College Student Wellbeing and Student Success
Even before the global pandemic, Covid-19, college students had been experiencing a “student wellbeing crisis” (Bladek, 2021). So much so, that universities and colleges across the globe have been prioritizing student wellbeing as a way to create healthy campus climates and learning environments. Wellbeing measures have become part of college and university mission statements as well (Baik, 2019). Recognizing the importance of wellbeing during the college years leads to greater health later in life (Baldwin, et al., 2017). With no single, agreed-upon definition of “wellbeing,” Travia’s (2022) framework conceptualizes wellbeing within a college campus context as inclusive of the spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, and social aspects of a college student’s life: “Wellbeing is dependent upon good health, positive social relationships, and availability and access to basic resources [food, shelter, income]” (p. 76).
Despite these urgent concerns over student wellbeing by college administration, staff, faculty, and educational scholars, feelings of isolation, social anxiety, stress, and depression continue to be part of the daily life for a growing population of students (Gopalan, et al., 2022). Acknowledging that each student, individually and culturally, has their own wellbeing concerns, there are some commonalities affecting student wellbeing. Financial concerns coupled with increasing tuition, food, and housing insecurities, availability of healthy food, access to mental health care, sleep challenges, feeling overwhelmed by increased homework demands, and difficulties to create social connections on campus are a few of the stressors (Bladek, 2021). Additionally, students from under-represented communities - Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian - and first-generation college students also feel the impact of microaggressions (Travia, 2022) and discriminatory, culturally exclusive campus environments (Strayhorn, 2019) which have an impact on their wellbeing. Within the strategies colleges and universities can take to boost student wellbeing is to make student sense of belonging a priority. Having a sense of belonging can buffer students against mental health issues, such as the symptoms associated with depression and stress (Gopalan, 2022). Colleges would do well to promote belonging as a public health outcome (Gopalan, 2022), yet there is little understanding about how a school’s environment influences students’ sense of belonging (Strayhorn, 2019). The focus of the next section will be on understanding how student’ sense of belonging functions on college campuses.