The Opportunity
Institutions of higher education (IHEs) are at the center of life, learning, work, and play for more than 25 million Americans, including almost 21 million students registered each year and 4 million faculty and staff; this positions colleges and universities to recognize and respond to factors influencing health, wellbeing, and equity in ways that ultimately can change the trajectory of health for a large segment of the population. Many of the core values of institutions of higher education – pursuit of learning and new knowledge, empowerment of learners, achieving equity in an increasingly diverse society, civic engagement, cross-sector collaboration, service, building community, and fostering wellbeing – are aligned with national action areas for mobilizing a culture of health and equitable wellbeing.
The path to improvement is anything but straightforward. We can accelerate transformational progress toward addressing the broad range of factors that influence health, wellbeing, and equity when we collectively embrace equitable wellbeing as a shared value and commit to experimentation using structured methods for changemaking, co-production and cross-sector collaboration, and openly sharing our learnings, successes, and failing forward experiences.
Significance
The relationship between health, wellbeing, and education has significant societal implications for the betterment of all three. The causal pathways between these outcomes are highly complex; however, individual-level interventions, institutional systems, and research often over-simplify this complexity and have yet to bend a concerning trend of worsening equitable wellbeing outcomes. As such, ANEW is important for several reasons:
Increasing Resource Allocation, While Not Meeting The Needs
College student wellbeing is now understood to be a critical factor influencing learning, retention, academic achievement, overall success, and lifelong flourishing. With increasingly diverse student populations, addressing the significant health and educational disparities is a moral imperative and core to institutional missions and societal economic vitality. While many academic institutions have significantly increased resources toward traditional student success and health initiatives, particularly mental health services, these resources are not meeting the increasing need for support or achieving widespread improvement of outcomes. The trends and models on wellbeing suggest that it is not financially sustainable to continue to invest in these traditional “reactive” models of support for students, but rather new models are needed that focus on creating proactive conditions that enable equitable wellbeing.
Gap in Pragmatic Research
As student health needs continue to grow, there is not widespread adoption of high-value, high-impact practices to improve equitable wellbeing and address wellbeing barriers to learning and academic achievement. Existing research, trends, and standard practice, together, suggest that institutions of higher education need new pragmatic evidence about what it will take to close these gaps.
Lack of Intersectional Translation Research and Communities of Practice
Many intractable challenges impacting college students are addressed as distinct and highly compartmentalized problems to be solved; yet, these challenges are interconnected, cannot be solved in siloes, and making progress on one outcome (e.g., health) of interest does not necessarily lead to improvement in other outcomes (e.g., educational outcomes), and vice versa. This network is innovative because it brings these challenges together under a single network to build a deep understanding of the intersectional problems, the system that produces it, and a shared working theory and process to improve.