Exposure to suicide attempts within one’s social network = subsequent suicide attempts

 Full report

Also see: https://www.nber.org/papers/w35603?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntwg14

The mental health of adolescents and young adults has been described as a public health crisis, with escalating rates of depression and anxiety¹ and high rates of suicide thoughts and behaviors.² Research on suicide has documented contagion effects associating exposure to suicide thoughts and behaviors in one’s social network with subsequent suicidal ideation and attempts.³ These effects have been explained using models including media copycat effects,⁴ social learning,⁵ and assortative relating⁶ and have been supported by both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies.^7,8

A systematic review examined research on exposure to suicide and subsequent suicidal behavior, with the overall evidence suggesting elevated risk among exposed individuals, although findings varied across study designs and outcomes.⁹ However, findings have not always been consistent regarding whether exposure is mainly associated with the emergence of suicidal thoughts, with the transition from thoughts to behaviors, or both. For example, Bearman and Moody¹⁰ found that exposure to friends’ suicide attempts was associated with suicidal ideation among adolescents, whereas evidence regarding progression to suicide attempts has been less consistent. Studies have also varied considerably in design, developmental period examined, exposure measurement, and the extent to which they accounted for individual mental health risk factors and broader social contexts.¹¹ Accordingly, reviews have emphasized the need for longitudinal studies that distinguish between suicidal ideation and suicide attempt outcomes and examine how social network characteristics shape risk over time.⁹

Suicide prevention practices, especially in communities of young people, often mobilize strategies to minimize contagion.¹² However, contagion effects are not distributed equally across young people. Communities facing higher levels of risky social determinants of health and young people identifying with groups that experience disproportionate adversities, including discrimination, also have greater contagion rates.¹³ Although prior studies have documented associations between exposure and suicidality,^9,11 fewer have examined whether exposure predicts suicide attempt onset independent of depressive symptoms or whether exposure is associated with changes in mental health over time. In addition, much of the suicide contagion literature predates contemporary digital social environments or does not account for online social engagement,^4,14 despite the increasingly central role of digital networks in adolescents’ and young adults’ social lives. Furthermore, adolescence and young adulthood are developmental periods characterized by heightened sensitivity to peer influence,¹⁵ making social network exposures particularly relevant for understanding suicide risk.

This longitudinal cohort study examined whether exposure to suicide attempts in respondents’ social networks was prospectively associated with suicide attempt onset, suicidal ideation onset, and depressive symptoms across 2 waves of follow-up. 

Result of study: Exposure to suicide attempts within one’s social network was associated with subsequent suicide attempt onset and higher depressive symptoms over time.

State social media laws don’t always align with evidence-based strategies to support youth mental health

From TikTok bans and age verification requirements to media literacy lessons in schools, U.S. states are exploring a wide range of strategies to protect young people online. 

The flurry of legislation reflects growing concern about social media's role in youth mental health, as rates of depression and anxiety have increased in recent years. But policy approaches have varied considerably, and the scientific evidence backing their effectiveness is mixed. 

To better understand how states are responding, a research team led by social work researcher Melissa Villodas of George Mason University’s College of Public Health analyzed 16 enacted laws across 10 states. The study, published in The Journal of Policy Practice and Research, offers one of the first frameworks for organizing and assessing the growing patchwork of state social media laws.  

Researchers found the policies generally fell into three broad categories: 

1. Limiting access through measures like parental consent requirements, age verification, internet restrictions in school, and, in one case in Montana, an attempted ban on TikTok. This was by far the most common approach, despite relatively limited evidence that many of these measures improve mental health for young people. 
2. Reducing harmful exposure by restricting targeted advertising to minors, limiting potentially addictive platform features, and expanding parental controls. Existing research offers somewhat stronger, though still mixed, support for these approaches. 
3. Building media literacy by teaching students about topics such as misinformation, cyberbullying, online safety, and social media's effects on mental health. This was the least common approach, even though existing evidence suggests it may be a promising strategy, particularly when it addresses both the risks and benefits of social media use. 

Why does this matter? 

