Episode 122: Alexis Redding on Designing Better Transitions to College
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As we think about how students transition to college, how do we set expectations, how do we support students, and how is this all changing with social media - including for the better in some ways? We talk through these with Alexis Redding, developmental psychologist at Harvard's Graduate School of Education who co-leads their Transition to Adulthood Lab and Editor of the Book Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students. Discover how to dismantle perfectionist myths, support students through typical developmental hurdles, and build a stronger sense of campus belonging.
Reimagining College Transitions: Scaffolding Belonging, Mental Health, and Student Success
The transition to higher education is rarely a straightforward path. While society often perpetuates the cultural narrative that college will effortlessly become the "best four years of your life," the reality for incoming students is much more nuanced and unsettled. Moving away from home, managing a complex workload, and adjusting to new social dynamics naturally trigger feelings of isolation, anxiety, and self-doubt.
When institutions fail to normalize these early friction points, students frequently assume that their personal struggles are uniquely theirs. Reimagining the student journey requires higher education leaders to rethink how they manage student expectations, cultivate student belonging, and scaffold developmental challenges throughout the undergraduate lifecycle.
Unmasking Misconceptions in the Transition to College
A primary obstacle in designing an effective transition to college is overcoming the romanticized narrative surrounding the initial campus experience. Culturally, incoming students are bombarded with expectations that they will instantly bond with roommates, secure lifelong friendships during orientation, and easily navigate campus life.
When the ordinary challenges of university life set in, a severe mismatch occurs between student expectations and institutional reality. Research into first-year cohorts shows that students frequently look at their peers and falsely assume everyone else has life completely figured out. This social comparison breeds a quiet sense of panic.
Rather than shielding students from the reality that college can be difficult, higher education administrators must actively name and normalize these struggles. Acknowledging that transition periods are inherently unsettled allows institutions to lower student stress and equip them with effective coping mechanisms long before feelings of loneliness turn into acute distress.
Moving Beyond Orientation to Cultivate Student Belonging
Building a genuine sense of student belonging is foundational to academic achievement, emotional well-being, and long-term retention. However, traditional orientation models tend to front-load all social and developmental programming into the first ten days on campus. While those initial days are critical for establishing institutional norms and community standards, the support often drops off precisely when students need it most.
Student transition curves reveal that initial enthusiasm typically dips mid-semester as early social circles shift, academic pressures increase, and original roommate dynamics sour. Maintaining momentum requires universities to deploy ongoing, strategically timed interventions:
Spreading Out Engagement Opportunities: Rather than ending campus programming after move-in week, schedule social connections, dialogue circles, and community-building events during mid-semester dip points.
Providing Qualitative Feedback Loops: Combine quantitative satisfaction surveys with qualitative focus groups to discover the root "why" behind student friction points, such as hidden financial barriers or operational inefficiencies.
Creating Low-Stakes Entry Points: Offer ongoing opportunities for first-year students to connect with peer advisors, teaching assistants, and staff members outside formal advising sessions.
Empowering Staff Audits: Conduct operational audits from the student perspective to identify buried web links, misaligned shuttle schedules, or confusing administrative steps that create daily friction.
When students feel seen, known, and valued by at least one authentic contact on campus, struggle gets noticed early, preventing learners from falling through the cracks.
Decoupling Everyday Struggles from Clinical Mental Health Support
In recent years, elevated awareness around mental health in higher education has dramatically reduced stigma, encouraging more students to seek help. However, an unintended consequence of this shift is the conflation of typical developmental challenges with acute clinical mental health crises.
Because students often adopt clinical-sounding language from social media platforms, faculty and staff can feel overwhelmed or ill-equipped when a student reports feeling stressed, burnt out, or anxious. The knee-jerk reaction is frequently an immediate referral to the campus counseling center. While counseling centers play a vital role in managing acute crisis care, relying on them for routine developmental support overburdens clinical staff and disconnects students from everyday campus networks.
To create a balanced support environment, educators can utilize a five-question conversation framework to better assess student needs before making a referral:
What does that mean to you? (Clarifies the student's personal definition of their distress.)
How is that showing up in your life? (Determines whether the issue affects daily functionality, like sleeping or attending class.)
How long has this been going on? (Identifies whether the situation is an acute stress reaction or a prolonged challenge.)
