Inside Higher Ed

We might consider starting the summer term earlier to make sure that it’s compatible with summer internships and traditional study abroad or its more recent variant: faculty-led overseas research trips. Let’s help our students build more career-relevant connections, with alumni or potential employers or mentors, and give them more opportunities to undertake virtual internships and complete digital projects, which students can include in an electronic portfolio. It’s about creating an integrated system of academic, personal, and technical support that can identify barriers to student success, respond proactively to early signs of trouble, and reach out electronically or in person with emergency aid, nudges, coaching, or more intrusive interventions when necessary. To overcome the academic and non-academic barriers to student success, a coordinated system of support must bring together academic advising, career and pre-professional counseling, disabilities services, financial aid, academic tutoring and other learning support services.

About 36 percent of these students also said their families experienced a loss or reduction in income since the pandemic began, and 21.7 percent of graduate and professional students said a family member had reduced income, the survey results said. Both undergraduate (34.3 percent) and graduate and professional students (26.9 percent) said they had unexpected living expenses during the pandemic, survey results said. One of the most important and concerning takeaways from the data was the heightened impact that the pandemic has had on students of color, Indigenous, low-income and working-class students compared to their white and wealthier peers in most areas of the survey, said Soria, who is also director of student affairs assessment for the University of Minnesota Office of Institutional Research and Office of Student Affairs. Nearly two-thirds of low-income students and 54 percent of working-class students also had a family member that experienced a loss of income, compared to 36 percent of middle-class and 24 percent of upper-middle-class students, according to a survey report based on an analysis of students' socioeconomic status.