New CDC data out last month revealed that more than 4 in 10 teens report feeling “persistently sad or hopeless.” The data reflects what parents and educators have learned intimately over the last two years: Young people are struggling with mental health. Unfortunately, schools tend to operate on a shoestring, offering a “skeletal” system of mental health services. Some school psychologists and social workers manage caseloads in the thousands.

President Biden promised more funds to address the crisis last month. Even before that, some states and districts had dedicated federal Covid relief dollars to hiring more professionals.

These investments are smart and long overdue. But they may not turn the tide on a crisis that has been unfolding since long before the pandemic began. While trained professionals are key to addressing acute mental health challenges, they are not always best positioned to detect those challenges early; nor do they offer the only way to prevent mental health issues in the first place.

For a better system long-term, schools should bank on a promising mental health support resource surrounding students: their peers.

The power of peer networks is well-documented in research. “Peers can often form a stronger therapeutic bond with the people they counsel because they have experienced mental health struggles themselves,” wrote life sciences consultant Nicola Davies about the benefits of peer counseling. Positive peer dynamics have been shown to support learning, prosocial behavior and social-emotional well-being.

Related: Rethinking campus health to better serve LGBTQ+ students and others

But peer support is too often taken for granted by policymakers and administrators focused on staffing and services. That’s a mistake, and one that some schools are actively countering.

For example, in Pomona, California, Garey High School operates a peer counseling center, which trains students to navigate conversations about mental health issues, recognize warning signs and refer peers to professional counselors. Other programs activate peers as advocates for those facing mental health challenges. Bring Change to Mind has demonstrated success with student-run clubs to end stigma and build awareness around mental health; the Health Information Project has trained over 15,000 teen peer health educators to facilitate class discussions about issues ranging from depression to abuse.

Peers can also provide what researchers dub “supportive accountability,” encouraging one another to persist with treatment — including treatment through high-quality mental health apps that could help large numbers of teens if they could access the apps and stick with them. Jean Rhodes, a leading mentoring researcher, has written: “Engaging youth in mental health services has always been a challenge, and self-administered [mental health apps] are no exception.” Her lab has found that enlisting “non-professionals,” including peers, can yield dramatic increases in engagement and adherence to high-quality online interventions.

Peer supports offer something that professionals often can’t, and vice versa.

These models don’t eliminate or compete with mental health professionals. Instead, they enlist peers as close, credible messengers who are especially attuned to one another’s struggles. Peer supports offer something that professionals often can’t, and vice versa.

As a case in point, peer-to-peer programs can be a source of culturally sensitive support when colleges’ and K–12 schools’ counseling staffs are overwhelmingly white. A MassINC Polling Group survey last October found that Black, transgender and first-generation college students reported using peer counseling more often than other students, and were more likely to prioritize finding a peer counselor with identities or life experiences similar to their own.

Peers can also offer protection against mounting rates of loneliness, a proven precursor to more serious mental health challenges.

Fostering peer “connectedness” is key. Peer Group Connection, for example, is a school-based program in which older students meet regularly with groups of younger peers to help strengthen relationships and practice academic and social skills.

Related: College dreams often melt away in summer months. ‘Near-peer’ counseling is helping keep them alive

Other approaches nudge students to forge new peer connections themselves. Two colleges recently found that Nearpeer, a platform that helps college students identify potential friends with similar interests, majors and experiences, increased students’ sense of connectedness.

In another recent study, Nod, an app that helps young people practice social skills, decreased feelings of loneliness for psychologically vulnerable college students after only a few weeks of use. Nod is currently being piloted in eight Colorado school districts with high schoolers, and is seeing promising early results.

Tools like Nearpeer and Nod are a refreshing departure from traditional social media that more often exploit loneliness than combat it. Technology anchored in research and focused on connection and engagement, rather than on clicks and ads, can increase healthy habits and pro-social behaviors — both online and off. Peers can be a source of sustainable change.

From a liability perspective alone, peer counseling and support models may feel risky. But advocates for these models have students and families in their corner. About three-quarters of parents in a national survey agreed that students trained to talk with their peers about mental health would better understand the challenges that teens face and would improve the odds that teens would speak up about mental health concerns.

Among college students, the MassINC survey found that one in five already use peer counseling. And of those who don’t, 62 percent were interested in doing so.

