Category: Mental Health

For more than a decade, colleges and universities have been relying on the Healthy Minds Study to help them understand the mental health of their students and those at other schools throughout the country. Indeed, this annual indicator and benchmark has become the bellwether for the state of college student mental health, capturing the dramatic increase in the prevalence of mental health issues among college students beginning around 2014.   

But as important as this survey data continues to be, the Healthy Minds Network’s principal investigators, Drs. Sarah Lipson and Daniel Eisenberg, stress that surveillance is only the start of a larger public health approach to helping every student on campus thrive. This mindset has led to strong partnerships with institutions and non-profits working to understand how mental health data can be interpreted and applied, particularly when it comes to policy changes and institutional investments.  

The latest example of this research-to-practice approach is a new report by the Healthy Minds Network, UNCF (United Negro College Fund), and the Steve Fund on the mental health and wellbeing of students at Historically Black Colleges and Univeristities (HBCUs) and Predominently Black Institutions (PBIs). Released earlier this month, the report, “Flourishing: Bolstering the Mental Health of Students at HBCUs and PBIs,” ties Black students at HBCUs to better mental health outcomes than both Black students at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and a national sample of students of all races. 

Akilah Patterson, the study’s project manager and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, said she was unsurprised by the results. Citing the strong sense of community HBCUs foster as a reason for students’ apparent wellbeing, she said, “nothing can really replace that.”

The concept and funding for the study came from UNCF, a major advocate and donor to HBCUs and their students. It partnered with the Healthy Minds Network to lead data collection and assessment, while the Steve Fund, a nonprofit promoting mental health among young people of color, contributed expertise.

Between spring and fall 2023, more than 2,500 students from 18 different HBCUs responded to a tailored version of the Healthy Minds Study. They answered questions from the standard Healthy Minds Study, along with a “Black College Mental Health Module,” added to provide insight into the Black college student experience.

The results suggest relatively better wellbeing among HBCU students across a number of scales. HBCU students report to be flourishing more (45% compared to 38% of Black students at PWIs and 36% of students nationally) and experiencing more campus belonging (83% compared to 72% of Black students at PWIs and 73% of students nationally).

The results suggest relatively better wellbeing among HBCU students across a number of scales.

While loneliness is endemic among students everywhere, significantly fewer students at HBCUs (56%) are experiencing “high loneliness” than Black students at PWIs (58%). Students at HBCUs are also less likely to keep negative feelings to themselves (74%) than Black students at PWIs (86%) or students nationally (83%).

Patterson said the wellbeing of HBCU students is an understudied area. “It’s not that it hasn’t been studied at all,” she explained, “but it hadn’t been studied in this way, on such a large scale, and also using some of the measures we chose to use.” 

In addition to insight into how HBCU students are already thriving, Patterson’s study suggests their institutions have room to improve support. Financial anxiety, for example, is the most reported stress factor among students at HBCUs. Twenty-three percent of HBCU students, compared to 18% of students nationally, say their financial situation is “always stressful”—an indicator correlated with greater risk of having one or more mental health problems.

Students’ financial struggles can be difficult for their institutions to tackle, Patterson said. But she hopes research like hers, and other projects going forward, encourage the kind of investment in HBCUs that, in turn, provides relief for the students. Empirically, she added, she believes the research “speaks for itself.” 

“We’ve been doing the work. HBCUs have been very committed for decades to the success and excellence of their students, and that’s not going to change.”

The Flourishing Factor

The spirit of this latest report from the Health Minds Network reflects an evolution of sorts for the data leader, along with many of its peers in the mental health research community. Their stronger focus on “flourishing” allows for greater examination of the many determinants that comprise mental health, such as financial wellbeing. 

In its 2023-2024 report, the Healthy Minds Network made headlines with news of slight improvements in student mental health, which had been trending negatively for several years. Lipson was particularly inspired by the 6% increase in student flourishing for several reasons, including the fact it is an outcome colleges mayhave some level of control over. 

“The web of causation for flourishing is much wider and often within an institution’s control,” she said. “When we think about what goes into flourishing—a sense of belonging, decreases in isolation, maximizing our built environment—there are levers here that institutions can pull, maybe not all of them, but more so than depression or anxiety.”

Flourishing has many definitions but is most often associated with healthy growth in a variety of domains. So anyone can flourish, with or without a mental health diagnosis. Additionally, while anxiety and depression are still alarmingly prevalent, not all students will experience either. From a public health perspective, flourishing is an outcome that is relevant to the entire population.  

Lipson said what is important about this measure, and indeed all of this research, is it helps administrators understand where to spend time and money based on what the evidence suggests is the best investment. To this end, the Healthy Minds Network has launched the creation of a best practices repository. While still a work in progress, the repository will provide that advice for a number of campus interventions.  

What is important about this research is it helps administrators understand where to spend time and money based on what the evidence suggests is the best investment. 

“What we should be investing in from a population, public health approach is a really difficult question given what little data currently exists,” Lipson said. “With the data repository, you can go to a publicly available resource and consider, ‘What are my options? What does the evidence look like? What schools have implemented this successfully, and who could I talk to there?’”

