Helping Every Student be “Whole”

I have been thinking about something Dr. Ralph Nilson, the President of Vancouver Island University, recently said to me: The core purpose of postsecondary education is to help every student become a “whole person” — the kind of passionate, curious, caring young adult who will go on to make our world a better place.

I couldn’t agree more. Watching my own university students grow into their whole selves has been one of the greatest joys of my teaching experience.

Yet, if that is our mission, as university administrators and academics, are we doing all we can to support it? If that is what we value, are we focusing campus resources in the most beneficial, student-centered way? Becoming a whole person is in part a function of the intellectual enrichment at which universities excel. But it is not enough to celebrate the life of the mind when students’ minds are overburdened by stress.

Numerous indicators show we have a crisis on our hands. In 2017, the Canadian Statistics Agency reported that 15 to 24-year-olds today have higher rates of anxiety and depression than any other age group. In the United States, feelings of “overwhelming anxiety” among college students spiked in 2016 to 62 percent.

I’ve seen the way the alarm is being sounded, at my university and elsewhere. Students, faculty, and administrators alike have organized, advocated, and invested in critical services to promote student wellbeing and respond to crises when they occur. In conversations on the matter with a top university administrator, she told me that mental health on campus is the most serious problem we face. Yet for all we’re doing, the data shows we still have far to go.

Of course, many factors exacerbate mental health issues on campus — pressure to succeed, financial strain, the existential confusion of becoming an adult, and more. But as leaders strive to design campus systems that actively reinforce mental health, one part of the solution may be resting in the palm of our hands.

As psychologist Dr. Jean Twenge wrote in The Atlantic last September, “The twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever.”

Dr. Twenge’s work is part of a growing body of research that finds screen time less fulfilling and more anxiety-inducing than good old-fashioned face-to-face time. That’s a problem for young people, who are estimated to spend one third of their free time staring at a screen.

What’s worse, research suggests that developmentally, young people are especially susceptible to the isolating effects of smartphones and social media. Earlier this year, an article published in Nature pointed out that adolescence is a time when peer acceptance becomes paramount, meaning not only are young people more likely to follow their friends onto social media platforms, they’re more sensitive to the feedback they receive on those platforms. The cycle is vicious. According to researchers at the University of Sheffield, “spending one hour a day chatting on social networks reduces the probability of being completely satisfied with life overall by approximately 14 percentage points.” Statistically, that’s more significant than the comparable effects of skipping school or being raised in a single-parent household.

Young people are well aware of the effects of smartphones and social media on how they feel. A 2017 British Royal Society for Public Health study on the issue found that “young people themselves say four of the five most used social media platforms [i.e. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter] actually make their feelings of anxiety worse.”

And they’re taking action. A recent survey by the research group Origin found that 34 percent of people between the age of 18 and 25 have deleted one or more of their social media platforms, in part because of the negativity they experienced.

These young people want an overhaul of their relationship to technology — and universities can be allies in helping students to unplug and reconnect. At campuses across North America, students, faculty, and administrators are putting forward solutions we could implement right away. For instance, the academic Donna Freitas surveyed more than 1,000 college students about social media. In a School Library Journal article summarizing her findings, Freitas wrote,

Over and over, at every university, I heard stories like this: “There’s this one spot in the third-floor sub-basement of the library…By the wall past the elevators…I always go there to study, because the Wi-Fi doesn’t reach. You have to get there early — it’s always jammed.”

Following their lead, Freitas recommends WiFi-free zones on campus, where students can read, think, and write without distraction; places where they can give unmitigated attention and care to friends, check in with their own thoughts, and reconnect with nature.

Similarly, in their essay on “Elevating the Student Experience,” Amy Aponte, an expert on campus infrastructure, and Gay Perez, executive director of housing & residence life at the University of Virginia, have called for “deep attention spaces” — device-free dining halls and dorm rooms, optimized with natural light and tranquil aesthetics. More provocatively, they suggest that tech-friendly spaces “be made intentionally less desirable to inhabit for longer visits.”

Inside the classroom, professors must do their part not only to help students engage with the material but with the community around them. Technology may be an aid in the modern classroom, but the work of building meaningful relationships requires a human touch. This isn’t supplemental to our work as educators; it’s integral. The best learning happens in caring classrooms, where people feel secure, respected, valued, and seen. And in my experience, a deliberate effort to foster interaction between professor and student, and among students as peers, enriches the classroom experience in all directions, making it more rewarding to teach as well as learn.

Of course, systemic change on a critical issue like mental health requires concerted leadership from the top. In addition to investing in traditional mental health services, and exploring student-centered approaches like the ideas described above, school administrations should commit to tracking the determinants of their students’ wellbeing. As Professor Lord Richard Layard, a leading scholar of happiness at the London School of Economics, often says, “Unless they measure it, they don’t treasure it.” Consistent, reliable data will help us assess, adjust, and improve our efforts to make universities places where students can be happy, healthy, and whole.