Ahead of the new academic year, a panel of undergraduates convened last Tuesday on Zoom to offer an audience of educators and administrators insight into some of the influences most affecting college student wellbeing today.

As the title suggests, “The State of Student Wellbeing: Navigating Pressure, Belonging, and A.I. on Campus” covered the young panelists’ views on a wide range of both academic and personal concerns, as well as ideas for how higher education leadership can help address them. 

The hourlong event was the second of its kind produced together by the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities (UERU), a national consortium of leaders from research universities, and the Coalition for Student Wellbeing (C4SW), a student-led college mental health advocacy group. 

This time, the LearningWell Coalition, which promotes best practices in college student wellbeing, was also an organizing partner. The LearningWell Coalition is the publisher of LearningWell magazine.

After words of welcome from UERU Executive Director Steven Dandaneau, Angela Lindner, the executive director of the LearningWell Coalition, opened the session with an overview of trends in college student wellbeing, as well as ways forward. Recent measures of flourishing and purpose are troubling, she said, but evidence shows experiential educational experiences, like mentorship, internships, and research, can set students for long-term success.

“To fully support lifelong wellbeing, we must liberate our students and our own universities from the burden of the notion that the only purpose of college is to punch a ticket toward a job, and we must provide access to and participate in these relationship-rich, lifelong giving experiences available to all students, not just for a portion of our population,” Lindner said.

The remaining time was devoted to the student panel, which was moderated by Carson Domey, the founder of C4SW and a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He was joined by three of his members: Mayeesha Avi, a rising sophomore at Yale University; Leyli Balaghi, a rising sophomore at Arizona State University; and Aneesh Chintala, an incoming first-year at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Time and again, the panelists highlighted how intertwined their academic experience is with their lives and struggles outside the classroom. 

Several of the stressors students identified might seem purely academic at first. Chintala spoke to his concerns about entering a university whose reputation for educational rigor he may not be able to keep up with. Avi pointed out how a prevalent “hustle culture” on her campus perpetuates the idea that “you’re always supposed to be doing more.”

But at a certain point, each of these academic anxieties became almost impossible to isolate from others, like financial or career-centered ones.  

In the nearly same breath that Chintala expressed his worry about maintaining an intense workload and top grades, he mentioned the coinciding urgency around “making sure that we have the internships, the experiences, and all of these different things needed in order to essentially get these jobs that we want.”

Avi, too, marked these entangled academic and professional pressures and how they can be exacerbated by financial need. “For students who are helping support not only themselves, but their families, it becomes even harder to slow down because success is tied to: How am I going to support my family in the future?” she said. 

According to Balaghi, financial concerns have the potential to influence just about every decision students make. Work hours could limit their class choices or ability to engage on campus in general. Earning requirements, not genuine interest, could dictate their major, extracurricular activities, or career path. 

There are also non-academic issues with potentially academic implications that are more personal or situational, the panelists revealed.

Balaghi opened up about the challenges of focusing on classes while grieving a close family member and far away from her support system at home. Avi said public and government scrutiny of her university, as well as general uncertainty about the future of higher education, has been distracting.

“There's this underlying feeling that the landscape is constantly shifting,” Avi said. “As a student, that can feel very exhausting and confusing.”

Even the prevalence of A.I. in classrooms these days, the panelists noted, may have its roots in wellbeing issues. If young people were less afraid of failure, they might be more willing to trust themselves, instead of A.I.

If young people were less afraid of failure, they might be more willing to trust themselves, instead of A.I.

“I think it speaks a lot to the very kind of changing landscape of education that so many students are just so scared of making mistakes and so scared of not being perfect that they're turning to tools like ChatGPT, like Gemini, countless others, because they know that it will usually output a correct answer,” Avi said.

To mitigate this reliance on A.I., Avi suggested “bringing it back to encouraging mistakes and encouraging the organic kind of thinking things through.” She mentioned a friend who was put at ease by a math professor who graded assignments based on proof of process, rather than the accuracy of final answers. 

A.I. chatbots are one tool the students all agreed should not be considered a mental health solution. 

Chintala recognized why young people, especially young men, might gravitate towards A.I. to work through emotional concerns. Its accessibility makes it a convenient option, he said, and a non-human sounding board could appeal to those hesitant to be vulnerable with others about their feelings. 

Still, Balaghi said, A.I. isn’t an appropriate replacement for professional, in-person mental health support. Institutions should educate students on its limitations, as well as provide the human resources they really need. 

“University leaders, I believe, should not simply tell students to stop using A.I. Instead, I believe that they should ask what A.I. is providing that [the] current support system at their institution is not,” Balaghi said.

All of the panelists agreed that one of the best buffers against college pressures have been the people and spaces that make them feel secure. A sense of genuine belonging, whether to cultural groups or living-learning communities, has helped each make second homes of their campus. Accessible and culturally responsive mental health resources on campus, they added, can reinforce that safety, too.

“Community has made all of the difference for me,” Avi said. “I think universities do a really great job when they create spaces where students can find people who share some part of their identity.” 

Often, the message the panelists seemed most keen to get across was that they are eager to be involved in determining and improving the decisions about how to address their own health and wellness. 

“One thing I hope university leaders remember is that today’s students are incredibly invested in their campuses. I mean, they serve as our second home for a large majority of the year,” Avi said in a closing statement. 

“We don't want to just receive decisions. We actually want to help shape them.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.