhile, relaxation training, mindfulness-based stress reduction and psychoeducation were more effective in reducing anxiety.

The authors find that all six program types were equally effective for undergraduate and graduate students.

The findings are based on an analysis of 43 studies dated from 1980 to 2015, 30 of which were conducted in the U.S. The rest were conducted in Australia, China, India, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Kora, Malaysia or Thailand. A total of 4,400 students participated.

Building an inclusive environment

Cultural Adaptations and Therapist Multicultural Competence: Two Meta-Analytic Reviews
Alberto Soto; et al. Journal of Clinical Psychology, August 2018.

If racial and ethnic minorities believe their therapist understands their background and culture, their treatment tends to be more successful, this analysis suggests.

“The more a treatment is tailored to match the precise characteristics of a client, the more likely that client will engage in treatment, remain in treatment, and experience improvement as a result of treatment,” the authors write.

Researchers analyzed the results of 15 journal articles and doctoral dissertations that examine therapists’ cultural competence. Nearly three-fourths of those studies were written or published in 2010 or later. Together, the findings represent the experiences of 2,640 therapy clients, many of whom were college students. Just over 40% of participants were African American and 32% were Hispanic or Latino.

The researchers note that they find no link between therapists’ ratings of their own level of cultural competence and client outcomes.

Internet-based interventions

Internet Interventions for Mental Health in University Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Mathias Harrer; et al. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, June 2019.

Internet-based mental health programs can help reduce stress and symptoms of anxiety, depression and eating disorders among college students, according to an analysis of 48 research studies published or written before April 30, 2018 on the topic.

All 48 studies were randomized, controlled trials of mental health interventions that used the internet to engage with students across various platforms and devices, including mobile phones and apps. In total, 10,583 students participated in the trials.

“We found small effects on depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms, as well as moderate‐sized effects on eating disorder symptoms and students’ social and academic functioning,” write the authors, who conducted the meta-analysis as part of the World Mental Health International College Student Initiative.

The analysis indicates programs that focus on cognitive behavioral therapy “were superior to other types of interventions.” Also, programs “of moderate length” — one to two months – were more effective.

The researchers note that studies of programs targeting depression showed better results when students were not compensated for their participation, compared to studies in which no compensation was provided. The researchers do not offer possible explanations for the difference in results or details about the types of compensation offered to students.

The post Improving college student mental health: Research on promising campus interventions appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

As adults with federal student loans await new details about the widespread loan forgiveness program President Joe Biden announced Aug. 24, many journalists will be trying to answer questions such as:

• How much will the program cost?
• Who will benefit most?
• What could be the unintended consequences?

To help, we’ve gathered and summarized a sampling of academic research and government reports that provide insights on Biden’s historic program, which offers adults earning less than $125,000 a year a one-time opportunity to erase up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt.

Borrowers qualify for a $20,000 loan reduction if they received Pell Grants, money the federal government gives low- and middle-income students to offset a portion of their higher education costs.

The White House estimates as many as 43 million people with outstanding federal student loan debt will qualify. Close to half could see their whole balances vanish. The U.S. Department of Education will make applications available by early October.  

Debt cancellation is one component of Biden’s three-part plan. He also extended the pause on federal student loan payments, ordered early in the pandemic, until Dec. 31. The new loan forgiveness program, which Biden implemented through executive action, increases the income threshold used to determine which borrowers qualify for Income-Driven Repayment plans, commonly referred to as IDR plans.

Borrowers on IDR plans make smaller monthly loan payments because payment amounts are based on income. Not only will higher-earning adults become eligible for IDR plans, the federal government also plans to discharge loan balances after 10 years of payments — instead of 20 years — for borrowers whose original loans were $12,000 or less.

Below, you’ll find government reports offering estimates on the cost of Biden’s plan and similar loan forgiveness initiatives plus research on who benefits most when the federal government makes changes aimed at reducing college debt loads.

We’ve also included three reports that provide additional context, including one the U.S. Government Accountability Office released in July criticizing the U.S. Department of Education for vastly miscalculating the cost of providing federal Direct Loans to help students and their parents pay for postsecondary education.

If you’re looking for practical guidance on covering student loan forgiveness, read our new tip sheet, created with help from Washington Post reporter Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, who covers the economics of higher education.

Cost estimates

Assessing Debt Relief’s Fiscal and Cash-Flow Effects
The White House, August 2022.

In this brief report, released Aug. 26, White House officials discuss how the new student loan forgiveness program will affect the federal government’s cash flow, which, they write, “is what matters when it comes to federal borrowing and the national debt.”

Because borrowers typically repay their loans over many years, the loss of revenue in the form of student loan payments will be felt over the next decade or more.

“Assuming a take-up rate of 75 percent, we estimate that over the decade from 2023-32, the average cash flow impact will be approximately $24 billion annually,” officials write.

The U.S. Department of Education is working with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget to estimate the budgetary impact, which will depend on variables such as interest rate projections and the portion of borrowers who successfully apply for debt relief.

White House officials note that many borrowers will resume making student loan payments in January, following a two-year payment pause prompted by the pandemic. The report cites a Goldman Sachs analysis that concludes that a debt forgiveness program that reduces monthly loan payments “is slightly inflationary in isolation, but the resumption of payments is likely to more than offset this.”

The Biden Student Loan Forgiveness Plan: Budgetary Costs and Distributional Impact
Junlei Chen and Kent Smetters. Report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model, August 2022.

In this five-page report, researchers examine the cost of Biden’s loan forgiveness initiative. They estimate the debt cancellation piece of the program alone will cost between $468.6 billion and $519.1 billion, “with about 75% of the benefit accruing to households making $88,000 or less.”

They also estimate that:

• The proposed changes to IDR plans will cost $70 billion.
• The payment pause in 2022 will cost an additional $16 billion.
• The total cost of the program could exceed $1 trillion.

Who benefits most?

The Distributional Effects of Student Loan Forgiveness
Sylvain Catherine and Constantine Yannelis. National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, updated in April 2021.

In this working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers investigate how the design of student loan forgiveness programs affects different groups of borrowers. Among the main takeaways: Universal student loan forgiveness policies, which discharge all borrowers’ debt, and capped forgiveness policies, which erase all debt below a certain amount, such as $10,000 or $50,000, disproportionately benefit high-income borrowers.

Meanwhile, expanding the number of borrowers eligible for IDR plans — a third type of student loan forgiveness – benefits lower- and middle-income borrowers, the authors write in the 58-page paper.

The authors study these three types of loan forgiveness programs under varying scenarios to estimate how much money borrowers of different income levels and racial and ethnic groups would save.

They find that when higher-income borrowers participate in universal and capped loan forgiveness programs, they benefit because they tend to have more education debt, some or all of it incurred during graduate school, including law school and medical school.

On the other hand, IDR programs benefit lower- and middle-income borrowers because they allow adults to make loan payments based on their earnings. Adults whose incomes fall below a certain threshold pay the lowest monthly loan payments. Some pay nothing at all. And after making those reduced payments for a certain number of years, their remaining balance is discharged.

Across their analyses, universal loan forgiveness programs are regressive, meaning they benefit higher-income borrowers, but expanding IDR plans leads to more forgiveness for lower and middle-income borrowers.

“Under a policy enrolling all borrowers who would benefit from IDR, individuals in the bottom half of the earnings distribution would receive three-fifths of dollars forgiven and borrowers in the top 30% of the earnings distribution receive one-third of dollars in forgiveness,” the authors write.

Who Are the Federal Student Loan Borrowers and Who Benefits from Forgiveness?
Jacob Goss, Daniel Mangrum, and Joelle Scally. Liberty Street Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, April 2022.

This brief report from the New York Federal Reserve examines four student loan forgiveness policies to determine which borrowers benefit most. They compare borrowers by characteristics such as age, credit score and the demographics of their neighborhood.  

The analysis suggests:

• Loan forgiveness mostly benefits borrowers with lower credit scores, frequently used as a proxy for financial instability. Credit scores typically range from 300 and 850. “Under all four policies, more than half the share of forgiven debt would go to borrowers with a credit score below 660,” the authors note.
  
  
• Forgiveness policies primarily benefit borrowers under age 40. “Those over 60 years old benefit the least from forgiveness,” the authors write. “Despite being 32 percent of the U.S. adult population, those 60 and older only receive around 6 percent of forgiven dollars, roughly in line with the share of this age group that owes federal student loans.”

• If the federal government were to forgive $10,000 in federal student loan debt for each borrower, “33 percent of forgiveness would go to majority-minority neighborhoods while 67 percent would go to majority white neighborhoods.”

Other research to consider

Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition
Grey Gordon and Aaron Hedlund. National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, February 2016.

This study finds the sharp increase in college tuition between 1987 and 2010 was largely driven by an expansion of the Federal Student Loan Program.

Researchers designed a simulation that allowed them to examine whether and how various factors affected tuition prices during that period and test the so-called Bennett hypothesis, which asserts, as former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett did in the 1980s, that colleges respond to increases in financial aid by increasing tuition.

Between 1987 and 2010, several financial aid reforms were implemented, including the introduction of unsubsidized loans and increased limits on some grants and subsidized loans. Over those 20-plus years, net tuition in the U.S. rose 106%, on average.

The authors find that reforming the Federal Student Loan Program generated a 102% tuition increase. If those financial aid changes had not been made, net tuition would have risen 16%, according to the model.

Financial Aid Offices Face Intensifying Staffing Challenges Amid Pandemic
National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, May 2022.

This report examines the challenges college financial aid offices in the U.S. have faced trying to meet student needs amid the pandemic and staffing shortages.

Months before Biden announced his massive loan forgiveness initiative, many financial aid offices already were in “crisis” mode, according to the report, compiled by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, a nonprofit organization representing more than 32,000 financial aid professionals at nearly 3,000 higher education institutions.

The 69-page document discusses the results of two online surveys the organization conducted in March and May of 2022. Financial aid staff from 518 schools participated in the first survey and financial aid staff from 507 other institutions completed the second.

“What we learned is simple: What was once a challenge — albeit a manageable one — has become a crisis for many institutional financial aid offices that are struggling to remain administratively capable and adequately serve students, whose own needs have increased in the last two years,” the authors write.

About 41% of employees who were asked how easy or difficult it had been to fill vacant positions with qualified staff said it had been “difficult.” Another 43% said it had been “very difficult.”

Of the employees asked whether their office had the staffing and resources necessary to adequately administer federal financial aid programs, 46% of those working at public universities said no, as did 37% of those working at community colleges. Meanwhile, 38% of staff working at private, nonprofit institutions said they did not.

Student Loans: Education Has Increased Federal Cost Estimates of Direct Loans by Billions Due to Programmatic and Other Changes
U.S. Government Accountability Office Report No. GAO-22-105365, July 2022.

The U.S. Department of Education botched its estimate for the amount of money the federal government would make off federal Direct Loans, which help students and their parents pay for education beyond high school, from 1997 through 2021, according to this performance audit conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency within Congress.

The education department “originally estimated these loans to generate $114 billion in income for the government,” the agency writes. “Although actual costs cannot be known until the end of the loan terms, as of fiscal year 2021 these loans are estimated to cost the federal government $197 billion.”

The report outlines some of the reasons the estimate is so far off. The biggest reason: Education officials made erroneous assumptions about borrowers’ behavior, including how much they would borrow, which repayment plans they would choose and whether they would prepay or default on their loans.

Another factor that has driven up costs: The federal government has allowed borrowers to stop making loan payments since the start of the pandemic. That payment pause is set to end Dec. 31, 2022.

“According to our review of Education data, COVID-19 emergency relief provided from March 13, 2020 through April 30, 2022 was estimated to increase Direct Loan costs to the federal government by about $102 billion,” the Government Accountability Office writes.

The agency notes how difficult it is to predict student loan costs when loan payment amounts can change substantially for adults enrolled in Income-Driven Repayment plans. The amount those borrowers are required to pay each month changes according to their economic situation.

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President Joe Biden on Wednesday unveiled his highly anticipated student loan forgiveness program, designed to eliminate up to $10,000 in debt for most Americans with student loans backed by the federal government.