"Most research on this topic has focused directly on how social media affects young people's mental health," said Villodas, associate professor in the Department of Social Work and the study's lead author. "We wanted to understand what state governments are actually doing in response, whether those approaches are supported by existing evidence, and where additional research is needed.” She also emphasized the study’s “person-in-environment” perspective, a fundamental approach in social work that considers how broader forces, including public policy, can influence a young person’s experiences and mental health. 

The study uncovered one glaring disconnect: the policy approach used most often, limiting young people's access, had the least supporting evidence of its effectiveness. Meanwhile, media literacy training, included in just one enacted law in Florida, appeared to have some of the strongest evidence behind it. 

"Many states have focused on measures like parental consent and age verification, but the evidence for those strategies is still limited," Villodas said. "Media literacy has received much less attention, even though it may be one of the more promising approaches when it teaches young people about both the risks and the benefits of social media." 

The study captures the policy landscape through November 2024, but Villodas said its findings are designed to help policymakers evaluate future proposals as the evidence continues to evolve. 

In addition to Villodas, the study was coauthored by Michael Wheeler and Natalia Acevedo, both recent graduates of George Mason’s Master of Social Work program; Fadi Hamati of Columbia Cornell Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian; and Ishita Kapur of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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Journal

Journal of Policy Practice and Research

DOI

10.1007/s42972-026-00155-5 

Today more than ever, higher income students receive more merit-based aid

Also see Financial aid for students without financial need: How widespread is it?

THE SHIFTING ROLE OF INSTITUTIONAL AID: WHAT ABOUT NEED? 

 Full report

The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), in partnership with the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), identified the financial aid application process as a barrier to more equitable college access (NACAC & NASFAA, 2022). The maximum Pell Grant in 2025-26 covered just over a quarter of the average total cost of attendance at public four-year institutions nationally and while increasing the Pell Grant is important, it is time to shift the conversation to examine how institutions distribute financial aid. Since Donald Heller’s seminal work on the shift from need to merit-based aid over 20 years ago (Heller, 2006), the research on the distribution of institutional aid has been sparse. 

Recent threats to federal financial aid programs and cuts to research funding have left the fate of lowincome students and the institutions that serve them in the balance (Knox, 2025). This follows the dismantling of race-conscious admission policies by the U.S. Supreme Court in the cases of Students for Fair Admission, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina1, as well as the COVID pandemic, which also exacerbated the barriers for underserved, underrepresented students (e.g., students of color and those who are low-income and first-generation) from enrolling in college and persisting through to a degree. 

Many public institutions have shifted toward merit-based aid over the last 20 years as part of their strategic efforts to attract academically competitive students, increase enrollments, and, in some cases, attract out-of-state students who pay higher tuition rates (Knox, 2023). And many selective colleges, as part of their enrollment management strategies, have historically recruited the highest achieving students who often come from affluent families. The practice known as “financial aid leveraging” places a premium on student scores that would boost an institution’s ranking rather than focusing on student financial need, even favoring students “…who otherwise can pay full freight and help boost the institution’s bottom line” (Burd, 2024). 

This research provides a much-needed update to the literature, examining the distribution of institutional need and merit-based grants by income and race/ ethnicity, in both public and private institutions. We also analyze the change in institutional aid patterns over time, and the remaining need left for families to cover through loans and work earnings. In addition to highlighting the needs of students, this research demonstrates the importance of collecting and using national data to track financial and enrollment trends of students and institutions.

 Key Findings 

Using the most recent National Postsecondary Student Aid Study2 (NPSAS:20) data, we find that: 

1. Higher income students receive more merit-based aid. 

• Merit-based grant awards are largest for the highest income students at both public and private four-year institutions. • The highest income students are also the most likely to receive merit-based aid at public institutions. 

2. Higher income students receive need-based aid. 

• At private institutions, one-quarter of the highest income students receive need-based grants, indicating that some private colleges and universities use a very expansive definition of financial need, one that goes well beyond the definition used for federal Pell Grants and most state need-based grants. In addition, the median need-based grant awards are roughly the same amount for both the lowest and highest income quartiles. 

3. White students receive the most merit-based aid.

 • Looking at race and ethnicity, White students are more likely than other groups to receive merit-based grants in both sectors, and Black and Latino students are the least likely to receive merit-based grants at public institutions. 