Savvy education leaders flush with federal funding are aware of the risk of adopting staff-heavy “programs du jour” only to have to ditch them when the money runs out. Pairing staff with strategies that activate the power of peer networks can be an antidote — and provide the fuel needed to foster connectedness in the long run.

Chelsea Waite is a senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Julia Freeland Fisher is the director of education research at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

This story about school mental health services was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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High school students tend to dream big. According to the national nonprofit YouthTruth, in 2015 and 2016, over 84 percent of high school students reported wanting to go to college.

But data from the past 18 months tells a sobering story. Amid the pandemic, an unprecedented number of high school grads are putting their college dreams on hold. The drop in enrollment has been especially severe for students from high-poverty high schools.

This troubling trend could have long-term consequences. Once deferred, students’ education dreams may never come to fruition. Students who delay college enrollment after graduating high school have much lower odds of completing a degree long-term.

In order to hear directly from students about what disrupted their higher education plans and what could best reignite them, Strada Education Network surveyed more than 1,000 graduates from the classes of 2020 and 2021who had intended to enroll after high school but decided to postpone.

Via the survey and in-depth interviews, students shared personal accounts of their struggles navigating postsecondary planning during the pandemic.

“It’s pretty hard to motivate yourself when it’s just you doing it,” a high school graduate named Tesahe shared. “And you’re just at home sitting alone, with no one to help you that really knows what they’re doing.”

Loneliness was an all-too common refrain in the survey responses. Students described acute social support gaps that high schools and colleges have failed to address and worsening anxiety and financial strain.

But the data also reveal what these students will need to get back on track. And, contrary to popular belief, it isn’t a matter of motivation. The students who answered the survey wanted to continue their education. But financial, familial and social anxieties overpowered that desire.

This was even more true for students of color. Black and Latino students were more interested in continuing their education than their white counterparts. But they were also more likely to have had to step away due to the pandemic.

Reigniting educational dreams is not a matter of persuading students who all too often get mislabeled as “disengaged” from school. Rather, it’s a matter of providing students with greater access to the relationships and resources that they need.

Indeed, the students surveyed ranked access to an adviser and to money — either in the form of aid or paid work — at the top of their lists of what would be most helpful for continuing their education.

Related: ‘Right now is not my time’: How Covid dimmed college prospects for students who need help most

Unfortunately, all too often, advisers and resources are in scarce supply in our education systems. The high school student-to-counselor ratio averages a staggering 424 to 1.

In Strada’s survey, only about half of the students reported knowing anyone who could help them find a way to get the education after high school “that is right for me.”

To address these shortages, high schools and colleges can learn from organizations that are connecting students to peers and community members who can help with guidance and financial aid or modest cash subsidies to help ensure that our pandemic-era graduates don’t permanently fall through the cracks.

Reigniting educational dreams is not a matter of persuading students who all too often get mislabeled as “disengaged” from school. Rather, it’s a matter of providing students with greater access to the relationships and resources that they need.

Peers can provide vital guidance that students need but schools can’t always afford to provide. For example, PeerForward trains peer leaders to build a college-going culture in low-income high schools. Peer leaders even take on case management roles, providing seniors who are going through the college application process with someone to turn to.

Beyond an emotional support role, peers promote scholarship opportunities and help their fellow students complete the FAFSA. The model has largely withstood the test of the pandemic: According to Gary Linnen, who leads PeerForward, while nationally FAFSA completion rates dropped by 17 percent during Covid, they only decreased by 5 percent in schools partnering with PeerForward.

Colleges looking to serve more students can also offer and promote modest financial resources, such as rewards programs. Union Capital Boston (UCB), a nonprofit working across low- and middle-income neighborhoods in Boston, is seeing positive gains among younger and older learners alike via its community engagement program.

Members, now over 2,800 strong, can earn Visa gift cards in exchange for the time that they participate in the Union Capital network, such as by volunteering with community programs, attending networking events or taking courses. The program has spurred students to persist in school and enroll at impressive rates. According to Union Capital’s own surveys, as compared to when they joined the organization, UCB members have experienced an 11 percent increase in obtaining GEDs, a 14 percent increase in associate degrees and a 21 percent increase in bachelor’s degrees.