Borrowers who received Pell Grants for low- to middle-income families while they were students could see their loan debt slashed by as much as $20,000.

Biden’s historic plan calls for a range of changes designed to reduce the financial burden associated with going to college and seeking training at trade schools, vocational schools and other programs after high school. Nationwide, student loan balances total $1.6 trillion, according to White House officials.

They estimate that as many as 43 million people — the vast majority of adults with federal student loan debt — qualify for the one-time reduction. About 20 million could see their whole balance disappear.

“The policy will deliver the single largest discharge of education debt on record,” The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

In the coming months, the U.S. Department of Education will release more details about the program, including how borrowers can apply and how much it will cost. An analysis from the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates the debt cancellation piece of Biden’s three-part plan will cost up to $519 billion. The Federal Student Aid office announced an application will be available by Dec. 31.

To help journalists cover this new initiative and student loan forgiveness more broadly, we asked Washington Post reporter Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, who covers the economics of higher education, for advice. She shared a wealth of insights and other information, which we distilled into these five tips to get journalists started.

1. Avoid focusing on young borrowers with college debt. Give audiences a more complete picture of the problem by including other types of borrowers, including older adults and people who used federal student loans to attend vocational and trade schools.

Douglas-Gabriel says it’s a mistake to present student loan debt as a problem plaguing mostly college graduates who have just begun to build their careers. She urges journalists to feature a variety of borrowers in their coverage to demonstrate how the burden of education debt has affected different borrowers and their families over the short- and long-term.

Although news coverage does not always show it, middle-aged Americans make up a substantial portion of the country’s student loan holders. In 2021, 38% of student loan borrowers were 40 years old and older, including more than 3.5 million over age 60, the Federal Reserve reports.

About 34% of borrowers were under age 30, and almost 28% were between the ages of 30 and 39.

Douglas-Gabriel encourages journalists to seek out older adults to ask about the challenges of paying down student loans while also, in some cases, helping younger family members such as a child or grandchild pay for college. It’s important for journalists to also examine student debt among Americans who attended vocational and trade schools, which offer training in areas such as welding, cosmetology and automotive repair, Douglas-Gabriel adds.

She points to a recent story about employer-based training for truck drivers as an example of journalists drawing attention to an education debt problem many people might not know about. The story, published by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit education news outlet, reveals how trucking companies offer training to help employees obtain commercial driver’s licenses, provided employees sign repayment agreements that can leave them in debt and make it tough for those who quit to find other jobs.

“Those kinds of hidden-debt stories are important to do because they add to the overall landscape of who has [education] debt and what it means for these different populations,” Douglas-Gabriel says.

Here are two of her other storytelling suggestions:

• Interview borrowers with average levels of loan debt instead of primarily focusing on adults with six-figure debt loads, who are uncommon. In late 2021, 10% of Americans who had taken out loans to fund their education owed $100,000 or more, according to a May 2022 report from the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, 26% owed less than $10,000 and 19% owed between $10,000 and $19,999.
  
  A separate Federal Reserve analysis shows average student loan balances vary substantially across states, ranging from $28,218 in South Dakota to $42,543 in Maryland during the last quarter of 2021.

• Seek out borrowers from the center of the country. Focusing on student debt in urban areas of the East Coast such as Washington D.C. can be misleading, Douglas-Gabriel notes.
  
  “A lot of people who live in D.C. have large debt loads because they have graduate degrees or they’re attorneys,” she adds. “They do not represent student loan borrowers [as a whole].”

2. Familiarize yourself with the loan forgiveness programs the federal government offers.

The student loan forgiveness program Biden unveiled Wednesday is one of several the federal government offers. Douglas-Gabriel recommends journalists become familiar with them, and these five in particular:

• Public Service Loan Forgiveness: This program aims to help teachers, nurses, firefighters and others who specialize in public service fields eliminate their federal student loan debt after 10 years of work.
  
  
• Teacher Loan Forgiveness: Teachers who agree to work five consecutive years for a school or educational service agency serving primarily low-income students can use this program to reduce their student loan debt by as much as $17,500.
  
  
• Income-Driven Repayment plans: Borrowers participating in this program can lower their monthly student loan payments to an amount more affordable for their income and family size. Any balance remaining after 20 to 25 years gets canceled, depending on the repayment plan.
  
  
• Total and Permanent Disability Discharge: People who become disabled and can no longer work can apply to have their federal student loans canceled.
  
  
• Closed School Discharge: This program eliminates student loan debt for people whose schools closed while they were enrolled or shortly after they withdrew.
  

It’s important to note that some states also offer student loan forgiveness programs. Many of those target adults specializing in fields where there is a shortage of workers or turnover rates are high.

In Maine, for example, the Alfond Leaders Student Debt Reduction Program provides loan repayment assistance to Maine residents who work in Maine in STEM, or science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. The New York State Young Farmers Loan Forgiveness Incentive Program helps college graduates who pursue careers in farming in that state pay down their student debt.

3. Examine the reasons more people have not qualified for or participated in earlier federal loan forgiveness programs.

The rules for federal loan forgiveness programs are complicated and confusing, Douglas-Gabriel notes. Because of it, many borrowers don’t follow the rules correctly and miss out on a chance to erase all or a portion of their loan debt. Some borrowers also are denied because of paperwork errors and other technicalities.

In 2018, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a 34-page report criticizing the way the U.S. Department of Education had administered the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, established a decade earlier. As of April 2018, fewer than 1% of borrowers who had applied for loan forgiveness under this program received it.

According to the report, “borrowers were frequently confused by program requirements.”

“For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported that borrowers have complained of spending years making payments, believing they were making progress towards PSLF loan forgiveness, and then learning that they were not eligible,” the Government Accountability Office writes.

That office released a report last year pointing out the Department of Education had, as of January 2020, denied 94% of Public Service Loan Forgiveness applications submitted by active-duty service members and other Department of Defense employees.

Last year, the nonprofit National Consumer Law Center released a report blasting Income-Driven Repayment plans, known as IDR plans. In the 25 years that program has existed, the federal government has canceled debts for a total of 32 people.

“As noted, only 32 IDR borrowers have successfully cancelled their loans even though approximately two million borrowers have been in repayment for 20 years or longer,” according to the report. “The shockingly low rate of cancellation of these borrowers’ loans is emblematic of [the U.S. Department of Education’s] failure to deliver the relief Congress intended when it passed the statutes enabling the creation of these IDR programs.”

4. Seek out experts who examine issues around student loan forgiveness through different lenses. Spotlight the work and opinions of authorities who are not white or male.

While Douglas-Gabriel recommends journalists interview researchers and academics when reporting on student debt and loan forgiveness, she says it’s important to reach out to other types of experts to get a fuller understanding of the issue.

“There are a wealth of people paying attention to this space who don’t get much attention for it,” she says.

She suggests interviewing:

• Consumer attorneys whose clients are borrowers struggling to pay their college debt.
• Borrower advocates and advocacy groups such as The Institute of Student Loan Advisors.
• Former legislators and government leaders who years ago helped design or set up student loan forgiveness policies.

Douglas-Gabriel urges journalists to further diversify their sources by spotlighting the work and opinions of experts who are not white or male. Ask researchers and other sources for suggestions about who to call.

This is how she does it:

“I say ‘Hey, I really want to elevate the voices of people of color and younger and older folks who don’t get attention [for their work]. Does anyone come to mind?’”

She adds that framing the question “in this really positive, altruistic language helps to break down any defensiveness people may have” about a journalist looking for sources with specific characteristics.

5. Watch the mini-documentary series, “Looking Back to Move Forward: A History of Federal Student Aid.”

Douglas-Gabriel recommends watching this series of six short films, presented by the Lumina Foundation and the Institute for Higher Education Policy, to learn about the origins and evolution of the federal student aid system over the last 60 years. Each film runs 10 to 15 minutes.

“I really would encourage anyone who wants to get into this space and to know how we got here and why we’re here to watch [the series],” she says. “It gives you a better idea of why this system — like many government programs — was really well-meaning but unwieldy, exceedingly complicated and made it easy to fall through the cracks.”

If you’re looking for more higher education reporting tips, check out our tip sheets on covering “free college” and “college promise” programs and covering college finances amid COVID-19.

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Colleges across the country face deep financial losses after the coronavirus forced school officials to shutter campuses and cancel events. Administrators worry their money troubles will only get worse if enrollment, government funding and other sources of revenue continue to fall amid a likely recession.

In the coming months, news outlets will monitor colleges’ finances and how administrators respond to the crisis, with particular attention to the largest and most prestigious institutions and those struggling most. To help journalists prepare, the national Education Writers Association held a webinar last week with college finance experts from Moody’s Investors Service, one of the for-profit agencies that determines credit ratings for public and private colleges and universities.

This tip sheet is based on that webinar, “Will the Coronavirus Drive Your College Out of Business?” Below, we spotlight six of the panelists’ best tips for reporting on colleges’ finances.

The three panelists were Susan Fitzgerald, who manages Moody’s Global Higher Education and Not-for-Profit Ratings team; Michael Osborn, a Moody’s vice president-senior analyst; and David Jacobson, vice president of communications for Moody’s Public Finance Group.

——————-

1. 1. The coronavirus pandemic and shrinking U.S. economy will continue to impact colleges’ various revenue streams. Expand your coverage beyond shifts in student enrollment and shrinking income from tuition, on-campus housing, dining halls and parking fees.

State funding, endowment proceeds and private donations all could fall in fiscal year 2021, which begins July 1, Fitzgerald said. Budget reserves likely will take a big hit, as will revenue generated by athletic events such as football games.

Meanwhile, Fitzgerald said some costs have increased as schools moved online. Converting traditional courses to virtual ones can be expensive and labor intensive, requiring software, technology and security upgrades as well as assistance from instructional designers and multimedia experts.

2. Keep in mind that public universities, community colleges and private institutions might be affected differently. The amount of time physical campuses stay closed will influence budgets across the higher education industry.
   

Moody’s predicts public universities will face greater financial challenges in the coming months than private colleges and universities. That’s partly because public institutions tend to rely heavily on state funding, which could be cut during the next fiscal year, Fitzgerald explained. The size of an institution also matters. “Larger ones are more resilient than smaller ones,” she said.

Some schools — community colleges in particular — could see enrollment rise. During the 2008 recession, community college enrollment swelled as people went back to school to learn new skills, switch careers and take courses to complete a degree they had been putting off. Community colleges, known for their workforce training and applied science degree programs, are less expensive than universities and admit students with a wider range of academic abilities.

But as the country heads into what’s likely to be the deepest recession in decades, Fitzgerald said it’s tough to know what will happen with enrollment. “The real question is consumer behavior,” she explained. “It’s really hard to predict because you have two countervailing forces — a health crisis on top of [an economic crisis].”

A few weeks ago, Moody’s reported that if campuses can reopen in time for the 2020-21 academic year, “the effect on [student] demand and budgets will be more manageable.”

3. Keep an eye on changes to colleges’ credit ratings, an indicator that the financial health of an institution has improved or worsened.

Credit ratings tell banks and investors the likelihood that a business or government will repay a debt. These ratings are expressed as a letter grade, ranging at Moody’s from an Aaa down to a C. Moody’s assigns an Aaa — referred to as a triple-A rating — to organizations that, according to its analysis, have the strongest capacity to fulfill their financial commitments.

The major credit rating agencies that regularly assess colleges are Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and Fitch Ratings.

Before the coronavirus began to spread, some U.S. colleges already were struggling financially and the number of colleges that had their credit ratings downgraded by Moody’s outpaced the number receiving upgrades. In 2019, for example, Moody’s lowered the credit ratings of almost 25 schools and raised ratings for fewer than 10, according to data presented at the webinar.

On May 1, Moody’s issued a report announcing rating downgrades for several higher education institutions, including Central Michigan University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and the William Paterson University of New Jersey.

Moody’s, S&P and Fitch make their ratings public and do not charge for the information. Moody’s also announces new reports and analyses on Twitter at @MoodysUSPubFin.

4. Read credit opinion reports and financial statements. Pay attention to the footnotes.

Osborn recommended journalists aim to answer three critical questions: Is the institution running a budget surplus or deficit? Have its revenues risen, fallen or remained steady over time? How have expenses changed?

