The United States urgently needs more nurses, and colleges are scaling up programs to meet that demand. 

But there’s a problem: While nursing education must prepare students to work with an increasingly diverse population of patients, the curriculum and the faculty are dominated by white women. How can colleges bridge that gap?

Universities are constantly looking for creative ways to support students’ mental health. One university is now offering a one-credit course designed to teach emotional regulation.

The ability to handle one's emotions is vital, says Amy Morgan, the creator of the course at The University of Maryland. This is especially true at a time when university counseling centers are stretched thin and off-campus therapy tends to be prohibitively expensive.

Many students attend community college with good intentions of transferring to a four-year institution. Few actually end up earning a bachelor’s degree. 

Researchers are now embarking on a two-year initiative to dig deeper into this dynamic, breaking down statistics by race and ethnicity to find practices that can help colleges improve their outcomes. Two leaders behind the project discuss what they hope to achieve in this interview.