A widespread health crisis is undermining American community colleges, with many current and potential students exhibit high rates of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, suicidal ideation, food insecurity, and more. The challenges predate the pandemic but were exacerbated by it. The COVID-19 infection itself also appears to have made the situation worse.
With their well-being undermined, students find it much harder to focus on learning — let alone graduate — which, combined with growing debt, puts them at risk of ending up worse off than if they didn’t attend college at all. That’s why researchers at Ithaka S&R found that three in four community college provosts rate student physical and mental health as critical to student success.
Let’s be real: it costs significant money and time to address this problem, and most community colleges lack both. Rampant funding inequities have been clear for a long time — colleges enrolling students with the most need tend to have the least staff capacity and financial bandwidth to help. Yet these institutions try to fulfill their mission, putting more pressure on a small number of campus health professionals, adopting telehealth programs (despite a lack of much evidence that they work well for students), and expressing frustration with the difficulty in doing more. 
Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab
But two new initiatives are giving me hope that more community colleges will have additional capacity to support student health. And there are ways for you to get involved, now, to enhance their impact.
The first is a project that promises to bring more sustainable revenue for community college health programs. The Community College Medicaid Project, supported by the ECMC Foundation and the Kresge Foundation, aims to improve student health by boosting Medicaid engagement by community colleges. In other words, this effort will bring more dollars to colleges by ensuring that they get Medicaid reimbursement for the eligible services they (already) provide.
Dr. Ryan Stewart, a former New Mexico Secretary of Education, and the first African American to serve as that state’s chief state school officer, spearheads this project. Having served as regional executive director for Partners in School Innovation, executive director of the Office of School Improvement and Innovation at the School District of Philadelphia (the poorest large city in the nation), and a California math and science teacher, Ryan noticed something important: many K-12 schools provided Medicaid-eligible health services to students but — often because of a lack of awareness and/or challenges with technical know-how — they didn’t get paid for it. In other words, schools left billions of federal dollars on the table, and system leaders were often unaware.
It’s very likely that community colleges are in the same boat — unknowingly forgoing federal dollars to support work they are trying desperately to do. For example, Ryan estimates that in California just 20% of community college students attend an institution participating in the state’s Medicaid program. That’s why he is on a mission to ensure that every college has access to Medicaid funds to support student health and well-being. Increasing colleges’ participation in and optimal use of Medicaid dollars to offset costs and generate recurring federal revenues can help remove healthcare access as a barrier to completion and build colleges’ capacity to sustain student health funding.