When reviewing a college’s financial statement — many schools post them online — he suggested scrutinizing its assets and liabilities as well as its revenues and expenses.

Ask rating agencies for a copy of the credit opinion it compiled for the college or college system you’re interested in. This report explains analysts’ assessment of the school or system, based on factors such as its reputation, relationship with local and federal governments and pension obligations.

5. Remind audiences that while a few colleges have closed recently, most are resilient.

News coverage tends to focus on the schools struggling most. Jacobson noted that journalists also are much more likely to report on downgrades of college credit ratings than upgrades. “People sometimes see these small schools that are in trouble and they get the incorrect feeling that this is what’s happening to all of higher education and that’s not the case,” he said.

6. Familiarize yourself with organizations and online platforms that provide financial data.

Depending on what information journalists seek, they might need to go to different places to get data on different kinds of schools. Here are some key sources of data on colleges’ finances. All provide important context.

• The National Center for Educational Statistics publishes detailed reports on current and past student enrollment as well as enrollment projections across the higher education industry. It also offers data showing how tuition and student housing costs surged over the decades.
• Grapevine is an annual compilation of data on state funding for public institutions, produced by the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University in cooperation with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
• Journalists can get financial statements, disclosures, default notifications and other information on any school that has issued any debt from Electronic Municipal Market Access, a service of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board.
• If you’re looking for financial data on a private, nonprofit school, go to Guidestar or ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer to look up its IRS Form 990. Most organizations claiming federal tax-exempt status must file this form annually. The document contains details on such things as number of employees, assets, liabilities, compensation for top administrators and income collected through various revenue streams, including tuition, grants, fundraising activities and student auxiliary services such as student housing.

Journalist’s Resource has lots of coronavirus-related resources, including tips on covering biomedical research preprints. One of our features examines rural broadband in the time of the coronavirus. We’ve also gathered academic studies that offer insights into the pandemic’s influence on our everyday lives, including threats to civil liberties and how infectious disease outbreaks impact mental health.

The author of this piece is a veteran education journalist who serves on the board of directors to the Education Writers Association. This image was obtained from the Flickr account of Shaylor and is being used under a Creative Commons license. No changes were made.

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Annually, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy awards the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting to a stellar investigative report that has had a direct impact on government, politics and policy at the national, state or local levels. Six reporting teams were chosen as finalists for the 2020 prize, which carries a $10,000 award for finalists and $25,000 for the winner. This year, as we did last year, Journalist’s Resource is publishing a series of interviews with the finalists, in the interest of giving a behind-the-scenes explanation of the process, tools, and legwork it takes to create an important piece of investigative journalism. Journalist’s Resource is a project of the Shorenstein Center, but was not involved in the judging process for the Goldsmith Prize finalists or winner.  “Copy, Paste, Legislate” — a collaboration among The Arizona Republic, USA TODAY and the Center for Public Integrity — was named the winner on March 23.

In the investigative series, “Fleeing Justice,” journalist Shane Dixon Kavanaugh uncovered dozens of cases of Saudi Arabian nationals fleeing the U.S. and Canada after being charged with serious crimes, including manslaughter, rape and possession of child pornography. He also documented a pattern of Saudi interference with their cases, and the fact that federal authorities had known about this practice for at least a decade.

The Saudi government paid bail and hired attorneys to defend nearly all of these young men, most of whom were international college students. In each case, they disappeared before they could be prosecuted or complete their jail sentences. Some were traced back to Saudi Arabia, even after surrendering their passports to U.S. authorities.

The series began when Kavanaugh, a general assignment reporter at The Oregonian since 2017, learned that Portland Community College student Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah had been spirited out of the country while facing charges of first-degree manslaughter, felony hit-and-run and reckless driving. The Saudi Consulate paid Noorah’s $100,000 bail and provided him with an attorney. Shortly before his trial in 2017, Noorah cut off his electronic tracking monitor and vanished.

“Law enforcement officials now say they believe Noorah got an illicit passport and boarded a plane — likely a private carrier — to flee the country,” Kananaugh wrote in an article published in December 2018 and then updated in August 2019. “Despite unknowns in the ongoing investigation, officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Marshals Service are all but certain who helped orchestrate the remarkable escape: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

The series prompted U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon to introduce the Saudi Fugitives Declassification Act of 2019, aimed at forcing the federal government to disclose what it knows about Saudi Arabia’s suspected role in helping its citizens escape prosecution in the U.S. President Donald Trump signed the bill into law in late 2019.

Journalist’s Resource reached out to Kavanaugh to ask him about reporting the story. We also asked him for tips for doing investigative journalism that initiates positive change. Below are six of his best tips.

1. Form as many source relationships as possible. Include people outside your beat.

“Talk to as many people as you can — all the time,” Kavanaugh says. “You never know when a story like this will fall into your lap.”

He learned about the first case of a Saudi Arabian student fleeing the country during a conversation with a law enforcement source in Portland. “We were actually chatting about something completely different,” Kavanaugh explains. “This person I was talking to, in an offhanded way, mentioned the Saudi Arabian government had helped this guy escape, and he had returned to Saudi Arabia and it was something that had never been reported on or explained before that.”

He continues, “If I had not developed a relationship with this person previously, if I hadn’t been discussing another case they were working on … this person would never have mentioned this to me. One of the things that continues to surprise me about this is how accidental it was.”

The relationship Kavanaugh had built over time with Sen. Wyden and his staff also helped him obtain information he, otherwise, might not have gotten — including tips about new legislation Wyden planned to introduce as a result of The Oregonian series. “That level of trust between that office and me — that was, I think, also very important in the end,” Kavanaugh says. “Because Sen. Wyden ended up doing so much and getting this bill passed that was ultimately signed into law.”

2. When key players in your story are private attorneys, check out the other cases they’re handling.

That’s how Kavanaugh learned the attorney hired to defend Noorah had represented other Saudi Arabian nationals who had been charged with serious crimes.

“A week or so after the first story ran,” he explains, “I was out walking with my kids on a Saturday morning and the thought occurred to me that I should probably go back and look up the other cases that this defendant’s attorney had handled in the state of Oregon. I went home that afternoon and put in [searched online for] this attorney’s name and the first thing I noticed was it appeared this attorney had represented a lot of other Saudi defendants. You could see that in the docket of her cases for the last few years.”

Kavanaugh said that when he looked at the attorney’s cases individually, he discovered that a number of her Saudi clients had outstanding warrants for their arrest because they had vanished from the U.S.

3. Don’t be discouraged if no person or agency is tracking a problem you’re trying to understand. Document it yourself.

No one anywhere appeared to be monitoring or collecting data on the number of foreign nationals fleeing the U.S. while facing criminal charges, Kavanaugh says. So he and his colleagues hunted down that information themselves. They searched news reports and court records nationwide going back decades.

“We identified 25 or 26 of these cases here in the U.S. and a couple in Canada where these young men accused of serious crimes fled the country before being prosecuted,” Kavanaugh says. There’s no way to know, though, whether what Kavanaugh found represents the majority or only a small fraction of the cases that actually exist. “Are we just scratching the surface with the cases we’ve found? A lot of this is sort of the first run at something nobody had ever explored or talked about.”

Such an undertaking involves patience, persistence and assistance from several other journalists, including stringers The Oregonian hired in other parts of the country. Kavanaugh reported one story in partnership with the nonprofit, investigative news outlet ProPublica.

“Getting the documents and sort of being able to connect all the dots — that was a serious challenge,” Kavanaugh says. “Some of these cases we uncovered are 30 years old. They went back to 1988, 1989. … Also, these are cases around the country and not just Oregon. So there were challenges there in reconstructing cases.”

4. Review the entire public record.

Kavanaugh says he follows the same advice that famed biographer and journalist Robert A. Caro received from his boss when Caro became an investigative reporter at Newsday in the 1960s. “Turn every goddam page,” managing editor Alan Hathway told Caro, according to an account he gave The Associated Press in 2019.

As Kavanaugh pored over court filings and other public records, he made sure to read everything — so he didn’t miss any details that, later, could’ve turned out to be important, he says.

He adds that Hathway’s advice was “just one of those things that stuck with me through the series.” He was intent on “making sure there was never any document we could get our hands on that I didn’t make sure to look over every single piece of paper.”

5. Give victims and their families a chance to tell their stories, especially if they haven’t yet spoken publicly about them.

Kavanaugh suggests making investigative stories as much about people as possible.

“In a lot of investigative work,” he says, “sometimes just finding the records or the document by themselves can be enough to tell the story. But to take what those findings are and find the people or the individuals who have been most affected or impacted by whatever it is you’re look into — using their experiences and their voice to tell that story — it just becomes a richer body of storytelling. It allows readers to create a more sympathetic or empathetic bond to the work that you’re putting out there.”

It also gives crime victims and their families an opportunity to be heard. “What came up in this particular series is that some of these people … never got justice,” he notes. “Whether it was the person who was directly harmed by a criminal act or the parent or siblings of these other people, for some of these people — and this is going back 30 years — nobody had ever asked them about it [the incident] or they were never given the opportunity to grapple with it or talk about their experience. And I thought that was an important part of this series.”

6. You probably won’t get all of your most pressing questions answered. Make peace with that reality and know when to move on to the next story.

At a time when newsrooms and their budgets are shrinking, investigative reporters often lack the time and resources they need to pursue all the angles of a story they’d like to pursue. Sometimes, despite their best efforts, they simply cannot nail down some key details.

There were lots of pressing questions Kavanaugh and his colleagues tried to answer with this series, he says. And while they were able to address many, they had to come to terms with the fact that some of the biggest questions would remain unanswered.

“With sort of each of these criminal cases we were looking into, there was a series of questions we were trying to answer, starting with: was this individual who was studying in the U.S. or Canada, were they on a government-sponsored scholarship?,” Kavanaugh says. “Because, in most of these cases, these people were studying in the United States as part of a massive scholarship program that’s funded by the Saudi Arabian government.” Kavanaugh said he also wanted to know: “When they were held, what was bail and who was their attorney and who were they [the attorneys] retained by? And then another question we had among many was whether an individual had surrendered their passport as a condition of their release from jail.”

Kavanaugh continues: “The bigger question is how on earth does a foreign national facing criminal charges in the United States — if they don’t have a passport — get out of the country? We have working theories, but that was something we were never able to nail down.”

It was important, he says, to focus on the parts of the story they could provide. “With this project and this series, I would say there are at least another dozen angles that I would very much like to explore if we had the sort of time and resources to do so,” he said. “We left so many different elements on the cutting room floor.”

Looking for more tips on how to do great investigative journalism? Read how a reporter discovered a government database that concealed millions of reports of medical device malfunctions and injuries. Check out the tips offered by two reporters whose yearlong investigation of the Elkhart, Indiana police department led to the police chief’s resignation.

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As college enrollment in the United States becomes more socioeconomically diverse, campus administrators increasingly grapple with how to help low-income students overcome challenges related to housing and food. In recent months, lawmakers in multiple states have responded with legislation aimed at helping ensure college students’ basic needs are met so they can focus on completing their degrees and certificates.

This past summer, for example, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill making it easier for low-income college students to qualify for CalFresh, the state’s food assistance program. A new law in Tennessee that took effect July 1 requires colleges and universities statewide to provide homeless students with access to on-campus housing during and between academic terms.

While there are no nationwide estimates for the number of college students who are homeless or experiencing food insecurity — a lack of regular access to affordable food, particularly nutritious food — Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice conducts an annual survey of college students’ basic needs. A report the center released earlier this year finds that 17% of the nearly 86,000 students surveyed at 123 two- and four-year institutions said they had been homeless within the past year. Meanwhile, 45% said they had been food insecure during the last 30 days.

As awareness of the problem grows, Sara Goldrick-Rab, the scholar who founded the Hope Center, says she hopes policymakers bring forward additional changes. Congress has not taken action yet on the proposed College Student Hunger Act of 2019, introduced in July. The bill would, among other things, allow more college students to participate in the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as SNAP or food stamps.

