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Behavioral risk factor surveillance system state survey on exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): Who declines to respond? [Children and Youth Services Review] "A wealth of research has examined the prevalence and impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) via various research methodologies. Some of these studies have also examined the presence of nonresponse bias, showing minimal nonresponse bias effects. More recently, many states and the District of Columbia have used the...

A four-minute film produced for the UnLonely Film Festival and Conference last month featured a young woman who, as a college freshman, felt painfully alone . She desperately missed her familiar haunts and high school buddies who seemed, on Facebook at least, to be having the time of their lives. It reminded me of a distressing time I had as an 18-year-old college sophomore — feeling friendless, unhappy and desperate to get out of there. I didn’t know it then, but I was in the age bracket —...

All San Diego high school graduates who are first-time college students can receive free community college tuition under an expansion of the San Diego Promise Program announced Monday. “We’re announcing the ultimate expansion of our program,” said Constance Carroll, chancellor of the San Diego Community College District . “A college education is key to economic advancement.” The district estimates that as many as 3,500 students may be eligible for the program in the 2018-2019 academic year.

Years of efforts to prevent sexual harassment in science, engineering and medicine have failed, and universities need to make sweeping changes in the way they deal with the issue, a searing new report by a national advisory panel concluded on Tuesday. “There is no evidence to suggest that current policies, procedures, and approaches have resulted in a significant reduction in sexual harassment,” said the report, which was more than two years in the making , starting well before the #MeToo...

Trauma-Informed Approaches (TIA) recognize the impact of trauma on the human experience. Everyone experiences trauma differently, and our experiences create a lens through which we view, and process, stressors. Training in TIA not only enhances professionals’ abilities to recognize and accommodate people in crisis to ensure their success. If applied habitually, these principles allow us to help all students (or clients, or patients), and not just those about whose trauma we are already aware.

About 30 percent of high school students in California go on to graduate from college, but only about 8 percent of foster youth make it that far, according to research by the Public Policy Institute of California and the University of Chicago. Young people who spend their teen years in foster care are more likely to land in jail than to earn a college degree. Those bleak prospects deter some students from even considering higher-ed options. Under the umbrella of Guardian Scholars programs,...

The number of college assistance programs for current and former foster youth is growing, but there are still major gaps in helping students access them, according to a national survey of state-run colleges. The goal of the survey, produced by the First Star Institute’s Foster Youth Success in College Project, is “to provide a more detailed current look at what these programs look like, how extensive they are throughout the country, and to detail best practices in place in different parts of...

There's been a lot of attention lately on low-income students on campus — mostly on how to recruit them and how to make them feel welcome. For good reason: Pell Grant recipients make up about a third of the undergraduate student population in the U.S., according to the College Board . And often, their experiences in college are very different than their wealthy classmates. Two recent reports offer a good snapshot as to what's happening for these students when it comes to college. One is from...

The true scale of this crisis was revealed last January in a groundbreaking report commissioned by the California State University system. The study found that 11 percent of students on the university’s 23-campuses reported being homeless during the past year. The problem was most acute at Humboldt State, where nearly a fifth of the student body had been homeless at one point the previous year. “In large part, students are homeless because they don’t get enough financial aid,” says Jennifer...

Russell Lowery-Hart spent a Texas winter weekend sleeping outside, even when a light rain fell and it grew so cold that he forced muddy shoes into his sleeping bag to warm his feet. By day, the 48-year-old became increasingly sunburned crisscrossing the streets of Waco, applying for fast-food jobs and searching for soup kitchens. He arrived at one charity at noon to find that lunch ended at 11:30; luckily, a homeless woman shared her cinnamon bread with him. He was unshowered and unshaven,...

As far back as she can remember, Berkeley City College Mental Health Specialist Janine Greer understood that there was a connection between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and health. She had a sense early on that racism figures large in that equation. “Looking around in my community – I’m African American, I noticed that even people who had healthy habits got funky diseases,” she said. “And I’m thinking there must be some sort of health trouble that happens if you’re always stressed.”...

Many proposals for addressing school segregation seem pretty small, especially when compared to the scale and severity of the problem. Without the power of a court-ordered desegregation mandate, progress can feel extremely far off, if not altogether impossible. Some even believe—understandably though mistakenly —that no meaningful steps can be taken to integrate schools unless housing segregation is resolved. But a new theory from Thomas Scott-Railton, a recent graduate of Yale Law School,...