At noon three days a week, a room overlooking the pond at the University of Virginia falls into quiet meditation while the rest of campus churns with mid-day activity. Some students sit, some lay on the floor. A facilitator leads with guided thoughts and modes of breathing, but you’re welcome to do your own thing. After about 20 minutes, everyone is back on their way to lunch and afternoon classes.

“It’s very accessible to all kinds of people. It’s a nice break in the day, and it’s powerful for the people who have discovered it so far,” says Dearing Fife, a sophomore who organizes the sessions at the Contemplative Commons.

Dearing is a student advisor at the Commons, a new soaring glass and fieldstone building that is home to the Contemplative Sciences Center (CSC). For more than 12 years, the CSC had been operating from UVA’s religion department with multidisciplinary research, experiential learning, and mindfulness initiatives. The construction of the Commons represents more than an impressive new building to house a department and some activities. It is headquarters for the interdisciplinary face of wellbeing on campus—from grounding activities like yoga and meditation to scholarship on the many intersections of contemplation and nature, art, and technology.

The construction of the new Commons makes tangible President Ryan’s desire for UVA to be a top school for holistic student life while pushing boundaries on what higher education can look like in terms of mental health promotion. For many years, UVA had been the administrative backbone of the Flourishing Academic Network (FAN), an inter-institutional collaboration aimed at promoting student flourishing through higher education.

A Contemplative Commons

On the western edge of campus, the new 57,000-square-foot building sits beside the serene 11-acre pond and watershed area known as The Dell. Its U-shape wraps around a Ginkgo tree-lined courtyard, and connects to central campus via a pedestrian bridge over Emmet Street inspired by the High Line in New York, with benches and plantings. It’s hard to imagine a location better suited for a center dedicated to research, teaching, and outreach for contemplative experience.

“Our building is designed around the three themes of nature, art, and technology, and all three combine together to create contemplative opportunities for individuals,” says Kelly Crace, Executive Director of the Contemplative Sciences Center. “It’s intentionally multidisciplinary, creating wonderful spaces where students just love to come and study, whether they want to come into our art galleries, or come into our Conservatorium and experience light and sound in a variety of ways, or connect with nature through our biophilic design.”

The Commons houses, and reflects, work being done at UVA’s Contemplative Sciences Center. The facility’s purpose is to support student flourishing through a host of indoor-outdoor spaces, academic classrooms, immersive learning and events. It will soon include art installations and flexible studios that can be configured as classrooms, research labs, or even yoga studios.

Technology plays an interesting role in both design and practice in the Commons, used both to enhance mindfulness experiences and to create intentional tech-free spaces for deeper reflection. The Conservatory is an immersive room with floor to ceiling windows, sounds and light panels, with state-of-the-art audio to mimic natural soundscapes—think ocean waves, rainforests, waterfalls, wind, and buzzing bees. Other areas at the Commons are tech-free zones, encouraging students to disconnect altogether.

Innovative Classrooms, both labs and studios, are designed as multi-modal spaces that allow instructors to change the room setup based on the session’s needs. Classes can alternate between traditional seating, or more free-form setup using yoga mats or meditation cushions. Some rooms feature sprung floors, ideal for movement-based practices like Tai Chi, or facilities conducive to a Japanese tea ceremony. Others serve as academic classes that faculty members would prefer to hold in something other than a traditional classroom building.

“There’s one class that meets in the Commons, for example, on medical Spanish. This professor has her own deep contemplative practice, and she incorporates it into every class that she leads,” says Connie Kresge, chief of staff of the CSC. “She’s not just bringing in somebody who’s pre-med to learn a few vocabulary words. She is saying, ‘Okay, you are going to be the front line of working with humans. How do you imbue your practice with understanding of this population and a contemplative, compassionate approach?’ And so they also get the benefit of a setting like the Commons.”

Research and Practice

In a world increasingly defined by speed, competition, and information overload, the CSC represents a shift in higher education. Housed within UVA’s Provost’s Office, CSC benefits from strong institutional support, ensuring its programs are not peripheral but central to the university’s academic mission. As Michael Sheehy, CSC’s Director of Research, points out, UVA’s investment in contemplative education is unique among public universities, positioning it as a leader..

With its three-pronged mission, CSC is reshaping how students, faculty, and the broader academic community engage with education, wellbeing, and leadership. Work and programming at the Contemplative Sciences Center is organized around three pillars: Research, focus on advancing contemplative studies through scholarship; University Life, integrating mindfulness into students’ days; and Systems Change, expanding contemplative education globally through leadership and K-12 initiatives.

At the heart of CSC’s work is a research lab known as CIRCL, which stands for Contemplative Innovation, Research, and Collaboration Lab. There, scholars study many aspects of the ways meditation, nature, and technology shape our well-being from a collaborative, cross-disciplinary perspective.

One of the current projects examines how different environments impact contemplative experiences, explains Sheehy. As part of the methodology, participants will be studied meditating in five different settings, and researchers then track brain activity, heart rate, and emotional responses. “If you meditate in a garden, does it feel different than if you meditate in a featureless white room?” he  asks. “What happens in your brain and body when you practice mindfulness in nature?” Sheehy is also editor of the Journal of Contemplative Studies and also Contemplative Currents, which  are uniquely poised to cover both peer-reviewed academic studies and open public scholarship.

Research, academics, and collaborations go well beyond the study of nature and meditation. CSC is diving into diverse studies such as virtual reality experiences, lucid dreaming research, and exploration of leadership and public policy.