Because of her expertise in the field, journalists often seek out Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple, for interviews. We asked her what she wished journalists knew about student homelessness and food insecurity and how they could improve their coverage. Here’s the advice she offered:

1. When using data collected via a survey to explain how many college students experience homelessness or food insecurity, note the number and types of colleges that participated in the survey.

“It’s really important that they [journalists] talk about the number of students and colleges in the survey,” Goldrick-Rab says, explaining that this prevents news outlets from overstating or mischaracterizing the study’s findings and helps hold higher education institutions accountable for paying attention to students’ basic needs. Only some colleges — primarily, community colleges and public universities — have allowed academic researchers to conduct studies on these topics. Few private colleges and almost none of the most prestigious ones have participated in surveys. No for-profit college has, Goldrick-Rab says.

“When we’re written up [in news articles], I always explain this issue, but it seems like it gets skipped,” she says. “We need to give these other colleges credit for their willingness to even look [at the problem].”

She adds that no academic studies on this topic are based on a nationally representative sample of colleges or students, which means their findings cannot be generalized to colleges and college students nationwide. Findings only apply to the schools and students who answered the specific survey the reporter is focusing on.

“The real story,” Goldrick-Rab says, “is the federal government hasn’t even bothered to collect nationally representative data. We’ve gone from having no numbers to numbers from underfunded, small studies when what we deserve to have are federally funded, legislatively mandated, nationally representative samples.”

In 2015, Goldrick-Rab’s research team began petitioning the federal government to assess college students’ basic needs as part of its National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, a survey conducted every two years used to collect data on the characteristics of students in postsecondary education. In 2020, those questions will be included for the first time, she says.

2. If a college opens a food pantry, ask campus administrators what else they are doing to address food insecurity and homelessness.

“It is not news to say X, Y or Z college has a food pantry anymore,” Goldrick-Rab says. “It has become a thing [for colleges] to say, ‘We addressed food insecurity,’ and all they do is open a food pantry.”

She says journalists “should always ask ‘What else?’ and ‘What are you doing to prevent the problem?’” She also suggests asking how many students use the food pantry and other, similar assistance programs that are available at school — to get a sense of whether the administration is reaching enough of the students who need such help. An estimated one-third of public university students and half of community college students are food insecure, Goldrick-Rab explains.

Another suggestion: If the college you’re covering offers emergency aid — a small amount of money to cover a financial emergency such as a car repair bill — ask how much money the college spends on emergency aid, how many students apply for help and how fast the money is made available.

“The real story is these funds are small, move slowly and serve very few people,” she says.

She says journalists can learn a lot by also asking about a college’s housing program. “Usually, the college will help with food, but not affordable housing,” Goldrick-Rab says. “Ask them, ‘How much money do you make from housing on campus?’ They often make a profit. They make money off their housing. They make money off of their meal plans.

3. Understand that food insecurity and hunger are not the same thing. Both, however, can hurt students’ progress toward a degree.

“Hunger is, in many ways, an oversimplification of the problem,” Goldrick-Rab explains. “You could skip meals and, eventually, you don’t perceive hunger — but you’re still being deprived of food.

“An easy way to think about it: Think about how athletes’ performance is hampered if they don’t get adequate nutrition,” she adds. “We all know that the same thing is true for people in the classroom. For example, low blood sugar — it’s a bad idea for learning.”

Research shows students who don’t have enough food are more likely to have lower grades and poorer health than those who do. The proportion of students who experience food security appears to vary by institution type and among student groups, with racial and ethnic minorities being most likely to skip meals or go hungry, according to studies.

4. Remember that the vast majority of college students don’t fit the image promoted by pop culture: someone who just finished high school, attends a four-year institution, has no children and lives on campus. Don’t perpetuate that stereotype.

About 15% of U.S. college students live on campus, Goldrick-Rab says. That means 85% live elsewhere in houses, mobile homes, apartments and other residences. Higher education, she says, “is an off-campus story.”

She adds, “This is a story about eviction. This is a story about affordable housing … They [journalists] have to understand most of these students are working and going to school and 4.3 million have children. These are the things to be writing about. If you’re writing about an 18-year-old, don’t assume the parents are paying or anything. Ask them who pays for what. You’re really getting deep as soon as you ask that question. It’s a real eye-opener.”

5. Recognize that the term “homeless” means different things to different people. And organizations, including government agencies, sometimes define it differently.

Being homeless doesn’t necessarily mean someone is sleeping on the street or in a car. It can mean sleeping on a friend’s sofa due to the lack of an alternative. Many college students don’t realize this and, therefore, don’t consider themselves homeless. Goldrick-Rab warns against using the term when talking to students about their living arrangements.

“They don’t use that language and they don’t use those labels,” she says. “Seek students having trouble affording to eat on a regular basis. Ask, ‘When did you last eat a real meal?’ and some will say it hasn’t been in the last 24 hours. Ask students, ‘Do you have a safe and affordable place to live?’”

Goldrick-Rab says only a fraction of the students who meet the federal definition of homelessness consider themselves homeless. “A student who’s couch surfing isn’t going to say they’re homeless, but they don’t have a safe, reliable place of their own,” she says.

She points out that unstable housing can affect learning and a student’s ability to stay in school.

“Housing insecurity — unstable, unaffordable and unsafe living conditions — can mean a student is not able to pay their electric bill or having it cut off from time to time,” she says. “It can mean they are living with someone who’s treating them badly, but they have nowhere else to go. It can mean they live in campus housing but don’t have somewhere to go for spring break and vacation.”

6. Keep in mind that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students face a particular set of challenges when it comes to food and housing insecurity.

LGBT students often face discrimination as well as rejection by their families, Goldrick-Rab says. Rifts with family members can mean suddenly losing an important source of financial help. LGBT students often have trouble finding shelters that accept them, she says.

“But it’s not just that they can’t go to shelters,” she says. “They’re at a higher risk because the financial aid formula wants to assume they’re supported by parents. It’s a public policy flaw. The problem is the formula assumes your parents help you when they don’t, even when they are more likely to be estranged.”

7. Educate yourself about federal financial aid policies and the shortcomings of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the FAFSA.

Goldrick-Rab notes that financial aid policies — including the FAFSA — have failed to keep up with changes to the student body. These policies were created years ago, when a higher proportion of college students were wealthier and their families were more likely to provide financial assistance, according to Goldrick. Today, some college students send money home to help their families make ends meet.

Says Goldrick-Rab, “To me, if we saw more stories about the fact that even students who fill out the FAFSA don’t get what they need, people would understand there’s no such thing as a free ride [using free forms of college financial aid] anymore.”

Here’s a list of research and readings Goldrick-Rab recommends for journalists:

• Hallett, Ronald E.; Crutchfield, Rashida M.; Maguire, Jennifer J. Addressing Homelessness and Housing Insecurity in Higher Education Strategies for Educational Leaders, 2019.
• Goldrick-Rab, Sara. “How Financial Aid Betrays the Modern Family,” The Atlantic, 2016.
• Poppendieck, Janet. Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement, 1999.
• U.S. Government Accountability Office August 2019 Report to Congressional Requesters, “More Information Could Help Student Parents Access Additional Federal Student Aid.”
• U.S. Government Accountability Office December 2018 Report to Congressional Requesters, “Food Insecurity: Better Information Could Help Eligible College Students Access Federal Food Assistance Benefits.”

Other academics with expertise in this field:

Rashida Crutchfield, associate professor in the School of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach.

Nick Freudenberg, professor of public health at City University of New York and director of the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute.

Katharine “Katie” Broton, assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Iowa.

Suzanna Martinez, researcher at the Nutrition Policy Institute at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Aydin Nazmi, professor of food science and nutrition at California Polytechnic State University.

Looking for more research on food insecurity? Check out our collection of research on how access to food can affect college students’ grades and mental health.

The primary image for this piece was obtained from the Flickr account of Oregon State University and is being used under a Creative Commons license. No changes were made.

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Historically black colleges and universities looking to raise money for major projects face higher fees than their non-HBCU counterparts, even when agencies that rate credit risk give HBCU-issued bonds their highest scores, according to research recently published in the Journal of Financial Economics.

There’s one big reason for the additional cost, according to the authors: racial discrimination.

Colleges and universities typically issue bonds to pay for big-ticket items, like a new dorm or athletic facility. Bonds are loans, paid back over time with interest. Multimillion dollar bonds are usually split across different investors, but schools don’t track down those investors. Instead, they pay underwriters. An underwriter buys an entire bond and then finds investors to buy chunks of it.

Out of the pool of bonds the authors studied, non-HBCUs pay on average 81 cents of every $100 raised to underwriters. For a $10 million non-HBCU bond, that’s $81,000 in fees going to an underwriter.

But HBCUs pay on average 92 cents per $100 raised to underwriters — about 14% more, the paper finds.

That’s $92,000 in underwriting fees on a $10 million HBCU bond. HBCUs are higher education institutions founded before 1964 primarily to educate black students, many of whom were barred from predominantly white institutions.

“The underlying notion is it’s harder for an [HBCU] underwriter to find a buyer and they pass the cost on to the schools,” says Bill Mayew, professor of accounting at Duke University and one of the paper’s authors. “That’s where the difference comes from.”

The financial premium is even higher for HBCUs in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, where racial animus runs higher than in other states, according to data the authors analyze. In those three states, the cost to HBCUs for bond underwriting is 106 cents per $100 raised. That’s $106,000 going to an underwriter on a $10 million HBCU bond.

Understanding two types of discrimination

Economists point to two things that typically underlie actions a reasonable person could perceive as racist: statistical discrimination and taste-based discrimination.

Statistical discrimination happens when people take actual or perceived aggregate information and apply it to a specific situation. This happens sometimes in labor markets. A hiring manager considering two candidates from two different demographic groups might believe people from one group are less productive on average than people from the other. The hiring manager might argue they are not being racist in relying on stereotypes. They might say they are simply considering the company’s bottom line productivity.

Taste-based discrimination is discrimination based on personal taste. Someone, “simply has a preference for working with one type over the other,” as economists William Neilson and Shanshan Ying wrote in 2016 in a paper on the relationship between these types of discrimination. The hiring manager’s decision is based purely on distaste or preference for a candidate’s skin color.

“When you think of the notion of race discrimination, that’s a taste-based preference,” Mayew says.

Differentiating between statistical and taste-based discrimination is difficult to do, but important toward understanding why people make decisions that might appear discriminatory.

Credit ratings and insurance: disentangling HBCU discrimination

The authors look at a sample of 4,145 tax-exempt bonds issued from 1988 to 2010 from 965 four-year colleges totaling $150 billion. HBCUs, both public and private, issued 102 of those bonds.

Creditworthiness scores make it possible to parse the two types of discrimination. Ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s rate higher education institutions’ credit risk. They provide a score that tells investors how likely the school is to default on its bond payments. A triple-A rating, the highest possible, means the college or university is practically assured to make their payments on time.

“You might say it’s not that buyers of bonds are racist, it’s they think those bonds are more likely to default,” Mayew says. “It’s really hard in most settings to disentangle those indications. But in the bond market, we can measure that really well with the credit rating so we can dig into and isolate race effects.”

Insurance is another way the authors rule out statistical discrimination. Universities can get bond insurance, so if they default the bond financer still gets paid back. Credit ratings and bond insurance give financers a sense of an institution’s likelihood of defaulting.

Still, the authors find that “identical [fee] differences are observed between HBCU and non-HBCUs with AAA ratings or when insured by the same company, even before the 2007–2009 financial crisis.”

HBCU bonds also take longer and cost more to offload in secondary markets. Those are markets where investors trade bonds that have already been financed. The authors find that HBCU bonds are 20% pricier than non-HBCU bonds to trade in secondary markets. Larger bonds — those over $50,000 — face a 60% premium. HBCU bonds overall linger 25% longer on secondary markets.

“If you’re going to say you’re talking about race discrimination you’ve got to provide a lot of evidence to make that case,” Mayew says. “That’s a tough piece of evidence to refute.”

Premiums are much higher in parts of the Deep South

If racism were the main driving factor behind higher HBCU bond fees, then HBCUs in states that are more racist should face even higher fees, according to the authors. Broadly capturing racism is not necessarily straightforward. The authors try to do it using a variety of data to rank racial animosity in the 50 states plus the District of Columbia.

