This Higher Ed Funder Recognized the Growing Crisis of Student Mental Health Over Ten Years Ago

At its most extreme, the crisis of student mental health shows up in disturbing reports of campus suicide, which are responsible for an estimated 1,100 deaths each year at colleges and universities in the U.S. But mental health on campus is a much broader story. It's a continuum spanning the entirety of students’ college experience — from personal growth and maturity to academic success and the transition to professional life. In fact, according to researchers, problems with mental health are actually the single biggest impediment to academic success, potentially dragging down motivation and the ability to concentrate, and driving feelings of social disconnection. The COVID pandemic, with all its isolation and disruption, made matters even worse for many students.

While on-campus student health centers have long offered psychotherapy or emergency psychiatric services, increasingly, colleges and universities are seeking to go beyond that strictly medical model. Rather, they're coming at the question of emotional wellbeing not as a response to problems, but proactively, as an integral part of their institutions' core mission to educate and develop the next generation of workers and citizens.

The Duke Endowment, based in North Carolina, is one higher ed grantmaker that’s long been prioritizing those efforts. For 100 years, the endowment has supported and worked closely with four universities in North and South Carolina, a connection that's written into its legal DNA. Under the indenture of trust outlined by its industrialist founder James B. Duke, who died in 1925, the endowment is committed to support Davidson College, Duke University, Furman University and Johnson C. Smith University. (However, its grantmaking in health and other areas extends beyond those schools.)

As a result of many decades of support for its four core higher ed grantees, the Duke Endowment has a particularly close relationships with the educators at those schools, said Kristi Walters, director of the Duke Endowment's higher education group. And more than a decade ago, the endowment's higher ed team began discussing student mental health, including the urgent issues of depression and suicide on campus — but they soon realized the topic of mental health was more generally central to student success than previously thought.

"In the course of those communications, mostly with students and [administrators] on each campus, the focus broadened from just mental health to student resiliency and what helps students thrive, and to put a positive spin on the challenging issue of mental health," Walters said.

In 2013, recognizing the role of emotional health in student success, the Duke Endowment launched its Student Resilience and Well-Being Project. Duke funded the project with $3.4 million across the four schools, backing research around student resilience and seeking to develop interventions to strengthen it.

At each school, psychology research faculty, practitioner staff from student affairs and others from student life, health services, counseling and health education and wellness came together to develop new ways to support students' emotional wellbeing. By 2014, the resilience project began tracking four-year cohorts of students from the schools to assess the impact of the schools’ resilience interventions, sharing all their data. This intramural cooperation turned out to be an important part of what amounted to a cultural change at the schools, covering many aspects of student experience — academics, emotional health and happiness, and social connectedness.

"Often, the academic side of the house and the student life side of the house are not always rowing in the same direction, and in some cases, don't even have close relationships, which is unfortunate, since they both touch students in such important ways," Walters said.

According to educators at the colleges, the resilience project strengthened the bonds between academic affairs and student life at all four schools by bringing the two sides together to work in ways that they probably never had before. "It's unusual to have someone from athletics, someone from the chaplain's office, someone from the center for student health and wellbeing, to meet together and work together on a regular basis," said Byron McCrae, vice president for student life and dean of students at Davidson College.

The project required each school not only to pilot new programs and interventions, but also to study and assess those interventions and share all the data. Keep in mind that the schools are all very different — Duke University, for example, is a large research institution, while Johnson C. Smith is a small HBCU with around 1,000 students. Davidson is also a small liberal arts college, with around 2,000 students. That’s been advantageous in a sense, because it created a body of research that might be broadly valuable to educational institutions across the country that are now also working to address student resiliency.

Furman University in South Carolina, for example, had begun developing a program to help undergraduates discover their interests and values, sharpen their academic focus and position themselves for employment or graduate school. Backing from the Duke Endowment enabled Furman to expand the program, including through required coursework — in other words, resiliency wasn't an idea or service tacked onto the students' college experience or simply available in the student health center, but integrated fully into every student's college career.

"The conversation around mentoring and advising is the opportunity to help students see what their path is, but to do that, you have to take a really holistic approach toward thinking about the student experience," said Michelle Horhota, associate dean for mentoring and advising at Furman.

Results of the resilience interventions at Furman were extremely positive, Horhota said, showing boosts in the students' sense of belonging and worth, as well as significant boosts in overall student retention, with the highest retention gains among Furman's students of color and first-generation college students.

While the Duke Endowment's funding for the Student Resilience and Well-Being Project concluded in 2019, the schools continue to operate programs developed during the project and informed by the findings. Then the pandemic hit, bringing with it new and complex challenges to student wellbeing and further underscoring just how important student resilience programs can be.

"Who would have ever known when we made this grant in 2013 that we would have a pandemic that exacerbates this issue around mental health — not only on college, university campuses, but in the world in general," Walters said. "During the pandemic, faculty on these campuses were really the only people that had direct contact with the students, at least virtually — it helped them support their students during a really challenging time. And I think it continues to be helpful as we emerge from the pandemic."

And given what college students have been through since the project was launched, it’s looking like an approach worthy of emulation as other grantmakers zero in on mental health.

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