4. Merit-based grants have increased significantly more than need-based grants. 

• Over the last 20 years, both public and private four-year institutions saw increases in the proportion of students receiving institutional grants, with the exception of need-based grants at private institutions.

• Students also saw increases in the size of median grant awards, even after controlling for inflation — particularly among merit-based grants at private institutions. 

5. The lowest income students have the highest unmet need. 

• Taking into account student budgets (total cost of attendance including tuition and fees, room and board, books and supplies, and other expenses), grants from all sources, and expected family contribution (EFC), students from families in the highest income quartile have little to no unmet need in both sectors, while those in the bottom half of the income distribution have the highest remaining need. 

• The unmet need distribution is particularly noteworthy when considering how grants are distributed. Families in the lowest income quartile have an EFC of 0, meaning they must fill in the remaining gap with loans or work earnings. 

• Given the high levels of unmet need identified among the lowest income quartiles, it is unclear how these students are able to pay for the remainder of their budgets. Even after the median loan amount, work earnings, family contributions and grants are taken into account, low-income students at private fouryear institutions still fall short of paying for college and associated expenses. 

This analysis focuses primarily on dependent, full-time students attending public and private non-profit four-year institutions, as these students are most likely to receive institutional aid. A separate analysis of independent, part-time students at community colleges shows a similar pattern of high-income and White students having the lowest unmet need. Unfortunately, with shrinking federal support, pressure may be on institutions to seek cost savings through reduced institutional aid expenditures, or to use financial aid more as an enrollment management tool than a college access lever for the neediest students. Cross-campus dialogue is needed to further explore how financial aid can be leveraged in the current environment to increase college access and economic mobility. 

The teacher pay penalty remained high in 2025

 

Teachers made 25.2% less than similarly educated professionals

Teachers earned 25.2% less than comparable college graduates in other professions in 2025, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

The relative teacher pay penalty—which is adjusted for education, experience, and demographic characteristics—was a slight improvement from 2024’s record high of 26.9%, but still more than four times the 6.1% penalty recorded in 1996. In other words, teachers earned on average 74.8 cents on the dollar in 2025 compared with other college graduates—much less than the relative 93.9 cents on the dollar that teachers earned in 1996. When broken down by gender, the relative teacher pay penalty was 34.5% for men and 20.0% for women.

Overall, simple inflation-adjusted weekly wages for public school teachers fell 6.2% over the last three decades, while wages for other college graduates rose 28.8% over the same period. 

Teachers were paid less than other college graduates in every state, with relative teacher pay gaps ranging from 10.4% in Rhode Island to 40.7% in Colorado. The teacher pay penalty was at least 25% in 25 states.

While teachers typically receive better benefits packages than other professionals, this only partially offsets the growing wage penalty that teachers face. After accounting for the difference in benefits, teachers’ total compensation penalty was 14.5% in 2025. 

As the report explains, providing teachers with competitive pay is necessary to retain and attract qualified workers. While there are many important factors impacting teacher retention and recruitment, pay consistently lands near the top of any list. 

Reversing these trends will require targeted, sustained investment in public education at the local, state, and federal levels. It will also require stronger support for public-sector collective bargaining, which has long been a driver of better pay and job quality for teachers.

“The decades-long teacher pay penalty has taken a heavy toll on public education. Yet, policymakers have failed to make the needed investments to reverse course. That failure is especially troubling in a country as wealthy as the United States, with more than enough resources for its public schools to be the envy of the world,” said report author Sylvia Allegretto, who is a senior economist at CEPR and research associate at EPI.

The Meritocratic Consensus and Stratification in Higher Education

 American colleges and universities are highly stratified by pre-college academic achievement, family background, and institutional resources. This study involves the meritocratic consensus in American higher education: colleges that high-testing students (who are generally also from high-income families) attend spend dramatically more on instruction than do those that enroll lower-testing students. 

Stratification by test scores has been largely stable since the 1960s, but the stratification of instructional resources has risen sharply since 1970 at both private and public institutions. Non-academic admissions criteria like athletics, legacy, and affirmative action are second-order in determining the allocation of students to universities. 

Potential economic justifications for the positive association of instructional expenditures with student prior achievement—q-complementarity between achievement and resources, convex social returns to high human capital, and incentives to invest in learning prior to college—have little empirical support. 