They use survey responses capturing resentment and opposition to affirmative action from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a large yearly survey of American adults by county. They also turn to state-level data on racist Google searches, and the percentage of white voters in each state who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 compared with the share of white voters who chose John Kerry in 2004. And they consider geocoded racist tweets just after Obama was reelected in 2012.

Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi scored highest for racial animosity. Georgia was next, but with a sharp drop-off. Those top-three states for racial animosity account for 4.7% of all bond issuances in the sample studied — but 26% of HBCU issuances. In those states, HBCUs pay about three times as much in bond underwriting fees as non-HBCUs, the authors find.

Tax exemptions limit the size of the market

The U.S. municipal bond market is worth almost $4 trillion. Though higher education bonds are a fraction of the total, that submarket is still big enough that taste-based discrimination shouldn’t matter. Anyone can finance a university bond issuance. If a racist investor doesn’t want to finance an HBCU project, there should be plenty of other investors to pony up capital.

But tax exemptions tend to limit university bond markets to the state a school is in. Interest payments are tax exempt if the bond is issued by an entity in the state where the financer is based. Someone living in Louisiana would receive tax-free interest payments by financing a Xavier University of Louisiana bond but not an Alabama State University bond.

The authors argue that a triple tax exemption — with interest payments on university bonds exempt from federal, state and local taxes — could take racism out of the equation. Triple tax exemption would allow HBCUs to, “tap into a larger market where racial preferences are different,” Mayew says.

Barriers to bonds

There’s no good way to quantify how much higher education institutions pay insurers and credit rating agencies, Mayew says, but those entities need to be paid in addition to underwriters. So there are costs to entering bond markets — and when it comes to underwriting, those costs are higher for HBCUs. That may mean some HBCUs pass up raising money through bonds, potentially forgoing major campus improvements.

“Bond markets should be one of the cheapest forms of capital,” Mayew says. “It’s many individual investors, and schools should be able to raise lots of money. And maybe 25 years ago, an HBCU passed up renovating a dorm. These are the opportunity costs schools face.”

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Just a few years ago, the College and University Food Bank Alliance, which helps schools establish food pantries, had 184 members. By early 2019, though, the number had more than tripled to 700-plus members.

As tuition rises and the other costs of college go up, campus administrators are forced to face a troubling reality: Many college students don’t get enough to eat. In response, hundreds of schools — from community colleges to Ivy League universities — have opened food pantries or stores selling subsidized groceries. Many students ages 18 to 49 are not eligible for the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

At Cornell University, the student-run Anabel’s Grocery attracted about 2,000 unique customers within the first several months, according to the student newspaper. The store offers “low-cost groceries for all Cornell students and subsidies for those who qualify.” At the Knights Helping Knights Pantry at the University of Central Florida, students can pick up five free food items a day. Portland Community College opened pantries on all four of its campuses and created a co-op with free school supplies, bus passes, clothes and other items.

Academic research shows that a substantial percentage of college students experience “food insecurity,” a lack of access to adequate amounts of food, especially healthy foods. The proportion appears to vary by institution type and among student groups, with racial and ethnic minorities being most likely to skip meals or go hungry. The research also suggests students who don’t have enough food are more likely to have low grades and poor health.

Below is a sampling of academic research on these subjects.

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“College Students and SNAP: The New Face of Food Insecurity in the United States”: From the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy and Temple University’s College of Education, published in the American Journal of Public Health, December 2019. By Nicholas Freudenberg, Sara Goldrick-Rab and Janet Poppendieck.

College students are a new group at risk for food insecurity — a problem explained by five trends, according to this analysis of academic studies, news media reports and three researchers’ experiences studying and addressing food insecurity at multiple universities.

The five trends:

• A higher proportion of college students are from households with incomes at or below the poverty line than were in the past.
• College is more expensive now than in the past.
• The purchasing power of the Pell grant, a federal grant for lower-income students, has fallen over time.
• It’s tougher to pay for college while working. “Coupled with rising college prices, students must work nearly full-time to afford full-time community college,” write the authors. “To avoid paying for benefits, today’s employers, including universities, often divide fulltime hours across multiple parttime workers, contributing to the growing number of students working several jobs to make ends meet.”
• Higher education institutions have less money to spend on student support programs. State funding, the authors write, “has decreased by 25% per student over the last 30 years, and states have cut $9 billion from higher education in the last 10 years alone. In public universities, budget cuts have led to significant reductions in student services.”

The researchers find that a number of individual colleges try to help students get food by introducing a range of programs, including food pantries, subsidized cafeteria meals and emergency loans and grants. However, the researchers recommend that the government and schools work to boost the number of college students who participate in the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, commonly referred to as SNAP or food stamps. “Because food pantries are often the first point of contact between food-insecure students and university resources, they can become hubs for screening and enrolling eligible students in SNAP and other public benefits, publicizing affordable meals on campus, and engaging students in organizing for food justice as well as distributing food,” the authors write.

“Hunger in Higher Education: Experiences and Correlates of Food Insecurity among Wisconsin Undergraduates from Low-Income Families”: From the University of Iowa and University of California, San Diego, published in Social Sciences, September 2018. By Katharine M. Broton, Kari E. Weaver and Minhtuyen Mai.

This study finds that the college students who are most likely to report experiencing the lowest levels of food security are racial and ethnic minorities and those who live off campus, attend college in urban areas and grew up in homes without reliable supplies of food.

The three researchers analyzed data from a longitudinal study of 3,000 low-income, undergraduate students who attended 42 public colleges and universities in Wisconsin in 2008. They also conducted in-depth interviews with a random sample of 50 of those students approximately every six months between 2008 and 2010 and then each year through 2012. In late 2009, almost 1,400 of the individuals studied answered another round of questions about their experiences buying and finding adequate food.

Some other key takeaways: “Among a sample of traditional-age students from low-income families, we found that nearly 1 in 3 are cutting or skipping meals, eating less than they should and going without food due to limited resources. All of the students received financial aid and most worked and received support from family, but they still struggled to get enough to eat. Students identified a lack of money and time — rather than a lack of knowledge regarding cooking or budgeting — as major barriers to their food security.”

“Experiences With ‘Acute’ Food Insecurity Among College Students”: From San Diego State University, published in the Educational Researcher, January 2018. By J. Luke Wood and Frank Harris III.

This study looks at which groups of college students are most likely to experience food insecurity. The analysis, based on survey data from 6,103 students in southern California, found that multiethnic and black students were most likely to say they have “challenges with hunger” — an acute form of food insecurity. Sixteen percent of black students and 16.5 percent of multiethnic students reported going hungry compared to 10.4 percent of Latino students and 9.2 percent of white and Asian students. The study suggests some students who lack food may also lack stable housing or struggle with transportation and health issues. Colleges with food pantries “may also consider having additional services such as bus passes, free health resources, and job boards,” the authors write.

“Going Without: An Exploration of Food and Housing Insecurity Among Undergraduates”: From the University of Iowa and Temple University, published in the Educational Researcher, December 2017. By Katharine M. Broton and Sara Goldrick-Rab.

This study looks at data on food insecurity taken from surveys representing the experiences of more than 30,000 students attending 121 colleges and universities in 26 states. More than half of undergraduates reported food-access problems. Between 11 percent and 38 percent of students enrolled in community colleges reported “very low” levels of food security, characterized by disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake. Half of community college students also reported living in unstable housing situations.

“Efforts to increase college completion rates must be broadened to include attention to material hardship and shed light on this all-too-often hidden cost of college attendance,” the authors wrote. “Stereotypes of undergraduates eating ramen noodles or couch surfing work against this.”

“The Prevalence of Food Insecurity and Its Association with Health and Academic Outcomes among College Freshmen”: From the University of Florida and nine other universities, published in Advances in Nutrition, 2017. By Aseel El Zein, et al.

This is another study focusing on food insecurity among college freshmen, who generally are learning to live independently after a lifetime of depending on parents and other family members. Almost 900 students from eight U.S. colleges participated, 19 percent of whom were classified as food insecure. The researchers found that students who did not have access to adequate food “showed significantly higher perceived stress and disordered eating behaviors and lower sleep quality.” These students also were more likely to have grade-point averages below a 3.0.

“Student Hunger on Campus: Food Insecurity Among College Students and Implications for Academic Institutions”: From University of Maryland School of Public Health and University of Maryland Dining Services, published in the American Journal of Health Promotion, July 2017. By Devon C. Payne-Sturges, Allison Tjaden, Kimberly M. Caldeira, Kathryn B. Vincent and Amelia M. Arria.

This study found that 15 percent of undergraduates surveyed at a public university in the mid-Atlantic reported food insecurity and that another 16 percent were at risk. The researchers found evidence that students who either experienced food insecurity or were at risk were “more likely to report their overall health as fair, poor, or very poor and reported lower energy levels compared with food secure students. Food insecure students however reported more frequent depression symptoms (little interest, feeling down, feeling tired, poor appetite, and feeling bad about oneself) and that they experienced disruptions in academic work as a result of depression symptoms.” Students reporting problems accessing food were more likely to live off campus and receive financial aid.

“Factors Related to the High Rates of Food Insecurity Among Diverse, Urban College Freshmen”: From Arizona State University and the University of Minnesota, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 2016. By Meg Bruening, Stephanie Brennhofer, Irene van Woerden, Michael Todd and Melissa Laska.

This paper suggests that a high proportion of college freshmen living in dorms at one of the nation’s largest public universities do not have adequate food and are more likely to report health problems such as anxiety and depression. Of the 209 freshman who participated in the study, 32 percent reported food insecurity in the previous month and 37 percent reported it in the previous three months. “Students who rarely consumed breakfast, students who rarely ate home-cooked meals, and students with higher levels of depression were significantly more likely to report food insecurity in the past three months,” the authors wrote.

“Food Insecurity Among Community College Students: Prevalence and Association With Grade Point Average”: From American University and Morgan State University, published in the Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 2015. By Maya E. Maroto, Anastasia Snelling and Henry Linck.

This food-access study involves students at an urban community college and a suburban community college. Sixty percent of study participants from the urban community college reported lacking adequate food compared to 53 percent of study participants at the suburban community college. Black, Hispanic and Asian students were more likely to have food-access problems than white students. Meanwhile, students battling food insecurity were much more likely to have lower grade-point averages.

Looking for more research on college students? Check out our posts on college hazing, guns on college campuses and how winning in college sports can generate new revenue for athletic programs.

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Most American moms work outside the home. Nearly 70 percent of women with children under age 18 were in the labor force in 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

In recent decades, as more mothers take paid positions, families, policymakers and scholars have wondered how the trend may impact children, especially during their early years. Many women, single parents in particular, must work because they either can’t afford to stay at home to raise their kids or the government agencies they rely on for assistance require them to be employed.

Work is also a choice for a lot of women. As more women in the United States complete college degrees — the percentage of women earning bachelor’s degrees skyrocketed between 1967 and 2015 — many have opted to leave their youngsters with a family member or daycare provider while they pursue careers and other professional interests.

Is this trend good or bad? Are kids with working moms different from kids whose moms are unemployed? Do they have more or fewer behavioral problems? Are their academic skills stronger or weaker? Let’s look at what the research says.

The good news: Overall, maternal employment seems to have a limited impact on children’s behavior and academic achievement over the short term. And there appear to be benefits in the long-term. A study published in 2018 finds that daughters raised by working moms are more likely to be employed as adults and have higher incomes.

Below, we’ve gathered a sampling of the academic research published or released on this topic in recent years. If you’re looking for workforce trend data, check out the U.S. Department of Labor’s website, which offers a variety of reports on women at work. A May 2018 report from the Pew Research Center, “7 Facts about U.S. Moms,” provides some useful context.

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“When Does Time Matter? Maternal Employment, Children’s Time With Parents, and Child Development”
Hsin, Amy; Felfe, Christina. Demography, October 2014. DOI: 10.1007/s13524-014-0334-5.

Do working moms spend less time with their children? And if they do, does that hurt kids’ cognitive development? Amy Hsin from Queens College-City University of New York and Christina Felfe of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland teamed up to investigate.