“We’re having professors coming in from our Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy to talk about policy and leadership from a contemplative perspective, professors from religion to come talk about Buddhism, and we’re exploring collaborative work of how we can do things with the school of data science,” says Crace. “What’s really cool is getting a sense of the breadth and diversity that’s possible. People might initially think, Oh, so this is where you do yoga, or this is where you do mindfulness, that type of thing. Yes, and we’re so much more than that. Being able to bring in that diversity of collaboration, I think, is really important.”

University life          

But the CSC isn’t just about research—it’s about making curiosity and mindfulness part of daily student routines to support an overall culture of thriving. The CSC hosts monthly salons, where students and faculty can discuss contemplative topics with leading interdisciplinary scholars.  A Citizen Leaders Fellowship offers students a year-long leadership opportunity to gain skills needed to flourish during their time at UVA and after graduation.

Beyond the lab and classroom, the CSC and Commons are uniquely poised to support student flourishing with a wide range of campus programming—beginning with a celebratory weekend of concerts, food and activities in April to mark the grand opening of the Commons. Going forward, a weekly calendar of programming and well-being initiatives include regular yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, reflective writing, and spaces to cultivate mindfulness and resilience.

It’s a bold push against what Crace calls the “stress-glorification culture” of modern academia.

People ask, Why would a university have a building for contemplation? They don’t ask, Why do you have a building for the arts, and a building for sports?

 “’I stayed up two nights. Well, I stayed up three.’ It’s this constant one upping, where we’re trying to find distinction through how hard I’m working,” he says. “It’s not only how hard I’m working, but it’s important for you to know how hard I’m working, and it just creates a very toxic culture that really disrupts flourishing. We want to be a disruption to that stress culture.”

Systems Change

Flourishing is a key word in the overall picture of contemplative sciences and its place in a larger ecosystem of institutions helping young adults maturing in a way that best supports their wellness and full potential. Appropriately enough, the Flourishing Academic Network (FAN) grew out of key individuals at UVA committed to flourishing, including David Germano, a religious historian at the University of Virginia and Crace’s predecessor as former director of CSC, and alumni Jeffrey Walker, a finance executive, philanthropist, and member of the board.

“What we’re trying to do with FAN is taking a system orientation and looking at how we can prepare students for the real world, and allow them to succeed in higher ed,” says Walker. “It means giving them tools when they arrive, and educating them about what kind of tools there are out there, working on things like social emotional learning models, meditation, yoga, body movement, breath practices, peer to peer support, and also managing ego and collaborative models, and looking at leadership models.”

For real systemic change, the third pillar of the CSC reaches beyond the campus into the wider scope of academia with FAN, and reaching K-12 classrooms and international leadership programs.

 “The systems change work can be thought of as expanding what we do reaching outward,” says Kresge. One major initiative is the Compassionate Schools Project, a groundbreaking K-12 mindfulness curriculum leading new practices in Louisville, Kentucky. Another is the Dalai Lama Fellows Program, which trains young leaders around the world in mindfulness-based social change. In 2024, CSC took 17 Fellows to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

CSC is also working on a national initiative to integrate contemplative education into higher education policy. By partnering with education policymakers and university administrators, CSC hopes to make contemplative practices a core part of the American educational experience—and something both more easily understood and more widely undertaken.

“People ask, Why would a university have a building for contemplation? They don’t ask, Why do you have a building for the arts, and a building for sports? No one stops and says, what do you mean by arts?” says Kresge.. “We don’t have that barrier in our colloquial understand of the words arts and sports, but we do in our conversation of what contemplation is.”

Leaders like Kresge hope there would be a greater understanding of mindfulness and meditation as an ongoing tool and practice—like exercise—and not a one-time thing that can be taught in a seminar and crossed off a list.

Sheehy learned meditation from his grandmother when he was about 10 years old, and it made a lasting impression. “I’ve had the chance to live most of my life with access to knowledge about contemplative practices, because I’ve had experiential access to as a constant reference point,” he says. “That’s why I think the research we do is important, because we’re showing people how these practices wok, how powerful and empowering they can be, and give them agency over transforming their lives.”

Dearing Fife also had access to these practices at an early age, and the addition of the Contemplative Commons at UVA cements her belief she could not have found a better place for herself to attend school. A self-described “anxious kid,” she discovered meditation in middle school, and it’s been a core part of her life ever since. “Like brushing my teeth,” she says. “A non-negotiable.” She grew up knowing that learning to handle it was just going to be her thing.

“Everyone manages something in their life, and I have to manage my anxiety,” she says. She meditates once or twice a day, and believes it’s a tool many more college students would benefit from. She is aware of a first-year student who shows up to the noon meditations regularly, and likes to envision that it’s making a difference in her life—and that in a small way, as organizer of the sessions, Dearing contributes to that.

“It’s a big school, and I’m in Greek life, and that’s been great,” she says. “But I also wanted an academic realm where it’s like, This is my place, and this is where I’m going to impact the university,” she says. “And this, working at the Commons and CSC, is it.”

A continuation of our series on answers to the question:  “What experience or person in college most influenced your development as a human being?”

