Effort, dedication, and critical evaluation are put forward to keep institutions running. With over five thousand colleges and universities, an incredible impact has been made, setting America’s education standards apart from the rest of the world (Liyanage et al., 2019). One of the most prominent learning institutions is Stanford University, established in 1885 (Liyanage et al., 2019). Many well-wishers, the school, government, and non-governmental organizations contribute every year to the school to accommodate scholarships for international students, those who have an intelligent minds but cannot afford quality education in their mother countries. Even with this success, Stanford students struggle with mental health, affordability, lack of welcome in the university, and racial discrimination, the most significant problems affecting the institution.
Stanford University is diverse in terms of the origin of the students in the school. Diversity is a good factor in helping students learn about different cultures as they associate in their learning process. Being a student at Stanford means a high level of competition and rigorous learning. Such high stress makes the students struggle with mental problems as they compete to be the best (Liyanage et al., 2019). Another problem is the high cost of living at the university. Housing expenses, food, and upkeep make the students work two or three jobs to manage the cost of living, negatively impacting their academics. Another crucial factor is Stanford’s culture of not being welcoming. Students face this during admission face and suffer throughout the study period, leading to school dropouts. A sad note of racial discrimination sums all this up; some students have used social platforms like Twitter to express racial discrimination, disrupting the learning process as the offended students fight back for their rights (Liyanage et al., 2019). Such challenges disrupt the education process and bring inefficiency to the study curriculum.
Efficient countermeasures should be implemented to fight all these problems and create a suitable planning model. The issue of high stress experienced by the students has led to students living miserable lives in school and developing mental problems. The school should implement a guidance and counseling team with compulsory sessions with therapists where each student should be evaluated, assessed, and advised later. The government should give directives to reduce the cost of services around the campus to allow the students to afford them. The university should organize teams of students according to different categories, such as regions of origin, courses, and religious beliefs, which should be incorporated together to form more defined categories. Students should be allocated one of these groups during the admission process to help them feel more welcomed by people with whom they share common interests. The Stanford Board of committees and directors should implement strict repercussions for students who try to discriminate against other students by race.
Some significant strengths in the planning and execution process are that students in anti-racism movements will work together to implement discrimination rules. Additionally, with the help of student leaders and club leaders, students will create groups willingly to help welcome their fellow students. Some of the foreseen challenges are that the government may not have full authority to direct the campus service providers to lower the costs because most are privately owned. One unforeseen challenge might be the unwillingness of students to open up to therapists during the sessions. The campus should create awareness of the importance of counseling to solve the problem of failure to open up. The government should also contribute by building amenities such as hostels and canteens with subsidized services.
Based on all of the above, despite the many merits of the original plan, it may not succeed. It is the primary option, but it is based on the correlation of many factors, and if one does not work, the whole plan will not function. For example, suppose students are not willing to join interest groups, even with the support of the state. In that case, the situation is unlikely to change. That is why a backup plan must be developed to support the program in the event that the first plan does not operate correctly. All of the contingency plan items will be based, respectively, on situations where the first plan does not work.
The first point of the contingency plan will be to find alternative means of funding. Funding is necessary in order to lower the prices of student services because there is little chance that they can be reduced in the usual way. With alternative sources of funding, the program will not be utterly dependent on government support and will not stop operating if it does not exist. Such sources could be various financial funds aimed at supporting education. It can also be a variety of charitable financial collections. The second point of the plan is to eliminate the problem of students’ reluctance to open up to a therapist. In this case, the very first measure should be the abolition of compulsory psychotherapeutic consultation. The obligation to do something always generates an adverse reaction and reluctance (Ingrams, 2020). If therapeutic help is optional and on-demand, students will feel safer and more willing to receive it. In addition, psychological counseling should be made a permanent option for students.
Everyone should have a year-round opportunity to see a campus professional without time constraints. If counseling is seasonal, such as only taking place in the spring, students will be left without psychological support for the rest of the year. Additionally, many of them may not be able to decide to talk to a therapist at first, but knowing that they can always do so will give them more confidence (Ingrams, 2020). Another backup plan would be to act in case students do not like working with interest groups, races, or religions. This could happen because the effect of such groups would be the opposite; it would not increase cohesion, but instead, it would increase segregation. For example, internal cohesion will grow in a small club where all the students are Muslims. However, they will also drift away from the community. Thus, their differences from the rest would be in the mainstream, and the problem of segregation would only be exacerbated.
To solve this problem, we can introduce mixed groups, rather than separate ones, so that students can better integrate into the community. In doing so, they could be grouped by interests that do not affect their racial or religious identity. Dance, theater, or music clubs would also be effective in integrating students but would not emphasize race or religion. Students will be grouped together but not separated from the outside world and those who are different from them. Such a system is much more efficient yet does not require specialized costs. In this way, the problems of the basic plan will be eradicated, and the program will be successful and make students’ lives better.
Reference
Ingrams, J. (2020). Counseling…? Me?: A guide to the talking therapies. Routledge. Web.
Liyanage, S., Dia, H., Abduljabbar, R., & Bagloee, S. (2019). Flexible mobility-on-demand: An environmental scan. Sustainability, 11(5), 1262. Web.