The gist of what they found: Mothers who work full-time do spend less time with their children, but they tend to trade quantity of time for better quality time. “On average, maternal work has no effect on time in activities that positively influence children’s development, but it reduces time in types of activities that may be detrimental to children’s development,” Hsin and Felfe explain. Each week, kids whose mothers work full-time spend 3.2 fewer hours engaged in “unstructured activities” — activities that don’t require children and parents to be actively engaged and speaking to one another — compared to kids whose moms are unemployed.

The researchers also find that children with college-educated mothers spend more time on educational activities as well as “structured” activities, which require kids to be actively engaged with their parents. “For example, college-educated mothers and their partners spend 4.9 hours and 2.5 hours per week, respectively, engaged in educational activities with their children; by comparison, mothers with less than [a] high school diploma and their partners spend only 3.3 hours and 1.7 hours per week in educational activities, respectively,” according to the study.

Maternal employment, generally speaking, appears to have a positive effect on children’s cognitive development. “When comparing the effect of maternal employment on child outcomes between stay-at-home mothers and mothers who work full-time, we see that the reduction in unstructured time resulting from full-time employment amounts to an improvement in children’s cognitive development of 0.03 to 0.04 SD [standard deviation],” the authors write. For children under age 6, the improvement is larger.

“Learning from Mum: Cross-National Evidence Linking Maternal Employment and Adult Children’s Outcomes”
McGinn, Kathleen L.; Castro, Mayra Ruiz; Lingo, Elizabeth Long. Work, Employment and Society, April 2018. DOI: 10.1177/0950017018760167.

These researchers analyzed data from two surveys conducted across 29 countries to examine how men and women had been influenced by their mother’s work status. The main takeaway: Daughters raised by working mothers are more likely to have jobs as adults — and those who have jobs are more likely to supervise others, work longer hours and earn higher incomes.

There doesn’t appear to be a link between maternal employment and employment for sons, according to the study. However, men whose mothers worked while they were growing up spend about 50 minutes more caring for family members each week than men whose moms didn’t work.

The study, led by Kathleen L. McGinn of Harvard Business School, notes that these outcomes are “due at least in part to employed mothers’ conveyance of egalitarian gender attitudes and life skills for managing employment and domestic responsibilities simultaneously. Family-of-origin social class matters: women’s likelihood of employment rises with maternal employment across the socio-economic spectrum, but higher incomes and supervisory responsibility accrue primarily to women raised by mothers with more education and higher skill jobs.”

“Increasing Maternal Employment Influences Child Overweight/Obesity Among Ethnically Diverse Families”
Ettinger, Anna K.; Riley, Anne W.; Price, Carmel E. Journal of Family Issues, July 2018. DOI: 10.1177/0192513X18760968.

This study looks at how maternal employment affects the weight status of Black and Latino children from low-income families in Boston, Chicago and San Antonio. The researchers find that an increase in a mother’s “work intensity” — for example, when a mother transitions from being unemployed to working or switches from part-time to full-time work — increases the odds that her child will be overweight or obese.

Kids whose mothers increased their work schedules during the children’s first few years of life were more likely to have a weight problem. “Children of mothers who increased their employment status during children’s preschool years had over 2.6 times the odds of being overweight/obese at 7 to 11 years of age compared with children of nonworking mothers,” the authors write. They also write that their results “suggest that changing work schedules and increasing work hours over time may be more disruptive to family environments and child weight than maintaining constant levels of employment over time (whether that is not working at all or working full-time).”

The researchers note that within their sample of 602 children, having consistent family routines such as mealtimes and bedtimes were associated with a 61 percent reduction in the odds of being overweight or obese. They also note that youth whose parents live together, whether married or not, tended to have lower odds of being overweight or obese than children living with single mothers.

“The Effect of Maternal Employment on Children’s Academic Performance”
Dunifon, Rachel; Hansen, Anne Toft; Nicholson, Sean; Nielsen, Lisbeth Palmhøj. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 19364, August 2013.

Rachel Dunifon, the interim dean of Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, led this study, which explores whether maternal employment improves children’s academic achievement. Dunifon and her colleagues analyze a data set for 135,000 children who were born in Denmark between 1987 and 1992 and followed through the ninth grade.

A key finding: Danish children whose mothers worked during their childhood had higher grade-point averages at age 15 than children whose mothers did not work. And children whose mothers worked between 10 and 19 hours a week had better grades than kids whose mothers worked full-time or only a few hours per week. “The child of a woman who worked between 10 and 19 hours per week while her child was under the age of four is predicted to have a GPA that is 2.6 percent higher than an otherwise similar child whose mother did not work at all,” the authors write.

The researchers suggest their paper “presents evidence of a positive causal linkage between maternal work hours and the GPA of Danish teens. These associations are strongest when mothers work part-time, and among more advantaged mothers, and are not accounted for by mothers’ earnings.”

“Maternal Work Early in the Lives of Children and Its Distal Associations with Achievement and Behavior Problems: A Meta-Analysis”
Lucas-Thompson, Rachel G.; Goldberg, Wendy A.; Prause, JoAnn. Psychological Bulletin, November 2010. DOI: 10.1037/a0020875.

This is an analysis of 69 studies that, over the span of five decades, look at the relationship between maternal employment during children’s early years and children’s behavior and academic performance later in life. Overall, the analysis suggests that early maternal employment is not commonly associated with lower academic performance or behavior problems.

The analysis did, however, find differences when comparing different types of families. Early maternal employment was associated with “positive outcomes (i.e., increased achievement and decreased behavior problems) for majority one-parent samples,” explain the three researchers, Rachel G. Lucas-Thompson, now an assistant professor at Colorado State University, and Wendy A. Goldberg and JoAnn Prause of the University of California, Irvine. Early maternal employment was associated with lower achievement within two-parent families and increased behavior problems among study samples comprised of a mix of one- and two-parent families.

The researchers offer this explanation: “The results of this meta-analysis suggest that early maternal employment in sole-provider families may bolster children’s achievement and buffer against problem behaviors, perhaps because of the added financial security and health benefits that accompany employment, as well as improved food, clothing, and shelter because of increased income and the psychological importance of having a role model for achievement and responsible behavior. In contrast, early maternal employment may be detrimental for the behavior of children in two-parent families if the increases in family income do not offset the challenges introduced by maternal employment during children’s early years of life.”

There were differences based on household income as well. For families receiving welfare, the researchers found a link between maternal employment and increased student achievement. For middle- and upper-class families, maternal employment was associated with lower achievement.

The researchers note that they tried to gauge how child-care quality might influence these results. But there weren’t enough studies to allow for a detailed analysis.

Family separation: How does it affect children?

Maternity leave and children’s cognitive and behavioral development

How to tell good research from flawed research: 13 questions journalists should ask

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One of journalists’ most important jobs is to scrutinize decisions made by governing bodies such as a state legislature, county council or school board. One facet of local government that journalists should pay particular attention to is how government leaders use and respond to economic impact studies — analyses that attempt to measure the impact a project such as a new tourist attraction or highway would have on economic activity in a given area.

Sometimes, economic impact studies will be commissioned before elected officials take a vote. Private individuals or groups typically present their own studies as they seek permission to build facilities such as factories or plants, or when they ask the government to partner with them on a project such as an athletic stadium. It is common for public colleges and universities to fund economic impact studies as a way to demonstrate their financial contribution to surrounding communities. Those studies sometimes coincide with the launching of fundraising campaigns.

It’s important to note that the quality of economic impact studies can vary as can the level of scrutiny government leaders themselves give to these documents. Sometimes it isn’t until after a project fails to live up to expectations in job creation, tourism growth, business income and property values that elected officials and others question the reliability of these forecasts. It’s important for reporters to recognize the claims an impact study is making — and notice what information, if any, is left out of the report. Journalists also need to understand how financial projections are made.

Some important questions to ask when writing about an impact study, also known as an Economic Impact Analysis (EIA), are:

• Where did the numbers come from? Ask the individuals who completed the study to explain how they made their calculations. What are they basing their projections on? What assumptions are they making as part of their calculations?
• How have similar proposals fared in other parts of the country? For example, if you’re writing about a county council that is considering allowing an expansion of a local convention center, do a quick internet search to find other counties that have taken on the same issue in recent years. Were convention-center expansions successful in those places? Did they meet the projections outlined in their economic impact studies?
• Have the people who did this economic impact study performed studies elsewhere? Check them out. It is important for the public — and public leaders — to know whether these authors have done a good job or a bad job predicting economic impact in other scenarios. Journalists also should read these other studies, if they exist, to look for problems and patterns. Do the studies look very similar even though the projects and circumstances are very different?

Even after a project is completed, news organizations can refer back to an impact analysis to gauge its success. A 2016 report from the Reno Gazette-Journal highlights the shortcomings of a Tesla-Panasonic battery gigafactory in Nevada, based on projections outlined in a study commissioned by the Governor’s Office. Several years earlier, the Charlotte Observer reported that “wildly inflated projections of economic impact” were used to justify the construction and expansion of a convention center that did not draw nearly as many visitors or as much business as elected leaders expected. The result, according to the article: “The city of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County and the state may make as little as 35 cents for every dollar they spend on the convention business.”

To help journalists write about economic impact studies, we’ve pulled together research that offers additional insight into their value and usefulness. We’re also including other resources that might be helpful, including links to scholars with expertise in this area.

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“How Long Does an Economic Impact Last? Tracking the Impact of a New Giant Panda Attraction at an Australian Zoo”
Driml, Sally; Ballantyne, Roy; Packer, Jan. Journal of Travel Research, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287516656916.

Abstract: “A concerning issue with Economic Impact Analysis (EIA) is that many EIAs give results for one year, without being explicit about how long impacts are expected to last. New tourism attractions should not be assumed to provide continuing positive impacts into the future. For instance, the Giant Pandas at Adelaide Zoo generated a positive economic impact in their first year of residence (22 percent of a sample of tourists visited Adelaide ‘due to pandas,’ additional tourism expenditure in the region was $27.7 million, with $2.3 to $4.6 million captured by the zoo); however, increased numbers visiting to see the pandas lasted only two years. Investment decision makers expected larger, longer-term economic benefits than eventuated, and the zoo experienced financial difficulties. This study provides advice for predictive EIA of new tourism attractions and prompts a call for tourism EIA studies to be explicit about the time period for which results are relevant.”

“Suggestions for the Needed Standardization of Determining the Local Economic Impact of Professional Sports“
Wassmer, Robert W.; Ong, Ryan S.; Propheter, Geoffrey. Economic Development Quarterly, 2016. doi: 10.1177/0891242416636685.

Abstract: “An effort to secure a local government subsidy for a professional sports venue or event typically cites findings from a private consultant’s economic impact analysis on its purported benefits to the jurisdiction(s) offering the subsidy. Scholars have consistently expressed concerns regarding the ability of the public, and the officials that represent them, to detect the deficiencies that often plague such an analysis. We review the previous academic research to identify a common set of concerns regarding this form of analysis. These concerns are the basis for a list of 20 evaluative questions to consider in a critical assessment of an economic impact study. To illustrate the practicality of these questions, we ask them of previous studies regarding the economic impact of different professional sport venues or events in five different U.S. cities.”

“The Potential Influence of Researchers’ ‘Hidden’ Procedure Decisions on Estimates of Visitor Spending and Economic Impact“
Jeong, Ji Youn; Crompton, John L.; Dudensing, Rebekka M. Journal of Travel Research, 2015. doi: 10.1177/0047287515605932.

Abstract: “The potential influence of eight decisions made by researchers that are unlikely to be reported in economic impact analyses are identified and empirically tested. The data set was comprised of studies undertaken at nine state parks in Texas. Four of the decisions were categorized as being potentially relatively malignant in that they used obviously inappropriate procedures and were likely to substantially exaggerate expenditure estimates: using group weighting rather than individual weighting; omitting a measure of the extent to which visiting a park was the primary trip purpose; retaining outlier values; and aggregating different visitor segments. The four relatively benign decisions were: convenience or probability samples; managers’ or samples’ estimates of number of nonlocal visitors; treating nonresponses as missing data or as zero expenditures; and sector selection for assignment of government expenditures.”