When Carter Jones left for college, he was thrilled to be moving on to the next chapter of his life, until a familiar anxiety dampened his excitement.  Would he fit in? – “like, really fit in” – as a student of color in a predominantly white school? He’d done it before, attending a suburban high school 15 miles outside his home in the city. His friends there had his back, but every new situation is a do-over when it comes to belonging. 

On one of the first days of school, Carter met Derrick, also a first-year student, and the two connected immediately. What they did not share in background (Derrick is White, from the suburbs, Carter is Black and Dominican from the inner city), they made up for in their mutual passions – sports, music, technology, and where to get the best pizza. The two became close friends. 

Halfway through that first year, Derrick shared with Carter that he had been struggling with his mental health. Like Carter, he had been worried about finding his place in a new environment. He  seemed preoccupied with his body image, though Carter said, “he looked fine to me.” In fact, Carter wasn’t aware how distressed his friend had become until he told him he was leaving school. It was then that Derrick explained that in his senior year of high school, he was so despondent, he had barely gone to school at all.   

When Derrick left college for home, it could have been the end of their friendship, but in many ways, it was just the beginning.

“I was like ‘are you kidding me?’ Here I find this great friend to go through school with and suddenly he leaves,” said Carter. “It was so disappointing.”

When Derrick left college for home, it could have been the end of their friendship, but in many ways, it was just the beginning. 

Then Carter did what Carter does.  He made it work.  Derrick lived in a town not far from campus and Carter found a way to visit often.  They’d watch football together, eat junk food and hang out. Soon, the family came to expect his Sunday visits and Derrick’s dad, Don, would pick Carter up at school and drop him off after dinner.  On those rides, they’d talk, and Carter was surprised to learn that Don, a successful businessman, had little money growing up.  He had put himself through college – the same college –  with loans and part-time jobs.  He could not afford to party in the dorms like the other students and, he, too, could feel out of place. 

“His upbringing was more like mine,” said Carter. “He was scaping by, hoping the next loan would come in to pay tuition.”

Derrick made the decision to return to school around the same time Carter was struggling to secure the money for that semester’s tuition.  “I am not going back without my best friend,” he told Carter, and they went to Don for advice.  Don created a financial plan for Carter that included working with aid officers, even the school’s president, to streamline tuition and allow for online participation so that Carter could graduate with a degree in computer science. When he needed an internship one summer, Don connected Carter with one of his own friends from college who was in technology.  

“His support for me was unbelievable,” said Carter.  “But it wasn’t just opening doors.  He was really invested in how I did and checked in all the time about my grades, how I was doing socially. I thanked him over and over again and he’d just say – stop, you are like a son to me.”

Asked how Don’s support changed his outlook on life, Carter said “Before, I felt like I was just getting by, not caring much about how I did but knowing how much faith Don had in me, it made me think of myself differently.  I began to really care about doing well. It mattered to me.”

Six years later, Derrick and Carter remain best friends and Carter continues to be part of Don’s family.  Carter may not ever know the depth of Don’s gratitude for showing up for his son, or how much of himself he saw in Carter, though it would benefit him for the rest of his life. But that’s not what this story is about – nor how it started.  It is about two college kids who find friendship and are smart or lucky enough to hold onto it. 

“It is amazing to me what relationships can do for your life,” said Carter. 

Names have been changed for this story.

College students consistently report feeling anxious and overwhelmed, many of them untethered by high levels of stress and the perception that they, alone, are struggling. What if colleges and universities offered these, and all students, a preventative well-being course where they learned resilience and coping skills, realistic perceptions of stress, and self-care? Would their levels of anxiety lessen? Would they feel more grounded?

This is the theory behind Be REAL, a mindfulness-based cognitive-behavioral coping program developed at the Center for Child and Family Well-being at the University of Washington (UW). The Be REAL Program (REsilient Attitudes & Living), is a six-week course that teaches students and staff a variety of skills that help improve well-being, starting with the acknowledgement that struggling is part of living.

While it partnered with the UW counseling center during the initial study, Be REAL is not a clinical solution. Rather, it is a population-based, preventative strategy aimed at helping all students thrive. 

“I think we are seeing a strong need to go from an individual approach to supporting mental health and well-being to a collective and a community approach,” said Sara McDermott, who leads the Be REAL training at the research center. “This is really important because our well-being is not related to one thing.  It’s related to our relationships, our stress levels, our politics, the food we have on the table, if we feel safe.”

The design of the Be REAL program is as sensible as its name. Typically, groups of students convene once a week for 90 minutes to learn mindfulness, stress management and cognitive behavioral skills that help with focus and executive functioning as well as self-compassion and compassion to others. In a combination of activities that build on themselves, the program is aimed at increasing students’ resilience by strengthening key protective factors, such as effective coping, perceptions of stress, and self-kindness, all of which can be in low supply among high performing students in demanding academic environments.

Originally launched as a study with a cohort of students living in residential halls at UW, the course is now available in a variety of settings. The flexibility built into the program is designed to meet students where they are, literally – whether it be dorms, classrooms or academic advising sessions.  As a general studies course, Be REAL can be a credit-bearing class for psychology students, or a mid-year elective for students needing to pick up one credit. (The Be REAL promotional video is featured on UW’s academic department web sites.) As a co-curricular program, it can be offered as a student support option for staff in residential life, advising, disability services, or any student-facing group.