Resource stratification across universities has not increased in the past decade, largely due to increased public funding of universities that enroll lower-testing students through financial aid programs like California's CalGrant, but stratification within institutions is now rising swiftly.

Measuring the Welfare Gains from Cardinal-Preference Mechanisms in School Choice

 Ordinal mechanisms use rankings but not preference intensities. Cardinal mechanisms also elicit school utilities, allowing them to use students’ preferences over assignment lotteries. This study compares probabilistic serial with four cardinal mechanisms that maximize the same welfare objective under successively stronger restrictions: capacity-only, ε-envy-free, envy-free, and a welfare-maximizing cardinal-preference pseudomarket. 

Because the feasible sets are nested, maximum welfare weakly falls as the restrictions tighten from capacity alone to approximate no-envy, exact no-envy, and equal budgets with common prices. We establish positive and negative results on large-market truthtelling. All 44 theorem parts in the paper are machine-checked in the Lean 4 proof assistant. 

We develop methods for computing cardinal-preference pseudomarket equilibria for Seattle’s 898 students and 11 schools. 

Using set-identified cardinal preferences from Seattle high-school choice data, we estimate that, under exact capacity, capacity-only raises mean welfare over probabilistic serial by 0.053, equivalent to shifting 5.3 percentage points of assignment probability from the average student’s worst school to the top school. Exact envy-freeness retains 79% of this gain; best-found pseudomarket equilibria yield a mean gain of 0.002. 

The estimates show both the value of cardinal information and the welfare cost of pseudomarket fairness restrictions.

Isolation drives lasting impact of cyberbullying on teens

 Teenagers who are subjected to online bullying are at greater risk of later emotional and behavioural difficulties, research suggests.

Young people who experienced cyberbullying were more likely to develop emotional and behavioural problems over the following six months if the experience led to feelings of loneliness and difficulties managing their emotions, a study shows.

The findings highlight the importance of supporting young people’s mental health after cyberbullying by helping them feel less isolated and supporting their emotional wellbeing.

The University of Edinburgh study is among the first to systematically examine the mechanisms linking online bullying and teenage mental health.

Around two-thirds of children worldwide report an increase in cyberbullying, with one in two saying they don’t know how to get the right support.

Researchers surveyed 501 adolescents to test whether more severe cyberbullying was associated with later greater emotional and conduct problems, and if so why.

They examined the results to investigate which emotional responses had the most influence on linking online bullying with later emotional consequences.

The team examined data from two senior Chinese high schools. China is particularly important as an example because of a high prevalence of cyberbullying, the researchers say.

The researchers analysed questionnaires which surveyed the adolescents aged 15 to 18 years about their online experiences, the research used the European Cyberbullying Intervention Project Questionnaire.

The surveys – which were repeated after six months – also measured loneliness, emotion regulation difficulties, self-esteem and emotional and conduct problems.

Findings showed that loneliness and difficulties in managing emotions appeared to have more influence than self-esteem issues in explaining why teenagers who experience online bullying were more likely to report later emotional and behavioural difficulties.

Problem with regulating emotions was a significant pathway to other emotional issues such as anxiety, while not being able to control impulses had a significant effect on the risk of conduct problems. 

This was the case even when other factors such as age and gender were taken into account.

Yixuan Li, PhD candidate, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Health in Social Science, who led the study, said: “Cyberbullying victimisation can have serious consequences for young people’s mental health, but our findings suggest that what happens afterwards also matters. Adolescents subjected to cyberbullying may feel increasingly lonely and may struggle to manage difficult emotions, which may help explain why some go on to experience emotional and behavioural difficulties. The clear message is that supporting young people after cyberbullying is important.”

The study builds on the team’s previous research which brought together evidence from 125 studies involving more than 260,000 participants from 33 countries.

The findings identified factors which influence the lasting impact of cyberbullying on teenagers’ mental health.

The current study identifies which of those pathways appear to play the most important role in linking cyberbullying with later emotional and behavioural difficulties.

The findings provide a more nuanced understanding of where prevention and intervention efforts may be most effective, the researchers say.

The study is published in the Journal of Affective Disorders (link to study: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2026.122151)