Union Capital’s founder, Eric Leslie, a former school principal, believes that addressing financial barriers is a critical first step to fostering connections that help members advance in their education and careers. “The rewards help get people out the door (or virtually onto Zoom),” Leslie said.

To address troubling declines in postsecondary enrollment, high schools and colleges may need to move beyond business as usual. While formal guidance and support matter, we are hearing from students that those traditional approaches are falling woefully short.

Investing more deliberately in peer and community networks could address student loneliness and become a linchpin for long-term success. Models like PeerForward and Union Capital Boston also illustrate the power of pairing close connections with access to cash — either in the form of financial aid or direct cash transfers — to address the financial anxieties wrapped up in exploring and pursuing further education.

High schools and colleges can learn from these strategies. Most education institutions are focused on what students know and what they can do. But schools can’t afford to ignore ways that access to financial and social capital matter too.

Investing in both may be our best hope to ensure that students aren’t shut out of opportunity, and that the thousands of dreams deferred in the throes of the pandemic can ultimately be realized.

Julia Freeland Fisher is the director of education research at the Clayton Christensen Institute. Nichole Torpey-Saboe is the director of research at Strada Education Network.

This story about college enrollment was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Colleges, on paper, may be deeply interconnected environments. But the emerging portrait of the pre-pandemic campus where everyone knows one another could prove misleading. Physical proximity isn’t a stand-in for actual connection. And based on what students say, higher education’s “tight-knit community” narrative starts to come apart at the seams.

Alumni-reported data from Strada and Gallup reveal that in 2018, fewer than half of students had a mentor in college. Minority students were 34 percent less likely to cite having a professor as a mentor. Harvard sociologist Anthony Jack’s recent research on the experience of low-income students on an elite campus underscores the fact that connection isn’t an equally distributed commodity, even at top schools. In Jack’s words, “access isn’t the same as acceptance.”

The coronavirus has brought this truth to center stage, as physical-distancing measures shed light on the social disconnect that many students were feeling before the pandemic. Colleges looking to shore up these gaps will need to connect students in new ways. Although by no means a cure-all, technology tools are among the solutions.

Large investments to support online learning have not been matched thus far with investments to support online connecting. That’s because the mainstream ed-tech market has tended to prize content over connection. However, institutions can harness a trove of online ed-tech tools optimized for facilitating relationships and safeguarding security.

Related: Coronavirus accelerates higher education’s trend toward distance learning

The tools are designed to strengthen campus communities on at least two fronts. First, some platforms can help colleges organize their relationship resources more deliberately and equitably, improving access to professors, peers and alumni. Second, they can show administrators whom they are reaching — and who may be falling through the cracks. Here are three such platforms:

1. PeopleGrove helps students build support networks and get access to mentors from the admissions process through graduation and beyond, all within one platform.

2. Mentor Collective helps colleges train and connect near-peer mentors with students, especially those who might otherwise lack support and connections. Platforms like these help students access both virtual connections and face-to-face meetups, as well as embark on tech careers.

3. Career Karma helps nontraditional candidates navigate coding bootcamp programs and embark on tech careers. At the heart of its model are its online “squads,” or peer networks, which candidates can lean on throughout their journeys.

The model was inspired by the Japanese tradition of a moai — meaning “meeting for a common purpose”— a group of friends who offer one another social, financial, health or spiritual support. Technology tools can help colleges foster tight-knit support networks, or cohorts, that help students get by and get ahead.

Colleges can use tools like these both to organize their existing networks and to supplement them. Shauntel Garvey, a co-founder and general partner at ed-tech venture capital firm Reach Capital, dubs these “community-driven learning solutions” that “reinforce existing communities, but also create avenues to build up new learning communities that may not be necessarily tied to one physical location.”

In the coming year, what exactly a college “community” looks and feels like remains to be seen.

Distance learning will strain even the closest of communities. It also threatens to expose the pockets of campuses in which connection was never present in the first place. Using technology to nurture close cohorts, expand more equitable access to faculty mentors and foster connections with alumni could mitigate the disastrous effects that social distancing will likely have on student retention and success.

Technology will, of course, only amplify what colleges choose to prioritize. But for campuses trying to sell the high-density, small-world experience that leaders so often tout, relationship-focused technologies could be game-changers. They stand to help students find mentors and one another both online and — eventually — offline.

