Survey Gauges Student Supports for Well-Being at College

Colleges collect all kinds of data to understand student behaviors and needs each year, but they are less likely to connect students’ well-being to their own institutional performance.

Butler University’s Institute for Well-Being decided to flip the script, creating the Student Well-being for Institutional Support Survey in 2020.

This spring, the institute published its first annual SWISS report, using data from 25 institutions and 10,000 students from the 2021–22 academic year, providing a glimpse into where institutions can promote health and wellness for their student populations.

“[Students] bring all kinds of things and constructs and experiences to campus and as institutions. We’re never going to control for those things,” says Bridget Yuhas, executive director of the Institute for Well-Being. “But what we can control for is how well we support the students once they arrive on campus.”

The report: Since it launched in late 2020, 25 institutions and over 18,500 students have participated in SWISS. Results from around 10,000 students across its institutional partners are reflected in this year’s report.

Questions cover a range of topics, from academic supports to campus resources and residential supports. SWISS also gauges a student’s perceptions of diversity, equity and inclusion, of purpose, and of engagement on campus.

“No campus has unlimited resources, so being able to focus our resources in data-informed ways is and will continue to be so important going forward,” Yuhas says.

SWISS uses Qualtrics for data and experience management, allowing institutions to filter and populate reports but also see results from their own student population against other institutions’ data.

The need: Yuhas, who also serves as director of student affairs assessment and strategy at Butler, in Indianapolis, designed the survey for her own institution to evaluate students’ perception of well-being resources and support measures.

“It’s the first survey that we know of to ask students not about their individual well-being but about how well their college or university is doing in supporting them along various dimensions of their well-being,” Yuhas explains.

Most institutions are looking to support students’ mental health, but holistic student well-being should extend beyond the counseling center and involve the entire campus, Yuhas says.

Beyond improving the student experience, colleges and universities can improve their outcomes with attention focused on how they’re serving students.

“There’s a very large body of research that talks about [how], if you are able to increase student well-being along various dimensions, then outcomes like GPA, retention, sense of belonging, sense of engagement—all those things also increase,” Yuhas says. “It’s a really a great crossroads between student success and institutional success.”

The survey is designed to create directly actionable feedback for practitioners and institutions and easy-to-navigate data.

“Around 75 percent of students have opportunities to give feedback to their institution, but only about half felt like they were heard when they did provide feedback, so we know that there’s this gap between giving your input and seeing something happen as a result of it,” says Katie Johnson, global head of research for education at Qualtrics.

The results: Across the board, the report found six areas of development for institutions to consider: financial literacy education, faculty support in academic goal-setting, affordable housing, identity exploration, religious and spiritual interest exploration, and social connections in residence halls.

Some areas trended positively—over three-quarters of students found their institutions provided adequate academic advising, exercise or fitness facilities, and access to reliable internet.

Peer engagement also saw high marks:

• Eighty-two percent of respondents agreed their institution provides opportunities to meet other students.
• Eighty-one percent agreed their institution provided activities for students on or near campus.

The next steps: The first report covers the “nuts and bolts” of the data, Yuhas says, as researchers thought this information was important and novel. Next is “disaggregating, disaggregating, disaggregating.”

“We already know that student experiences vary by student characteristics, so we really want to dig in to that and be able to highlight areas of difference in student experiences by characteristics,” Yuhas says.

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