Georgia College & State University

Emily Jarvis

Educational leaders have heard ad nauseum for the last six years about the mental health crisis facing college students. Student mental health concerns did not originate with the COVID-19 pandemic, but that event served to both exacerbate the existing crisis among college students and bring greater institutional and societal attention to the issue. Most institutions have adapted to a post-COVID way of being, but echoes of the crisis still reverberate in the ways students learn, cope and interact.

Each new class of college students was in a different developmental stage when COVID-19 hit and that interrupted period of formation is now manifesting in subtly different ways that affect their social-emotional development and academic trajectories. Initially, we had the high school seniors who missed their proms and endured Zoom graduations, so colleges were tasked with replacing some of those important emotional milestones. Then came the class who spent their senior high school year behind a screen and entered the test-optional college admission cycle that often resulted in a mismatch of academic preparedness with college expectations. Each subsequent cohort faced different degrees of learning loss and social-emotional disruptions that bled into their college experiences.

The students who will enter college in the fall of 2026 were in the seventh grade in the spring of 2020, a critical time for physical development (puberty and hormones and sex ed) and for social learning: becoming a teenager, detaching from parental dependence and all the experiences of the dreaded middle school years. Higher education practitioners and student development researchers have found that the disruptions of COVID, combined with rapid technological evolutions and changes in the sociopolitical environment, have affected students’ abilities to communicate effectively, manage conflict and cope with adversity. In response, universities have been compelled to adopt more holistic student support structures, cross-disciplinary approaches that foster students’ intellectual, emotional and social development in all areas of the university.

Faculty have seen first-hand the effects of mental stress and disrupted social-emotional development on students’ academic performance and personal well-being and most are eager to be part of the solution. However, many faculty reports that they don’t know how to help effectively and what the appropriate boundaries are. By no means are faculty expected to act as counselors or therapists. Simply by adopting a culture of caring in the classroom, faculty can make a difference in a student’s experience.

“Faculty can make a difference simply by adopting a culture of caring in the classroom.”

An abundance of publications guiding faculty on ways to incorporate more caring practices into the curriculum have cropped up since 2020, including a collaborative resource from Active Minds and the Association of College and University Educators called “Creating a Culture of Caring” and The Jed Foundation’s “Faculty Guide to Supporting Student Mental Health.” Centers for Teaching and Learning at institutions like Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California, Irvine, have created similar guides for their faculty that incorporate tailored campus resources and align with the local pedagogical culture.

These caring practices need not detract from the important content of a class, nor should they take an inordinate amount of effort or expertise to implement. At Georgia College & State University, we suggest several ways faculty can incorporate well-being in the classroom. Some of these strategies involve adopting more empathetic policies to support students’ complex lives, like implementing a deadlines policy that allows for both flexibility and accountability and offering a “Not OK Today” pass that affords students a no-questions-asked absence. Promoting social connections in class can also have a significant positive effect on student well-being. Having students learn and use each other's names or launching a brief, fun survey to get students to connect can make class feel more like a community. Faculty can foster a positive, growth mindset in students by creating space for wellness practices like gratitude. Five minutes before a quiz, have students write down something they are grateful for to defuse the stress of an assessment. To the extent they are comfortable, faculty can also share their own past struggles with college or career life to humanize the experiences of challenge and success.

Student-faculty relationships are an influential part of students’ college experience, decisions to persist and overall well-being. Outside of peers, faculty often have the most frequent and consistent contact with students and occupy a significant portion of that student's interactions. Particularly for first-generation and marginalized students, faculty may be seen as having punishing power, which may reduce their likelihood to seek help from or communicate openly with their professors. The 2025 National College Health Assessment showed that, among students who responded that faculty posed a problem or challenge for them, that negative interaction or relationship was the second strongest impediment to academic performance. (The first was procrastination, another phenomenon accelerated during the pandemic.) On the contrary, students who have a positive sense of belonging on campus tend to have stronger academic performance, increased retention and better mental health indicators. Given their prominence and influence in students’ lives, faculty are critical to fostering that sense of belonging. When faculty extend a culture of caring by demonstrating empathy, promoting community and making space for well-being practices, they create an environment where students can feel supported to try new things, make mistakes and practice resilience in their learning and development.