“We are training folks in this work that already have relationships with students so we are supporting them in a way that is coming from the community,” said McDermott.  “That speaks volumes about how we can offer a collective approach to well-being.”

This “task-sharing model” does not require clinical skills but instead involves training people who work with students to facilitate groups, or to incorporate practices from the program into their work. Staff take the course themselves as part of their training to deliver the program in an effort to relate to and interpret what the students are experiencing which McDermott says is a benefit to both parties. “It’s really empowering to be able to say to students ‘Yeah, I tried that practice, and I found it really hard to do when you’re feeling a lot of different things.’”

McDermott says the program can also offer an opportunity for students to break out of the prescriptive patterns their majors demand. The self-compassion dynamic, and the sense of shared humanity, offers a different kind of learning experience. In an evaluation of the program, one student wrote, “the course created a space within academia where I felt seen and heard.”

99% of the students agreed that the program helped them learn ways for reducing stress.  

One of the program’s unique advantages is its position within a major university research center. Since its launch, the Be REAL program has been studied by researchers at UW’s Center for Child and Family Well-being and funded by patrons such as the Maritz Family Foundation and Brad and Judy Chase.  The  third study included 325 undergraduate students and 100 staff members at UW.  The published results noted, “Compared to students in the assessment-only group, students participating in Be REAL showed significant improvements in mindfulness, self-compassion, flourishing, resilience, happiness, emotion regulation problems, executive control, active coping, social connection, and depression and anxiety symptoms. These effects were maintained at follow-up.” 

In 2017 and 2018, the program conducted an evaluation in the UW residential halls and found that compared to students who had not yet received the program  students who participated in Be REAL reported improved well-being measures, including mindfulness, executive control, active coping, self-compassion, social connectedness, resilience and flourishing.  A majority of these changes were maintained at a three-month follow-up. 99% of the students agreed that the program helped them learn ways for reducing stress.  These and subsequent studies recommend the task-sharing model as an opportunity to include the entire campus community in the work of improving student and staff well-being.

McDermott says the proven efficacy of the program is both personally and practically rewarding.  With evidence comes additional funding and with funding, the program can expand.  Be REAL is now being offered in other colleges in addition to UW as well as with high-school-age teens. 

To learn more about the Be REAL program, including training opportunities to bring this program to your campus, contact, Sara McDermott, Be REAL Program Manager at saramcd@uw.edu

Alexis Redding’s career has many interconnections. She was a college counselor who became a developmental psychologist to better understand why her students were struggling, despite their good choices. She now teaches her students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education about the kinds of emotional supports first year college students need but don’t often articulate. As the faculty chair of the school’s Mental Health in Higher Education Professional Education Program, she brings her training as a counselor to the necessary task of addressing student mental health from a variety of touch points.

In her recent book “The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood,” Redding continues to demonstrate the interconnectedness of life. With co-author Nancy Hill, she makes a strong case for giving young people the time and the license to become authentic authors of their own lives, as opposed to being “fast-tracked” into adulthood. Through a uniquely effective research method, the authors are able to reject the narrative that today’s students are over-protected and under-prepared by showing that becoming an adult has always been emotionally difficult. In addition to evidence within the literature, Redding and Hill review abandoned tapes of interviews with the Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1975 and conclude that there are far more similarities than differences between that cohort and today’s Gen Z students.

Now, Redding and Hill are working on an extension of that research that involves reconnecting with the class of 1975 and interviewing Harvard classes of 2025 and 2026. The work is not yet complete but in our interview for LearningWell, we get a glimpse into what they are continuing to learn about the important developmental period known as “the college years.”

Here is an excerpt from our interview.

How did your experience as a college counselor and then a graduate school professor motivate you to write the book?

From my vantage point as a college counselor, I became concerned about how much our students were struggling emotionally in college, especially during  the transition to school. And, while the struggles they experienced were quite similar to each other, no one seemed to be talking about them. Consequently, our students described feeling very alone and even worried they were doing something wrong. Once I saw this pattern, I knew that I could better prepare my high school students in advance, but I worried that we were missing opportunities to ease the transition and normalize these challenges for all students once they arrived at school. I wanted to do work to help ease the transition more broadly.

It all starts with how we talk about college. The story young people hear, far too often, is about college being the ‘best four years’ of their lives. The gap between what they expect and the reality can be profound. We don’t talk enough about what is going to be hard or help them develop strategies for navigating these predictable obstacles. And we do them a disservice by not being candid about the challenges they will encounter. Today, I train future student affairs practitioners to help build meaningful support structures and foster the kinds of conversations that I wish my own students had found at college so many years ago.

One motivation for writing our book was to help normalize these challenges for students, for their parents, for faculty members, and for student affairs practitioners as well. We want to empower students and everyone who cares about them to understand what it’s really going to be like and to give them the language to talk about it openly. It’s great to see how this simple change can have such a profound impact.

The way you do that is amazing – revealing what college students of almost five decades ago were feeling from interviews done on the class of 1975. Did you and your co-principal investigator go looking for this kind of information?