This story about ed-tech platforms and higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

Julia Freeland Fisher is the director of education research at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

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The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) released a report last week warning that online and blended learning schools are struggling. Regarding blended learning in particular, the report used a deeply flawed methodology to count and evaluate the blended schools nationwide. Its conclusions run contrary to the on-the-ground reality lived by many educators and leaders dedicated to providing millions of students with blended-learning experiences.

The reality is that blended learning is flourishing. In fact, it is quickly spreading, as online learning becomes an integral part of the nation’s schools. We predict that by 2019, 50% of all high school courses will be online in some form or fashion, with the vast majority of these using blended learning instructional models – models that consist of students learning at least in part online and at least in part in brick-and-mortar school settings. Teachers, both online and face-to-face, are critical to the implementation and success of these models.

In light of this growth, it’s vital that we keep an eye on the quality and efficacy of blended learning. To rigorously assess quality, however, we must first have a sense of the scope of blended learning occurring nationwide. To be fair, with technology rapidly penetrating schools and classrooms, it can be difficult for researchers to keep track of precisely how many schools are implementing blended learning. Indeed, it’s quite likely that some of the greatest innovations are not even being measured, as they are happening behind closed doors, among teachers who are trying wholly new methods of instruction using the power of technology to reach students in new ways.

Related: Despite its high-tech profile, Summit charter network makes teachers, not computers, the heart of personalized learning

But a few organizations — including the Foundation for Excellence in Education, Evergreen Education Group and the Christensen Institute — have done our best to monitor the pace of change. For example, the Christensen Institute’s Blended Learning Universe (BLU) houses a growing online database of blended schools, with 324 school profiles featuring blended learning models across the country.

Those profiles represent only a fraction of the activity afoot. Indeed, entire states are seeing an amazing uptick in blended learning. For example, we conducted a survey last year, in partnership with The Learning Accelerator, of the 994 public district and charter schools in Ohio. Of the 211 respondents, 122, or 57%, indicated that they were implementing blended learning. And, contrary to some accounts, blended learning is occurring throughout our public education system, in districts and charter schools alike. In fact, some of the largest urban districts (such as D.C. Public Schools and Miami Dade) have been pursuing blended models for years.

Perhaps most importantly, blended learning is yielding promising results for students. In our recent publication Proof Points, we chronicled 12 school districts within which approximately 111 schools were experiencing the benefits of blended learning as measured both by improved graduation rates and increased student achievement. For example, in the Enlarged City School District of Middletown, N.Y., students in blended elementary school classrooms outperformed students in traditional classrooms by 18% in reading and 7% in math. The D.C. public school district redesigned 17 schools to incorporate blended learning, and those schools have since recorded extensive and well-studied student gains in math and reading on district-wide assessments and the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

As with most technological innovations, keeping up with change can be hard. Given the spread of blended learning, how can researchers and school systems continue to assess the state of blended learning to drive practice forward?

First, we need to appreciate that blended learning is not one thing, or a single intervention. Indeed, the variety of blended learning approaches emerging reflects a wide variety of delivery models and instructional choices — including how long students spend in online and face-to-face modalities, the software that best supports instruction, how teachers use online data to drive small group instruction. These can vary from school to school, depending on the circumstances they face and the students they serve.

Related: Blue-collar town leads Rhode Island’s tech-assisted learning revolution

The best research shaping the field, then, will not ask the blunt question, “Does blended learning work?” That is tantamount to asking: Do textbooks work? Do lectures work? Do small group interactions work? Of course these delivery methods—like blended learning—vary widely in their effectiveness depending on how they are implemented. Instead, we need to evaluate specific blended learning models relative to acute problems that individual school systems are trying to solve.

We also need to take a long view when it comes to the role that technology stands to play in education. For the first time in America’s decades-long commitment to public education, we have tools and instructional models that can break open the factory model of school—the one that most of us grew up in, in which teachers taught to a non-existent middle, and could never truly differentiate the individual needs of students. Scarce research dollars should not go toward using skewed sample sets and simplistic definitions that ignore the smart ways in which so many educators have successfully integrated technology into their classrooms. Instead, we should focus on research and evaluation that helps educators make informed decisions about how best to use technology to support bold new instructional models.

Julia Freeland Fisher is the director of education research at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

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