How STEM Can Help the Mental Health Crisis in Higher Education

Patty Patria, MBA, PMP, CISSP, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Higher Education has faced many challenges over the last several years, and now it’s on the brink of one of its greatest challenges: student mental health and wellness.

The seemingly never-ending COVID pandemic has caused significant increases in students reporting anxiety and depression. Isolation, quarantine, hybrid learning, and the ever-evolving COVID pandemic have caused significant increases in anxiety and depression in both high school- and college-age students. Now more than ever before, it is critical for institutions to prioritize well-being at every stage of the student life cycle, surround students with a care team to enhance their lifelong wellness, and leverage technology to help ease this journey. According to the American Council of Education (ACE), 70 percent of college presidents rank student mental health as the most pressing issue at their institutions. When lockdowns were enforced at the beginning of the pandemic, college students reported feeling depressed, anxious, stressed, and unmotivated; two years later, statistics show increases in these feelings.

How can higher education meet the demands needed to support students? Through a variety of ways.

One positive aspect of COVID was the shift to telehealth. Prior to COVID, only 18 percent of health care providers offered telehealth options. Today, nearly 64 percent of providers offer telehealth. This provides a great opportunity for colleges and universities to engage in contracts with mental health providers that offer scalable telehealth mental health services to students to offset the burden already placed on university counselors. Some universities are going even further and offering 24x7 mental health hotlines so students can talk with a person at any point in the day.

“solation, quarantine, hybrid learning, and the ever-evolving COVID pandemic have caused significant increases in anxiety and depression in both high school- and college-age students.”

In addition to virtual appointments, universities should shift from traditional student success efforts to holistic student well-being. This can include leveraging existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that can aggregate to look at the big picture of how a student is doing and then having support staff reach out to students. In the past, these metrics typically included a student’s grades, class participation, or frequency and access to Learning Management Systems. However, some universities have begun to leverage additional data points, such as card swipes to key areas or dining usage in recent years.

In addition to data analytics, some universities are starting to engage in proactive student outreach. Over the last few years, pulse surveys have become an important tool for human resource organizations to measure employee engagement. Now, some universities are taking this technology and leveraging it with students for wellness pulse checks. With short one- or two-question surveys sent out more frequently, institutions can capture a general pulse on their student body and then, based on survey responses, leverage workflow technology to initiative workflows to follow-up with students who might need it.

Communicating with students on the medium they prefer is also key. As students are much more comfortable with chat than email, organizations can leverage chatbots that specialize in wellness. By leveraging chatbots integrated with a mobile-friendly wellness knowledge base, students can find basic information on their own and then jump to a live person if they can’t find the solution they need. Chatbots can also be configured to leverage machine learning to automate common requests and leverage analytics to key performance indicators (KPIs) to adapt and improve experiences.

Resilience is another critical aspect of helping our students. Everyone has difficult days; however, if we can provide content and training to help build resilience skills—from the point of entry to all the way through a student’s college career—then, hopefully, we are preparing our students to be more successful in the workforce after they graduate. Hopefully, more students will take advantage of these offerings by leveraging CRM tools that give students a common dashboard that includes resources, pulse checks, and content to help with topics like resiliency.hopefully more students will take advantage of these offerings.

Last, the most important aspect of this journey is data, alerts and dashboards. When universities holistically look at student success touchpoints such as pulse surveys, grades, learning management engagement, early alert triggers, chatbot usage, and other engagement measures, outreach programs can be built for students to engage earlier in the process proactively. While people and processes are critical aspects of assisting students with mental health and wellness needs, technology can also play a major supporting role.

Learning Management

Human Resource

Machine Learning

Employee Engagement