Not at all! I discovered that these interviews existed when I was doing research on achievement culture in an old attic building here at Harvard. I came across some misplaced pieces of paper that suggested a study had been done about the college experience in the 1970s that no one ever wrote about. I wanted to know more. (My father was an archeologist, and he trained this sort of curiosity in me.) It took about nine months to figure out where these data had come from, and then to track down the recordings of the interviews. Nobody thought they still existed. But, after many months of calling up box after box from archival storage and going through the attic and the basement to find all the data, I put the entire study back together again and even found the original recordings. We had incredible sound technicians lift the student voices off these degrading old reel-to-reel tapes and we eventually listened to these student interviews from 1972-1975 on our iPhones.

Were you surprised at what you discovered?

Nancy and I went in thinking we would study what was different between college in the 1970s and college today. We thought it would be an incredible time capsule to document what had changed over nearly half a century. It was startling when we began to listen to the recordings because there was so little actual difference. Both of us were struck by how similar those students were to the students who we advise and teach today. It was an interesting puzzle for us. I even coded the data three different times using three different analytic techniques because we were looking for differences. But what we kept coming back to was similarity. And eventually, we realized, that was a powerful conclusion that really contradicted a lot of our popular narratives about “kids today.”

Remarkably, in all the archival work, I ultimately found the documents that told us why the original research team abandoned the study. We had assumed it was because Dr. William Perry, who led the original study, had retired. But then we found minutes from the meeting where they made the decision. It turns out that the motivation for the project was to replicate a study they conducted in the 1950s because they had also assumed they would find that “kids today” were so different 25 years later. What they determined through their analysis was that there was essentially no difference in the developmental experience between those two cohorts. For them, this was a failure. Of course, that was the exact conclusion we had already come to through our analysis decades later, but we had a different take. We were excited to understand why there were such meaningful similarities and to unpack that in our research.

Recognizing the parallels around loneliness and isolation across generations can help us better understand what is ‘typical’ and what is a genuine ‘crisis.’ 

Whenever we present this work, people inevitably ask, “but what about social media? What about covid?” And, of course, we asked those questions too. It would be silly to imagine those realities don’t impact our lived experiences. Of course they do! But what stays the same is the developmental experience, the process of figuring out who you are and asking the big questions: “Who am I? Who do I want to be? What do I want my life to look like?” That experience is not tied to a specific decade or a specific moment in time, despite how much has changed between the generations.

What implications do you think this has for addressing some of the emotional and behavioral health struggles college students report today?

For me, it’s most important to recognize that college has always been hard for a lot of people and that these challenges are predictable and follow some established patterns. One of the things we documented in our research was the profound sense of loneliness that was reported, especially in the first two years. And students talk about those challenges in similar ways between the 1975 and the 2025 cohorts. Recognizing the parallels around loneliness and isolation across generations can help us better understand what is ‘typical’ and what is a genuine ‘crisis.’ As soon as a student calls home to say they’re having trouble or questioning if they fit in at school, family members can immediately – and understandably – panic. But if we understand that this is an expected challenge and that this is indeed typical of the student experience, we can have very different conversations before that call happens and we can respond in ways that can be more helpful in the moment as well.

A strong theme in the book is our needing to give students time to pause the fast tracks of their lives and discover who they are. How did your research influence this conclusion?

One of the biggest similarities across the two cohorts is the intense pressure young people feel to have it all figured out on day one. Students in both generations also struggle to navigate differences between what they envision for the future and what their parents expect, what their friends are doing, and what society says. It can be hard to take action when their goals diverge from those external stories. Trusting their internal voice is growth edge for students in this age group and something we can scaffold.

We tend to push students to make decisions about their future before they are ready. And our students get very mixed messages from us, especially when they’re coming into a place with a liberal arts curriculum. They are told: “it’s time to explore, it’s time to test out different ways of knowing and learning.” But we simultaneously say, “Be careful! If you don’t take this course now, the door will close. You won’t stay on track and you will miss out.” If we believe that students need more time for exploration, our curriculum genuinely needs to allow for that.

This story now continues. Tell us about your current work?

We are still fascinated by the similarities across the generations, but we are seeking to identify meaningful differences and continue to test our hypotheses as well. With that in mind, we are replicating the study with the classes of 2025 and 2026. We are using the exact same protocol, interviewing students annually an asking just one single question, “what stood out to you from the academic year?” We are three years into that work now. As in the original study, we are only following Harvard students so we have a one-to-one comparison, but the hope is, of course, to be able to expand and study at very different institutions that are more representative of college students as a whole. This is really just the first step.

The other exciting follow up is that we were granted permission to reopen the original study, and so we’ve spent the last two years interviewing the original participants from the Class of 1975. It is such a gift to get to do this work. The last time we heard from these participants was in June of 1975 when they were 22 or 23 years old, graduating and making decisions about going to grad school or the workforce. Now we meet them in their early seventies and they are at another pivot point – retirement. And few of them thought about this study at all in the 45 years in between. So, we can capture their stories in two very distinctive and pivotal moments in their lives.

The students who found their way to mentors had the help they needed to ask meaningful questions — What do I really want to do?

We first ask these participants to tell us the story of their life as they would tell it today. Then we ask them if they want to listen to their recordings and meet their younger selves. It’s a fascinating time capsule of their lives from about 19-23 years old. They write reflections after each of the four recordings, and then they come back and participate in an interview to make meaning of both what they heard and how it’s different and similar from their recollections.

What are you learning?

