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Substantive research indicates that 37 to 44% of college students report the death of someone important to them (i.e., family member or close friend) in the prior 2-year period (Cousins, Servaty-Seib, & Lockman, 2017; Cox, Dean, & Kowalski, 2015). Yet, few institutions in the United States offer bereavement leave policies for students that are parallel to their polices for employees. Students are generally required to approach individual faculty to request bereavement-related accommodations. We provide rationales for student-focused bereavement leave policies and offer details regarding the development, structure, and ongoing implementation of one such policy at a large Midwestern university.
RATIONALE
Experiencing the death of someone close often affects college students’ overall functioning and may hinder their ultimate success. Balk (2011) argued that grief interacts in dynamic and holistic ways with college students’ physical, interpersonal, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual development. As connected with Tinto’s (1993) model of retention, challenges appear clearest in the academic and social domains. Students who experience deaths report difficulty concentrating (Cupit, Servaty-Seib, Tedrick Parikh, Walker, & Martin, 2016) and display lower GPAs than their matched nongrieving peers during the semester of their death loss (Servaty-Seib & Hamilton, 2006b). Grieving students describe isolation, lack of support, and decreased belongingness (Servaty-Seib & Fajgenbaum, 2015) and are also at risk for leaving college at higher rates than matched nongrieving peers (Servaty-Seib & Hamilton, 2006a).
Only college students attending a small percentage of colleges and universities across the US are protected by policies that allow time away following a significant death loss. Such lack of policy seems surprising given that these protections (e.g., paid absence separate from other types of leave) are generally afforded to adult employees and K–12 children and adolescents. Using Google Search (June 2018; terms were student bereavement leave policy and student grief absence policy), we located 44 institutions with established bereavement leave policies for college students (contact authors for list). Most were in the Northeastern US (36%) and were institutions classified by Carnegie (http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu) as 4-year (89%), large (52%), public (75%), and primarily residential (48%; 25–45% of students live on campus).
Bereavement leave policies are advantageous. First, they communicate respect and compassion for students as adults with lives outside the institution and as individuals who experience difficult life events. Second, such...