Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

Author Richard Arum, Ph.D, speaks at Georgia Southern University on Learning During Unsettled Times: College Graduates\u27s Academic Performance and Recent Experiences in the US as the 2012 Norman Fries Distinguished Lectureship Series... To read the full article, click on Download

Levels and facets of university students' stress during the COVID-19 pandemic: Longitudinal evidence from the first two academic years in Germany and the U.S.

Following its outbreak, the COVID-19 pandemic had strong negative effects on university students' stress and mental health worldwide. Using two longitudinal datasets from Germany (N = 504) and the U.S. (N = 893), we investigated how students' stress developed over the first two academic years during the pandemic. In both studies, we found elevated levels of students' stress at the beginning of the pandemic. In Germany, we found a significant intraindividual decrease in students' general stress experiences even before universities had returned to in-person classes. When examining specific stress facets in the U.S., we found that students' academic stress increased during the first pandemic year with remote teaching and decreased significantly after the university resumed normal operations, that is, in-person classes and on-campus residence. Students' practical stress decreased towards all later time points compared to the onset of the pandemic, whereas health stress continuously increased until the university resumed normal operations. We report differences by students' demographic backgrounds (gender, college generation status, childcare status, ethnicity, academic year) and discuss our findings against the background of the course of the pandemic in the particular context in which both studies were conducted

Legal Mobilization in Schools: The Paradox of Rights and Race Among Youth

In this article, we analyze ethnoracial patterns in youth perceptions and responses to rights violations and advance a new model oflegal mobilization that includes formal, quasi-, and extralegal action. Slightly more than half of the 5,461 students in our sample reported past rights violations involving discrimination, harassment, freedom of expression/assembly, and due process violations in disciplinary procedures. Students, regardless of race, are more likely to take extralegal than formal legal actions in response to perceived rights violations. Self-identified African American and Latina/a students are significantly more likely than white and Asian American students to perceive rights violations and are more likely to claim they would take formal legal action in response to hypothetical rights violations. However, when they perceive rights violations, African American and Asian American students are no more likely than whites to take formal legal action and Latina/a students are less likely than whites to take formal legal action. We draw on in-depth interviews with youth and adults-which we interlace with our quantitative findings-to explore the interpretive dynamics underlying these survey findings, and we offer several theoretical and methodological implications of our work.</p

A HIF1alpha regulatory loop links hypoxia and mitochondrial signals in pheochromocytomas.

Pheochromocytomas are neural crest-derived tumors that arise from inherited or sporadic mutations in at least six independent genes. The proteins encoded by these multiple genes regulate distinct functions. We show here a functional link between tumors with VHL mutations and those with disruption of the genes encoding for succinate dehydrogenase (SDH) subunits B (SDHB) and D (SDHD). A transcription profile of reduced oxidoreductase is detected in all three of these tumor types, together with an angiogenesis/hypoxia profile typical of VHL dysfunction. The oxidoreductase defect, not previously detected in VHL-null tumors, is explained by suppression of the SDHB protein, a component of mitochondrial complex II. The decrease in SDHB is also noted in tumors with SDHD mutations. Gain-of-function and loss-of-function analyses show that the link between hypoxia signals (via VHL) and mitochondrial signals (via SDH) is mediated by HIF1alpha. These findings explain the shared features of pheochromocytomas with VHL and SDH mutations and suggest an additional mechanism for increased HIF1alpha activity in tumors