By Brandon Paykamian Government Technology (TNS) and Tribune Media Services
Noting a decline in students’ financial, physical and mental health over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, 20 universities recently adopted a new survey to gauge students’ sense of well-being and to create initiatives to address critical needs affecting campus wellness.
According to a news release last week, schools including Butler University; California State University, Sacramento; and the University of South Alabama have launched the Student Well-being Institutional Support Survey, or SWISS, to gather students’ health insights for new support strategies. It said the survey is housed within a data platform from the tech company Qualtrics, which turns data relating to mental, physical and financial well-being into “actionable data.”
“Education institutions need dynamic systems that can sense and respond to the needs of students,” said Omar Garriott, global head of education at Qualtrics, in a public statement. “This is especially true in this time of rapid change. Schools that rise to the top in the coming years will be those that not only listen to students, but really understand and improve the experiences they are having on campus with respect to their mental health, basic physical and financial needs and their ongoing sense of belonging.”
According to previous research from Qualtrics, mental health has declined for college students since the start of the pandemic, with nearly 1 in 3 students saying they “do not feel connected to other students,” on top of having to deal with rising costs of living. In addition, nearly 30 percent of students said their institution does not have mental health resources, or they don’t know whether it does, with nearly two-thirds (63 percent) saying current offerings are inadequate.
Bridget Yuhas, creator of the survey and Butler’s director of Student Affairs Assessment and Strategy, told Government Technology the survey was developed and first administered in 2020 in response to increased reports of Butler students feeling disconnected from peers due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“SWISS is the first national survey that measures students’ perceptions of how well their institution is supporting their well-being on a bunch of different factors. There are a lot of surveys out there that measure individual well-being, like how you are doing, along with your mental health or your physical health, but this kind of raises it up to a higher level to look at the climate for well-being at institutions,” she said. “What that does is give practitioners and institutions directly actionable information so they can help target areas that students are telling them they need more support in.”
Yuhas said the findings revealed that college sophomores, in particular, were struggling with “COVID-19 fatigue,” leading officials to create new residence-life programming for students on campus, such as social gatherings focused on helping students connect and find common interests with one another.
“We were able to take some of that data to action and directly support students in their social well-being, and that was an exciting step to be able to take,” she later added. “If we’re not able to communicate it in ways that folks are able to understand and take action on, then collecting that data isn’t as useful as it could be.”
So far, Yuhas said, more than 16,000 students have provided insights into their concerns about health-related issues, with the goal of guiding new strategies and programs to promote campus wellness.
Shannon Mulqueen, director of residence life at Butler, said the university has already acted on some of those suggestions and found them helpful.
“Our RAs (resident advisers) noticed immediate results as students began to make new friends,” she said. “It happened because we administered the SWISS survey and took action based on the results.”
Earlier this year, according to the news release, officials at Sacramento State noted that 59 percent of students surveyed through SWISS identified mental health issues as a top stressor, along with a need for academic support. Students also reported a need for programs and workshops designed to help build resilience, self-compassion, mindfulness and empathy.
“If we’re trying to solve mental health issues, there’s a lot of room for advancement there,” Kate Smith, director of student wellness at Sacramento State, said in a public statement. “The end goal is to use this data to really inform our decision-making as we set our strategic plan moving forward.”
In terms of physical health, the University of South Alabama’s adoption of the survey found a large number of students struggling with food insecurity, with a third of them reporting an inability to pay for food consistently. In response, officials said they’re launching a new wellness website to highlight food resources for those students, in addition to the university’s free food pantry.
“That was pretty eye-opening,” Brian Allred, director of campus recreation and wellness at the University of South Alabama, said in a statement about the findings. “Food insecurity wasn’t even on my radar prior to the survey, so this has impacted the direction we’re going to take.”
Yuhas expects more universities will use surveys like this, and other data, in the months and years ahead as they grapple with combating learning loss, providing counseling services to students with emotional problems and rebuilding a sense of community on campus. Another emerging issue across higher ed, she said, is the need for support services such as coaching geared toward strengthening students’ financial wellness and literacy.
“For a lot of universities who are short-staffed and short-budgeted constantly, having easy-to-use and quickly understandable tools is of the utmost importance … Being able to take the data, interpret it and act on it is one of the most important things that we can showcase from SWISS,” she said. “The thing that is wonderful about the Qualtrics platform’s dashboards is that you can set it up so that each institution can see their own data come in, and in visualizations that are intuitive and easy to understand quickly.
“Being able to support students outside of [just] the counseling center [or] health center is really an important step that universities can take to help address these concerns for mental health as well.”