“Economic Impact Studies: Instruments for Political Shenanigans?”
Crompton, John L. Journal of Travel Research, 2006, Vol. 45. doi: 10.1177/0047287506288870.

Abstract: “Most economic impact studies are commissioned to legitimize a political position rather than to search for economic truth. Often, this results in the use of mischievous procedures that produce large numbers that study sponsors seek to support a predetermined position. Examples are selected primarily from the reports of ostensibly expert consultants that illustrate 10 of these mischievous procedures: including local residents; inappropriate aggregation; inclusion of time-switchers and casuals; abuse of multipliers; ignoring costs borne by the local community; ignoring opportunity costs; ignoring displacement costs; expanding the project scope; exaggerating visitation numbers; and inclusion of consumer surplus. The political payoff of these shenanigans is discussed.”

“Convention Myths and Markets: A Critical Review of Convention Center Feasibility Studies”
Sanders, Heywood T. Economic Development Quarterly, 2002, Vol. 16. doi: 10.1177/08942402016003001.

Abstract: “American cities are seeing a boom in the development of convention centers. In city after city, massive public investment in convention facilities has been justified by feasibility and market studies that consistently portray a booming national demand for exhibition space. These studies also suggest that the demand for convention center space has and will outrun increases in the supply of space. This article reviews studies for more than 30 cities and demonstrates that they have been consistently flawed and misleading. Some analyses argue that successful convention centers need to expand to remain competitive. Others conclude that failing centers need to add space to succeed. Studies repeat the same positive findings verbatim from one city to another and fail to account for contradictory data. These market and feasibility studies thus offer no real basis for public investment and serve to bias public decision making and choice.”

“Assessment of Economic Impact Studies: The Cases of BMW and Mercedes-Benz”
Connaughton, John E.; Madsen, Ronald A. The Review of Regional Studies, 2001, Vol. 31. ProQuest document ID: 1690838746.

Abstract: “In 1992, the state of South Carolina offered an incentive package in excess of $120 million for the possible location of a BMW auto assembly plant. As part of the location effort, the state of South Carolina sponsored an impact study that appeared to be very optimistic. This paper evaluates this very optimistic impact study. The results presented in this paper fail to support the assumption made in the South Carolina impact study that 21 net new supplier chain firms would accompany a new BMW plant opening. Our findings suggest that the impact studies overestimated the total impact on the state economy.”

“A Theoretical Comparison of the Economic Impact of Large and Small Events”
Agha, Nola; Taks, Marijke. International Journal of Sport Finance, 2015. SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2709537.

Abstract: “In response to the increasing debate on the relative worth of small events compared to large events, we create a theoretical model to determine whether smaller events are more likely to create positive economic impact. First, event size and city size are redefined as continuums of resources. The concepts of event resource demand (ERD) and city resource supply (CRS) are introduced, allowing for a joint analysis of supply and demand. When local economic conditions are brought into the analysis, the framework determines how a city resource deficiency or surplus affects the economic impact of an event. This resource-based approach assists public officials and event organizers in making more rational decisions for hosting events when they pursue positive economic impacts. Specifically, we find small events have a higher potential for positive economic impact and hosting multiple smaller-sized events is a better strategy than hosting a big event.”

“Economic Significance of Recreational Uses of National Parks and Other Public Lands“
Stynes, Daniel J.; National Park Service; U.S. Department of the Interior. Social Science Research Review, 2005, Vol. 5. http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/govdocs/423.

Abstract: “This paper reviews concepts and methods for estimating the economic significance of recreational uses of public lands and reports estimates of recreation values and economic impacts from recent studies. Aimed primarily at non-economists, the review clarifies the distinction between valuation and impact studies, defines key concepts, summarizes the most accessible approaches, and discusses conceptual and practical issues related to choosing among available methods and interpreting and applying the results. Terms that may be unfamiliar to the reader are highlighted in bold face and defined in a glossary at the end of the paper.”

“Assessing the Economic Impact of College Football Games on Local Economies“
Baade, Robert A.; Baumann, Robert W.; Matheson, Victor A. Journal of Sports Economics, 2008. doi: 10.1177/1527002508318363.

Abstract: “This article provides an empirical examination of the economic impact of spectator sports on local economies. Confirming the results of other ex-post analyses of sports in general, this article finds no statistically significant evidence that college football games in particular contribute positively to a host’s economy. Our analysis from 1970 to 2004 of 63 metropolitan areas that played host to big-time college football programs finds that neither the number of home games played, the winning percentage of the local team, nor winning a national championship has a discernable impact on either employment or personal income in the cities where the teams play. An examination of a subset of 42 smaller college towns finds that winning seasons actually reduce the growth rate of per capita personal income. Although successful college football teams may bring fame to their home towns, fortune appears to be a bit more elusive.”

“Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Subsidies for Sports Franchises, Stadiums, and Mega-Events?“
Coates, Dennis; Humphreys, Brad R. Working paper for the North American Association of Sports Economists, 2008.

Summary: “Both academic economists and consultants reach a conclusion about the economic impact of professional sports franchises and facilities, but these two groups reach opposite conclusions. The clear consensus among academic economists is that professional sports franchises and facilities generate no ‘tangible’ economic impacts in terms of income or job creation and are not, therefore, powerful instruments for fostering local economic development. The clear consensus among consultants who produce ‘economic impact studies’ is that professional sports franchises and facilities generate sizable job creation, incremental income increases, and additional tax revenues for state and local governments.”

Other resources:

• The Airports Council International-North America maintains a collection of economic impact reports from various states and years.
• The North American Association of Sports Economists is a good resource for journalists writing about athletic stadiums and related projects.
• Research conducted by Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, focuses on publicly-funded convention centers and urban development.
• John J. Siegfried, economics professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, has written about pitfalls common to economic impact studies of colleges and universities.
• John L. Crompton, a professor in Texas A&M University’s Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences, has written extensively about the economic impacts of parks and recreation.
• We’ve done write-ups on economic impact studies of Olympic games and legalized gambling.

Journalist’s Resource would like to thank multiple scholars and experts for their input on this post, including Heywood Sanders, professor of public administration at The University of Texas at San Antonio; David Luberoff, senior project advisor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard; Steven Poftak, executive director of Harvard’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston; Chris Roush, professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill; and Michael Leeds, economics professor at Temple University.

This photo by James Willamor was obtained from Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.

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Community college students in Tennessee were 2.5 times more likely to complete an associate degree within two years if they had participated in dual enrollment during high school, a recent study suggests.  

The issue: The number of high school students taking college courses has risen sharply in recent decades as education leaders nationwide promote dual enrollment as a way to help more Americans earn college degrees.

Dual enrollment programs, also referred to as dual credit programs, allow students to complete courses they need to graduate high school while also earning college credit. This saves students time and reduces the cost of going to college. Research indicates there are other benefits as well. For example, students who participate in dual enrollment are more likely to graduate high school, according to the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, a leading authority. They also are more likely to go to college.

The vast majority of dually enrolled students earn college credit through partnerships their school districts have formed with local community colleges. Oftentimes, dual enrollment courses are free or offered at deeply discounted tuition rates.

A study worth reading: “The Answer Is Yes: Dual Enrollment Benefits Students at the Community College,” published in Community College Review, 2017.

About the study: A team of researchers from Northeast State Community College and East Tennessee State University sought to determine whether community college students who had participated in dual enrollment during high school performed better than students who had not. The team looked specifically at remediation rates and degree completion.

The researchers focused on students who attended high school and community college in Tennessee, which received national attention for becoming the first state to offer free community college tuition to its high school graduates through the Tennessee Promise program in 2015.

The team looked at students who had entered Northeast State Community College in Blountville, Tennessee as full-time freshmen. The sample comprised 1,232 students, 246 of whom had taken dual enrollment courses during high school. The study does not indicate how many college credits these students had earned during high school.

Key findings:

• Community college students who took dual enrollment courses in high school were 9 percent less likely to require remedial help than those who did not.
• More than 30 percent of students who had been dually enrolled completed an associate degree on time. Fifteen percent of students who had not participated in dual enrollment were able to do that.
• Nearly half — 46 percent — of students who were dually enrolled earned associate degrees within three years, compared to 33 percent of those who were not.

Other resources:

• The American Association of Community Colleges is an advocacy organization that represents nearly 1,200 two-year, associate-degree granting institutions. Similar state-level organizations include the Community College League of California, Michigan Community College Association and Association of Florida Colleges.
• The National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships has developed standards to ensure the quality of college coursework taught by high school teachers. The agency also offers accreditation.
• The Education Commission of the States offers a state-by-state comparison of policies designed to ensure the quality of dual enrollment courses, especially those taught by high school teachers at high schools.

Other research:

• A 2017 study published in Educational Researcher, “Dual Credit, College Type, and Enhanced Degree Attainment,” found that students who participated in dual enrollment programs in high school were much more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees later in life than those who had no experience with dual enrollment.
• A 2017 study from the Community College Research Center provides data on the percentage of new community college students in each state who are high school students participating in dual enrollment. Participation ranged from 1 percent in Georgia to 34 percent in Kentucky in fall 2010.
• A 2011 working paper for the National Center for Postsecondary Research at Columbia University, “Determinants of Students’ Success: The Role of Advanced Placement and Dual Enrollment Programs,” suggests that students who took dual enrollment courses are more likely to go to college after graduating high school than students who took Advanced Placement courses.

Photo by Community College of Vermont obtained from Wikimedia and used under a Creative Commons license.

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When research grant proposals are evaluated mainly on the credentials of the researcher, and not the proposal itself, there is a bias in favor of men.

Gender bias in the workplace is not new. Pay gaps, hiring discrimination and harassment all demonstrate differences in opportunities and outcomes on the basis of gender.

As researchers work to shed light on gender bias, academia itself is not immune. For example, research has found that in hiring searches, committees take the relationship status of women, but not men, into account. This study indicates that women with partners who had high-status jobs were excluded from positions if there were single candidates available. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2015, only 32 percent of full professors were women.

New research conducted by scholars at four Canadian institutions probes another area of academia in which gender might play a role, examining differences in the funding success of proposed academic studies.

The researchers reviewed the outcomes of 23,918 grant applications submitted from 2011 to 2016 to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Since 2014, CIHR has evaluated applications through two separate programs. One focuses primarily on the caliber of the lead researcher on the application, the other emphasizes the quality of the proposal itself.

When the proposals were evaluated on their own merits, the researchers found that the probability of funding success was 0.9 percentage points higher for male principal investigators. When the review focused on the credentials of the lead researcher, however, there was a 4-percentage-point gap that favored men.

This points to a bias against women in grant review, according to the study’s authors. “Gender gaps in funding stem from female principal investigators being evaluated less favorably than male principal investigators, not from differences in the quality of their science,” they write. The authors do not attempt to explain the reasons for this bias.

Though the study examined Canadian data, other research indicates that funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) goes to men more commonly than women, and women’s projects receive less money, on average. Research published in Academic Medicine indicates that gender bias might persist in the NIH grant review process despite changes to its format. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reviewed research grant awards from a number of federal agencies and found differential success rates, which favored men, at the Departments of Defense and Energy.

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Every year, college students are injured or killed during events associated with hazing. Often, violence, heavy drinking and humiliation are part of the rituals students endure to gain acceptance into a popular group on campus. At times, sleep deprivation, nudity and sex acts also are involved. While college hazing is most commonly associated with fraternities and sororities, other organizations participate as well, including sports teams and marching bands. While many states have made hazing a crime, only some have made it a felony. In 2012, Congresswoman Frederica Wilson introduced legislation that would have made the activity a federal offense. But that effort was unsuccessful. Colleges and universities nationwide prohibit hazing but struggle to prevent it even after launching numerous programs over the years to urge students to avoid such activities and report them.

It is difficult to gauge the prevalence of college hazing because no organization formally tracks it. Higher education institutions generally do not monitor hazing incidents or allegations. And hazing is not one of the student offenses that colleges must report to the U.S. Department of Education under the federal Clery Act, formally known as the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act. Some individuals informally monitor hazing-related deaths. For example, Hank Nuwer, a journalism professor in Indiana who writes about hazing, keeps a running tally of published accounts of hazing deaths on his website.

