Everyone is worried about students’ mental health. What can colleges actually do to help?
During a Friday session at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting, three researchers offered lessons learned from new research focused on eight colleges. Their core message was that administrators should start small, experiment with interventions, frequently assess how students feel about the interventions, and change course as needed.
Students don’t view their campus experience as a collection of offices and departments, like administrators often do, said Jennifer Maltby, director of data, analytics, and planning at the Rochester Institute of Technology. That should inform colleges’ approach to troubleshooting students’ mental-health challenges, Maltby said.
Improving student mental health is as complex as raising a child, said Allison Smith, director of health strategy and outcomes at New York University, and both tasks require constant adaptation to fit shifting needs.
Two other key findings were that colleges should pinpoint which student demographic groups are disproportionately failing to thrive, and that institutions should tailor their goals to improve the experiences of specific student populations, rather than attempting to create a blanket solution that will work for every student.
“For a trans student, that means being called the right name and right pronouns in class,” Smith said. “For a student of faith, that means being able to observe their religious holidays without getting penalized.”
Researchers also discovered that having a “core team” of four to eight individuals working to change an institution’s systems was an ideal management structure.
It’s impossible for one administrator, such as a vice president for student well-being, to reach every student and make the necessary changes that can improve students’ mental health, Smith said.
Inside the Research
The research followed Case Western Reserve University, New York University, Cornell University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, Texas A&M University, Stanford University, the University at Albany in the State University of New York system, and the University of California at Los Angeles.
The study examined whether a concept known as “Triple Aim” — the idea that, simultaneously, a population can become healthier, health-care costs can decrease, and the quality of care can improve — could apply to student well-being. Smith is a co-founder of the Action Network for Equitable Wellbeing, a new collaborative of organizations dedicated to improving students’ mental health that aims to expand the effort to more colleges.
The colleges involved in the study frequently collected data through a survey called the Wellbeing Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings, allowing researchers to get a clear picture of what was working.
Maltby said one intervention at RIT focused on professors and students. Three professors were encouraged to include statements on their syllabi saying they cared about mental health and knew college was challenging.
Feedback from students was initially positive, and the initiative grew. But when the statement was included in the syllabi of 30 professors, the results changed. Students didn’t always feel that professors who included the statement on their syllabus acted in a way that showed they genuinely cared, ultimately causing more harm for students than good. Maltby’s team later discovered that marginalized students were disproportionately experiencing this harm.
“We were able to really pull back and say we’re not going to try and implement this statement universitywide because we understand that there are potential impacts on that for our students that are going to be negative,” Maltby said.
While it might seem resource-intensive to talk individually with students to get a better understanding of their lives and to collect data so frequently, Maltby believes the study’s approach could work for a range of colleges.
“Oftentimes folks will say it’s not possible or we can’t do it that way, and I think one of the things we’ve learned, especially through Covid, is that we can do lots of things that we previously thought were impossible when we have the will and interest to do that.” Maltby said.
