Colleges Are Canceling Spring Break. In Its Place: ‘Wellness Days’

As colleges announce their spring-semester plans, a pattern has emerged: Spring break is out, and “wellness days” are in.

From a public-health standpoint, canceling spring break makes sense. The prospect that millions of young people will leave college towns and fan out across the globe — some of them meeting elsewhere to party in large groups — is clearly at odds with efforts to contain Covid-19.

But asking students — and their instructors — to slog through another pandemic semester with no break at all could be detrimental to mental health, not to mention learning.

Enter the “wellness day.” A growing number of colleges have announced plans to cancel class on a handful of days sprinkled throughout the spring semester. The trend seems to be putting wellness days in midweek, perhaps with the thought that creating a long weekend could encourage travel or drinking. Some colleges plan to offer wellness programming on the selected days; others will just give students a day off.

It’s an understandable and surely well-intended move. A few scattered days off may not be the same as a week off, or even a long weekend, but it’s better than nothing. A single, planned day off could offer needed respite — or simply be spent catching up on work or a backlog of chores.

Perhaps that explains why students’ response to the idea has varied. At the University of Pennsylvania, the Undergraduate Assembly passed a resolution asking the administration to add wellness days after it canceled spring break, The Daily Pennsylvanian, its student paper, has reported.

But other colleges that have added the days have drawn student pushback. “That the university thinks a mere two days off in the middle of the week are enough to help students cope with an increasingly stressful semester only shows that administrators are out of touch with the needs of their students,” one student wrote in an op-ed column for The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, the student paper at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Students are completing what “felt like the longest semester ever,” Ana Pietrewicz, a junior journalism and political-science major who wrote the UMass op-ed, said in an interview. At home, Pietrewicz said, she has additional responsibilities that make it harder to focus on her courses than when she’s on campus. Courses and college life have been upended. And then there’s the pandemic itself. “There’s so much going on in the world right now,” Pietrewicz said. “Having those breaks is important; it’s more important than ever.”

What Makes a Break Work

While wellness days have been presented as a replacement for spring break, no one seems to be suggesting that they’re its equivalent. Wellness days are a concession, a nod to the fact that students haven’t been getting their usual midsemester breaks, and that they’re suffering for it.

But why do students need a break, anyhow? And are wellness days able to provide one?

As a general rule, breaks help people regroup. “We use them to catch up on work,” said Sarah Rose Cavanagh, an associate professor of psychology at Assumption University, in Massachusetts, who is working on a book about student mental health. “We use them to catch up on some assignments; we use them to catch up on things we’ve been neglecting while we didn’t have breaks, whether that be other life responsibilities — or email.”

But work is not the only thing people catch up on during a break. There’s also sleep, exercise, and social connection, said Cavanagh, who is also interim director of the university’s D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence. All of those activities, she added, support mental health.

Breaks matter for learning, too: Studies suggest that taking them can improve attention and performance.

One reason the usual breaks in the academic calendar matter is that “we’re used to them,” Cavanagh said. “If we never had them to start with, we would pace ourselves differently, both in terms of the workload and in terms of figuring out how to build in our own breaks.” That’s true of both students and professors, she said.

If students need breaks under normal circumstances, it stands to reason they especially need them now. College life has grown unfamiliar and unpredictable on top of however the pandemic is affecting students personally. Many of the healthy ways colleges encourage students to manage stress and feel connected on campus — join a student group! attend a big event! — are hard to square with Covid-19 precautions, while the destructive ways people decompress, like relying on alcohol, are just as available.

Cavanagh, for one, is wary of how some colleges have avoided giving students long weekends. Colleges may think they’re making it less likely students will party, she said. But getting less of a break will only add to their stress, and many of them will drink to cope. “You’re making things potentially worse, instead of better, in terms of students’ choices with regard to stress reduction,” she said.

One way a single day off might be more restorative, Cavanagh said, is if it comes as a surprise. Some colleges give such days off as a matter of course; Davidson College did so this semester, giving students a day off after canceling fall break. It seemed to go over well.

But an unannounced break means students can’t plan to travel — or do much of anything else. Instead, Cavanagh said, “everything’s canceled” — like a snow day. (Some colleges have also gotten rid of those, figuring that students can simply Zoom into class, should bad weather arise.)

Campus Context

Wellness days are a good idea in concept, said Will Meek, global director of mental health and wellness at the Minerva Schools at KGI, an undergraduate program. As is the case for most programs, success comes down to how they’re designed and rolled out, said Meek, a former director of counseling and psychological services at Brown University.

That requires understanding the culture — and subcultures — of a campus community, Meek said. “Does our campus celebrate big,” he said, “and we all put our work down and come together around some big events,” like how game days work at a big football school? “There’s other places where it’s sort of like, we’re going to have a break so you can catch up, because we know this is a crucial part of the semester.” A well-designed break, he said, matches the campus culture.

Colleges should also be mindful that giving students and faculty members a break could mean creating more work for the staff, Meek added, especially if additional programming will be offered.

Any programming, Meek said, should account for the fact that not all students will need the same thing from a break. Meek uses a model that considers key components of mental health, including how well people handle stress and emotions, their relatedness with others, and their comfort with who they are.

Ideally, a college would give students a similar framework for thinking about different aspects of mental health, allow them to decide what would be most restorative for them, and support different ways to meet those varied needs. So a student who’s behind on coursework could use the day to catch up, Meek said. One who’s focused on study at the expense of seeing friends or sleeping could socialize — or just take a nap.

A college, then, could provide socially distanced opportunities for students to relax or exercise, Meek said, and make them all optional.

But there’s no substitute for listening to students. Ultimately, Meek said, figuring out “what are students asking for, what do they need, and being responsive as an institution to that is going to have a lot bigger chance of success.”