Hazing is an issue that journalists on the education and crime beats cover quite often, especially if they work near large universities. It’s a topic of intense interest to parents and educators and one that requires considerable time to cover well. A reporter could be writing about a single hazing incident for a year or longer because a death or serious injury often prompts multiple investigations, lawsuits and new anti-hazing initiatives. Breaking news about hazing happens year-round. In December 2017, a sorority at the College of William & Mary and a fraternity at the University of Southern Indiana were suspended for hazing. Meanwhile, the Pi Kappa Alpha International Fraternity was indicted on a hazing charge after a pledge at the University of Houston was body slammed and suffered a lacerated spleen. A total of four fraternity pledges died in 2017.

As journalists explore the issue from various angles, this selection of academic research and other reports will help inform their coverage.

Role of alcohol

“Bullying Victimization Among College Students: Negative Consequences for Alcohol Use”
Rospenda, Kathleen M.; et al. Journal of Addictive Diseases, 2013, Vol. 32. doi: 10.1080/10550887.2013.849971.

Abstract: “This study reports the prevalence of bullying victimization at school and work among college freshmen and the relationships between victimization and changes in alcohol consumption and alcohol problems. Web survey data at two time points from a sample of 2,118 freshmen from eight colleges and universities in the midwestern United States indicated that 43 percent of students experienced bullying at school and that 33 percent of students experienced bullying at work. Bullying, particularly at school, consistently predicted alcohol consumption and problematic drinking, after controlling for baseline drinking and other school and work stressors.”

Hazing and race, gender

“Asian American Fraternity Hazing: An Analysis of Community-Level Factors”
Parks, Gregory S.; Laybourn, Wendy Marie. UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal, 2017.

Summary: This law review article examines hazing among Asian American fraternities, the history of Asian American fraternities and the social concept of masculinity among Asian men. “Within  Asian  American  fraternities,  among  those  cultural  factors  are  notions  of  masculinity  and  how  they  were  reared  and  disciplined  by  their  parents. These  factors  may engender hyper-masculine conduct, namely violence, and be directed at those whom Asian American fraternity men exert authority over, pledges, because of displaced aggression. These points may provide helpful points of intervention within Asian American fraternities that might help curtail hazing within these groups.”

“White Boys Drink, Black Girls Yell . . . : A Racialized and Gendered Analysis of Violent Hazing and the Law”
Parks, Gregory S.; et al. Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, 2015.

Summary: “In this article, the authors theorize that legally consequential behavior is influenced by race and sex. Specifically, this article contends that hazing, as a form of legally consequential behavior, manifests itself quite differently within BGLOs [Black Greek Letter Organizations] than within their white counterpart organizations. Specifically, this article finds that hazing in Black fraternities is more physically violent. The authors contend that prevailing and yet provincial notions of Black masculinity in the United States underscore the violent nature of Black fraternity hazing.”

Hazing in sports

“Qualitative Review of Hazing in Collegiate and School Sports: Consequences From a Lack of Culture, Knowledge and Responsiveness”
Diamond, Alex B.; Callahan, Todd; Chain, Kelly F.; Solomon, Gary S. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2016. DOI: 10.1136/bjsports-2015-095603.

Findings: “Despite increased attention to its dangers, hazing remains pervasive throughout the sports world. However, many do not recognize those actions as consistent with hazing. A change in culture, increased education and awareness, along with methodologically sound strategies for action must occur in order to reduce the ill effects and cycle of hazing. To date, current information and efforts are lacking.”

“Hazing Rites/Rights: Using Outdoor- and Adventure Education-Based Orientation to Effect Positive Change for First-Year Athletes”
Johnson, Jay; Chin, Jessica W. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, August 2015. doi:10.1080/14729679.2015.1050681.

Summary: This study examines outdoor-based and adventure education-based orientation as an alternative to traditional forms of orientation for sports teams. The study “highlights some of the promising possibilities for creating new welcoming traditions for collegiate athletic teams.”

“Male Team Sport Hazing Initiations in a Culture of Decreasing Homohysteria”
Anderson, Eric; McCormack, Mark; Lee, Harry. Journal of Adolescent Research, July 2012, Vol. 27. doi: 10.1177/0743558411412957.

Abstract: “In this longitudinal ethnographic research, we report on seven years of hazing rituals on two separate men’s sports teams at one university in the United Kingdom. Using 38 in-depth interviews alongside naturalistic observations of the initiation rituals, we demonstrate that hazing activities have changed from being centered around homophobic same-sex activities to focusing on extreme levels of alcohol consumption. We show that whereas same-sex activities once occurred paradoxically to prohibit them, today these initiations open up the possibility of same-sex behaviors for young men in the life stage of emergent adulthood.”

“Hazing and Initiation Ceremonies in University Sport: Setting the Scene for Further Research in the United Kingdom”
Groves, Mark; Griggs, Gerald; Leflay, Kathryn. Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, 2012, Vol. 15. doi:10.1080/03031853.2011.625287.

Abstract: “In recent years, the pervasive practice of student initiation ceremonies into university sports teams has become widely reported in the British media. Such initiations have been likened to the practice known as hazing, which is prevalent in universities across the U.S.A. Although there is some research that has considered how and why hazing occurs in American universities, less attention has been paid to the initiation ceremonies that regularly occur in British institutions. This article provides an overview of some of the literature that has examined the practice of hazing in the U.S.A. in order to set the scene for much needed research in the U.K.”

Hazing in the military

“Hazing in the U.S. Armed Forces: Recommendations for Hazing Prevention Policy and Practice”
Keller, Kirsten; et al. Report from the RAND Corporation, 2015.

Summary: “Initiation activities have long been part of U.S. military culture as a way to mark signi­ficant transitions, status changes, and group membership. However, along with these activities have often come acts of hazing, in which individuals were subjected to abusive and harmful treatment that went beyond sanctioned ceremonies. In recent years, extreme cases of alleged hazing have led to the high-profi­le deaths of several service members, resulting in renewed interest from the public and Congress in seeing these hazing rituals eliminated from military culture … In this report, we address ways to improve the armed forces’ definition of hazing, the effects of and motivations for hazing, how the armed forces can prevent and respond to hazing, and how the armed forces can improve the tracking of hazing incidents.”

Hazing policy

“Defining Hazing: Why Popular Definitions Are Misleading and Counterproductive”
Cimino, Aldo. Journal of Higher Education Management, 2017.

Summary: This paper, written for a publication of the American Association of University Administrators, aims to “highlight the shortcomings of these popular definitions of hazing, and to provide a universally applicable definition of hazing that will improve education efforts and provide a coherent basis for constructive policy.”

“Hazed and Confused: The Rohm Incident and the Necessity of Hazing Legislation”
Gurbacki, Karrie. Berkeley Journal of Entertainment and Sports Law, April 2015, Vol. 4.

Summary: This article offers insights into the history of hazing among different social and academic groups and explores the need for changes in state laws dealing with hazing and its effects.

“Hazing as Crime: An Empirical analysis of Criminological Antecedents”
Parks, Gregory S.; Jones, Shayne E.; Hughey, Matthew W. Law & Psychology Review, 2015, Vol. 39.

Summary: Because little research has been done by legal scholars on the topic of hazing in recent years, this study seeks to fill the void. It explores “hazing as a criminal legal issue and the extent to which social science helps elucidate why hazing persists and the factors that may militate against it.”

“Hazing in Public Schools: A Liability Challenge for School Leaders”
Essex, Nathan L. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 2014, Vol. 87. doi: 10.1080/00098655.2014.936809.

Abstract: “Hazing in public schools is a significant problem that may result in serious physical or emotional harm to students who are victims. According to experts in the field, each year more than 1,500,000 American students become new hazing victims. Hazing also results in legal challenges for school personnel. The courts consider public schools to be safe places where teaching and learning occur in a peaceful environment. Thus, school personnel have a leading responsibility to protect the safety of students under the functional custody of their schools. Hazing activities, if not checked, pose a threat to the health and safety of students. Hazing by its very nature is a private act. Consequently, a significant number of hazing acts goes unreported. Hazing has become so prevalent that it has prompted 44 states to pass legislation banning it. Despite anti-hazing laws, hazing continues to occur among athletes, peer groups, gangs, and other schools clubs and organizations. Hazing creates stress, anxiety, intimidation, and often results in physical and emotional harm to victims. Well-defined policies prohibiting hazing and proper procedures for reporting hazing, coupled with vigilance by school personnel, in monitoring student activities may greatly reduce hazing incidents and minimize potential liability claims for school personnel.”

Prevalence

“Prevalence and Profiling: Hazing Among College Students and Points of Intervention”
Campo, Shelly; Poulos, Gretchen; Sipple, John W. American Journal of Health Behavior, March 2005. doi: 10.5993/AJHB.29.2.5.

Summary: This study examines university student attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs about hazing. It found that 36 percent of students surveyed participated in hazing and that Greeks, men, varsity athletes, student leaders and upperclassmen were more likely to engage in hazing. It also suggests that many students do not recognize hazing when they experience it.

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Infants whose mothers received less than 12 years of education are, in some states, more than twice as likely to die as those born to college educated mothers, a new study finds.

The issue: Education provides tangible benefits, including employment opportunities and knowledge that can improve both the quality and duration of one’s life. But these effects extend beyond just the direct recipients of an education — children also benefit from their parents’ schooling.

Prior research on maternal education has shown that increased education offers mothers more connections with resources for infant health and an awareness of healthy behaviors (including exercise and not smoking). Education might also hone the skills needed to access and effectively use the health care system.

In general, infants born to more educated mothers have lower mortality rates. A new study delves into the specifics, determining on a state-by-state basis the extent to which mothers’ education levels affect their babies’ chances of survival.

An academic study worth reading: “Inequality in Infant Mortality: Cross-State Variation and Medical System Institutions,” published in Social Problems, October 2017.

About the study: Benjamin Sosnaud, a sociologist at Trinity University, looked at almost 23 million infant birth and death records from 1997 to 2002. The records, provided by the National Vital Statistics System, include data on the mother’s schooling. Sosnaud compared two groups of mothers — those who had less than 12 years of education and those who had 4 years of college or more. Controlling for other variables, including race and maternal age, he analyzed the association between maternal education and infant mortality across the 50 states.

Sosnaud also collected state-specific data from the American Hospital Association on the number of neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) per 10,000 residents and from the American Medical Association on the number of primary care providers per 10,000 residents. This data allowed him to analyze whether linkages exist between these components of state medical systems and trends in infant mortality rates.

Key findings:

• Taking into account other factors, including race and maternal age, maternal educational level is significantly linked to infant mortality risk.
• Alaska, North Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky had the largest differences in infant mortality rates across maternal education levels. In these states, infants born to less-educated mothers were more than twice as likely to die as infants born to more-educated mothers.
• The state with the smallest difference in infant mortality rates across maternal education levels was Hawaii. New Mexico and Nevada also exhibited less inequality.
• In states with more NICUs, infant mortality risk decreased only for those born to less-educated mothers.
• In states with more primary care physicians per 10,000 residents, infant mortality risk decreased for both groups of mothers, but more so for the college-educated group. Sosnaud suggests this might be because not all mothers could access primary care providers, regardless of availability.

Other resources:

• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Reproductive Health describes initiatives aimed at reducing infant mortality rates. They also have statistics available on infant mortality by state.
• The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau collects relevant data and research.
• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has an advisory committee on infant mortality.

Related research:

• A study published in 2017 in Health Affairs, “Widening Disparities in Infant Mortality and Life Expectancy Between Appalachia and the Rest of The United States, 1990–2013,” highlights increases in infant mortality across races in Appalachia as compared with rates outside the region.
• A study published in the Journal of Health Economics in 2010, “Understanding Differences in Health Behaviors by Education,” considers potential explanations for how education might shape the behaviors that determine health outcomes.
• A study published in 2011 in the American Sociological Review, “The Enduring Association Between Education and Mortality: The Role of Widening and Narrowing Disparities,” takes a look at the issue for adults between the ages of 40 and 64.

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