It’s too early to share anything beyond top line takeaways, (we’re just now wrapping up the interviews), but one of the important things that we are hearing has to do with how they remember their time in college. None of them remember college being as hard as what they hear themselves talking about on the recordings. That’s simply not the story that they have told themselves for almost half a century. They forgot how lonely they felt. And that’s totally natural – knowing that things turned out ok softened the intensity of the emotions that they felt in the moment.

The other thing that has emerged from this work, and something Nancy and I care deeply about: a confirmation of the importance of mentorship. The students who found their way to mentors had the help they needed to ask meaningful questions — What do I really want to do? How do I translate my interests into a vocation? Having followed up with these students 50 years later, we were able to see how much even the smallest mentoring interaction mattered to their lives.

Unfortunately, too many students – in both generations – don’t have meaningful mentoring experiences. In the absence of genuine mentorship, it is too easy to land on a default path. Colleges and universities can be more intentional about creating opportunities for students to have a range of mentoring experience – not just the big, long-term relationships we tend to prioritize now. The small-scale mentorship interactions matter a lot – even 50 years later!

What if higher education made student wellbeing a goal on par with graduation rates and GPA’s? That is the organizing vision behind the Flourishing Academic Network (FAN), a group of centers, institutes, and universities across the United States and Canada dedicated to embedding flourishing throughout higher education for the benefit of students, communities and society.

The idea to gather like-minded institutions into a flourishing collaborative grew from the pioneering efforts of four big thinkers at three separate universities. David Germano, a religious historian at the University of Virginia and former Director of the school’s Contemplative Sciences Center, was determined to connect the work he was doing in mindfulness and flourishing to the emerging crisis in college student mental health.

Germano was joined in this purpose by colleagues Richard Davidson, William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin; Mark Greenberg, former Director of the Prevention Research Center at Pennsylvania State University; and Rob Roeser, the Bennett Pierce Professor of Caring and Compassion at Penn State. The scholars came from different disciplines but shared a common belief that embedding flourishing concepts into the college experience was both a pragmatic approach to addressing mental health issues among students and a moral imperative for higher education.

A major contribution of the alliance was the creation of “The Art and Science of Human Flourishing,” an interdisciplinary course they created that helps students develop skills and perspectives that support individual and collective flourishing, defined as “living a fulfilling life of meaning, purpose and a sense of belonging.” 

The course was launched in 2017 at all three universities. With consistent outcome data showing significant improvement in mental health symptoms among participants, the collaborators soon formed what they called “The Flourishing Academic Network” to welcome more colleges and universities into the learning community. But like so many initiatives thrown off course by the pandemic, the 2020 national conference of interested universities was delayed until 2022. The changes within FAN schools that occurred during that gap brought starts and stops to the new network but the desire to work collaboratively to apply the science of flourishing to the lives of college students remained strong among the group.

While still nascent, the Flourishing Academic Network is now finding its footing with plans for in-person convenings and ongoing collaboration among 20 or so members.  Some believe the current vulnerabilities within the sector may be an opening to include student flourishing as a primary goal of higher education, though not without disruption.

The FAN charter underlying the organization’s mission states, “We believe centering student wellbeing and flourishing, bridging the gap between student affairs and academics, and changing how higher education systems operate and are designed can establish new pathways for flourishing.”

The following is the first in a series of features on FAN member institutions.

The Renée Crown Wellness Institute:

The administrative backbone of the FAN is now at the Renée Crown Wellness Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder.  With a mission “to promote the wellness of young people and the systems and adults who support them through interdisciplinary research-practice partnerships,” the Institute is one of 12 research centers within the university.  It was founded in 2019 just months before the onset of the pandemic and while many organizations immediately shut down, the Crown Institute went to work providing resources that were in high demand. In the fall of 2020, undergraduate students within schools at CU Boulder were required to take a course, developed by the Crown Institute and its collaborators, called “Health, Society and Wellness in COVID-19 Times.” 

Designed by faculty members of diverse disciplines working collaboratively with undergraduate students, the course not only supported the CU Boulder community during stressful times, it put on display the methods and mission of a very different kind of university research institute. 

Some believe the current vulnerabilities within the higher ed sector may be an opening to include student flourishing as a primary goal, though not without disruption. 

Dr. Sona Dimidjian is the Director of the Crown Institute, and a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU Boulder. She has both a PhD in clinical psychology and master’s in social work and worked as a therapist with adolescents for many years. “Our research is really focused on action,” she said. “We are interested in changing systems in classrooms, in healthcare settings, in living rooms and dorm rooms because we want a bigger and faster change in young people’s lives.”

The term the Crown Institute uses to define its work is “interdisciplinary research-practice partnerships.” In this sense, the Crown Institute is less of a lab than it is a workshop where those for whom the research is intended (young people, parents, educators) are involved in solving real world problems. Collaborative design is informed and influenced by the expertise and experiences of community partners who work alongside the university researchers. Its intent is to disseminate and apply that research back into the community and on behalf of the partners who have been engaged.

“We believe that our research products are much more sustainable, meaningful, and equitable when the intended audiences of research are included in the design,” said Dr. Leah Peña Teeters, Outreach and Education Director for the Crown Institute and point person for the FAN at CU Boulder.

The Crown Institute has three research strands: children and young people; families and communities, educators and schools, all of which apply the same approach. Consider “Alma,” a peer-to-peer program for new and expectant mothers who are struggling with anxiety and depression. Moms and their peer mentors meet six to eight times utilizing peer support strategies that are informed by the science of behavioral activation. The Alma team developed the program collaboratively, grounded in Dimidjian’s many years of conducting research on the mental health of parents. In assessing their interventions, Crown Institute researchers have found a significant reduction in anxiety and depression, leading to the program’s expansion in other communities.

The children and young people research strand is at the center of the Institute’s work and its primary connection to the FAN.  Here, active initiatives like The Mindful Campus Program have broad appeal among Gen Z students who, as a cohort, continue to report significant mental health issues. Co-designed with undergraduate students, The Mindful Campus Program aims to increase access to mindfulness and compassion-based practices that have proven to support the mental health and wellness of students.  Other programs include the mind.body. voice. program, which promotes body acceptance, belonging, and leadership while reducing vulnerability to disordered eating among girls and young women in middle, high school, and college. Another program, The CU Well Brainstudy, examines how CU Boulder undergraduates experience wellness and cope with stress.

Each of these initiatives includes the deep participation of young people.  According to the Crown Institute, young people serve as both participants and designers of its work, providing vision and feedback to inform the iterative design of its programs and practices. The Crown Institute directs an Undergraduate Research Fellows Program where Psychology and Neuroscience students begin a three-year research journey at the start of their sophomore year, leading to independent research projects in their senior year.  Students, who are given a stipend to compensate for their time apprenticing and working in research labs, are matched with faculty and work closely with them as mentors.

“We are focused on training the next generation of researchers, scholars, and practitioners with the skill sets that really center wellbeing and flourishing across disciplines,” said Teeters. 

The Crown Institute is less of a lab than it is a workshop where those for whom the research is intended are involved in solving real world problems

Alison Ofori is a third-year integrated physiology major at CU Boulder.  She joined the mind. body.voice. project as a peer facilitator after one of her favorite professors suggested she would be a great addition to the team. As a pre-health student, she had always been interested in doing research but felt like working in a lab or a hospital fell a little flat. 

“When I heard about this opportunity, I was like ‘Yes! this is really different.  I get to work with real people.’”

Orofi is particularly energized by the work she is now doing with high school and middle school girls on external vs internal beliefs. 

“We have the girls come in and engage with our curriculum and we ask specifically tailored questions that help them connect with their mind and then what society may be telling them.  For example, we might ask ‘what do you think the perfect woman is?’  A lot of times they’ll answer first with everything society tells them. And then we’ll reframe the question and ask it based on what they think is suitable for them, not society, and we’ll get different answers.”

Orofi, who is the eldest of three sisters, says the work she has done with the Crown Institute has helped her evolve personally.

“I am very mindful now of how I speak to myself, how I talk to other people,” she said. “What Crown is trying to remind us about is that we all go through these struggles and it’s important to bring some conversation to that.”

Like many institutions within the FAN, the Crown Institute also focuses on the teaching of flourishing through specifically designed curricula.  Dimidjian teaches a course through the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience called Flourishing, Belonging, and Liberation that is anchored in the work of other institutions in the FAN as well as the Mindful Campus Program in the Crown Institute. Specifically, the course is an adaptation of The Art and Science of Human Flourishing course, adapted at the Crown Institute at CU with doctoral student, Caitlin McKimmy, and Professors Donna Meija and Natalie Avalos. It examines psychological science to explore, define, and apply the construct of human flourishing, defined as “an existence filled with wellness, purpose, connection, and justice.” 

Dimidjian says the feedback she receives from the students who take the course is consistently inspiring.  “I have had so many students say to me ‘I’ve never had another class like this in my entire time at college’ or ‘I’ve been waiting for a class like this.’ I had one student say to me ‘I can’t wait to come to this class. No matter how exhausted I may be from work and classes, I always feel rejuvenated.’” 

Dimidjian believes the FAN connections have been important to the design and offering of the flourishing course: “We rely on the expertise and generosity of our friends and colleagues in the FAN. It is exciting to share our learning about how to bring a focus on flourishing into all the facets of our campuses.”

The Crown Institute’s mindfulness work closely aligns with the FAN, which has strong roots in contemplative science. Teeters underscores that mindfulness is only part of the pathway to what she calls “the crosswalk between the inner and outer resources needed for flourishing.”

“We recognize that in human flourishing, we can support individuals with contemplative practices, and we also need the systems change work that supports the creation of more just systems in which to practice and thrive. The two go hand in hand and can be mutually informing.”

Teeters sees her coordinating role for FAN within the Crown Institute as a natural extension of her work in outreach and education. She hopes with more opportunities for interaction and scholarship, each institution will learn from one another and enhance their own work as a result.

“I think there’s a lot to be learned from what works and doesn’t across institutions and across settings and one of our hopes in the next iteration of FAN is to bring more youth and undergraduate voices to the direction and leadership of student flourishing.”

Dimidjian concurred.

“There are amazing colleges and universities represented in the FAN currently and deep dedication among all the individual members to the flourishing of students, staff and faculty on our campuses. This work is just at its beginning in many ways, and I think everyone is enthusiastic about the potential for moving from intention to action.”