How can I help? (Determines actionable next steps, such as contacting tutoring, career services, or student affairs.)
What kind of supports do you already have? (Assesses existing social networks, family support, or academic resources.)
Empowering faculty and staff to have these supportive, five-minute conversations ensures that students facing typical transition hurdles receive appropriate developmental support while preserving clinical capacity for those in serious crisis.
Episode 122 Transcript
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Alexis Redding: I think the more we tell honest stories to not just young people, but anybody starting college, and that can be at any age, the more we prepare them to navigate our institutions, and the better we have equipped them. And I do feel like that conversation is changing in important ways.
That was Alexis Redding a developmental psychologist at Harvard's Graduate School of Education who co-leads their Transition to Adulthood Lab and Editor of the Book Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students. We had a great conversation about how we set expectations, how we support students, and how this is all changing with social media - including for the better in some ways. I love episodes that are real conversations, and this is one of them. I hope you love it too. Let'd dive in.
Welcome to the Connected College podcast. I'm your host, Elliot. Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities.
Elliot Felix: Welcome, Alexis. I'm so excited about our conversation on designing transitions to college, and really to adulthood more broadly
Alexis Redding: Thank you, Elliot. I'm thrilled to be here
Elliot Felix: Tell me a little bit about how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today. I know lots of great things
Alexis Redding: I actually began my career as a college counselor. So I spent 10 years working with students, high schoolers preparing to transition into colleges and universities, and that is an incredibly privileged role or space to hold for young people. These were folks who were going directly from high school into college, so 17, 18 years old, and I got to carve out the space in my office for them to dream big about what they wanted their future to look like.
And I loved doing that work, but I started to see something that actually started to keep me up at night, really, which is that my students in the transition to college were struggling more than I had anticipated. And they would come back sometimes on their first holiday break home, sometimes at the end of the first year, to tell me about what had been going on since I saw them last.
And they would start the conversation in this joyful, exciting, these are the things we talked about that I was eager to do, the friends I met, the classes I've taken, the clubs and organizations I'm now part of. And almost inevitably, a couple of minutes into that conversation, they would slump back in the chair and lower their voice as if they were going to tell me a secret, and they would share with me some version of, "It's harder than I thought it would be."
And the conclusion at the end of that story was always that they looked around and everybody else seemed to have it figured out. Their conclusion was that they alone were struggling. And as I realized that there were parallels in all of these stories, but none of them were talking to each other, I started to ask questions about how we could better scaffold the experience of transitioning into college.
And so I had the opportunity at the tenure point in my career to reflect, and I thought I'd go back and I'd get my master's degree. I would spend one year, and then I would get right back into practice. But what I discovered is asking these questions about how we better scaffold the transition into college, and now teaching courses to the people who do that work on college and university campuses, was a different kind of impact that I could have.
And so now I'm 25 plus years into a career, 15 in this second chapter, of trying to help create campuses that better understand what students are going through and minimize the risk that they think that their struggles are uniquely theirs.
Elliot Felix: That's r- it's really inspiring to, I think, have had that direct work helping with the transitions and then finding a way to have the, broader impact and in a way not just assuage concerns, but address them before they happen. Transitions are such an important part of students being successful. What do you think is misunderstood about how students transition to college? Is it this like everybody's got it figured out but me? Or what are the biggest misconceptions? I know you always hear like your roommate's gonna be your best friend, right?
Which like never happens. That's a big one. But the expert in this. I'd love to hear your take.
Alexis Redding: Your expertise hit the nail right on the head. I think the biggest struggle in the transition is part of that roommate puzzle. It is the fact that we tell, culturally, a story that college will be the best four years of your life. You will meet your best friends. You will have experiences with people who will stand up for you at your wedding.
Elliot Felix: No pressure,
Alexis Redding: No pressure.
Elliot Felix: Such a low bar
Alexis Redding: It's, it is too glorious of a story for what happens on the ordinary Tuesday when you are in a new place, surrounded by new people. You haven't yet had the time to build the kind of meaningful connection and friendship that you're hoping to have. And the thing we know about transition, every time we are in a moment of transition, we are unsettled.
Everything about our daily lives feels different, and that can feel scary and intimidating as well as feeling exciting. And so what I've seen over the years is we're so scared to scare students by talking about the fact that college is going to be hard, that we just let that narrative stand of the best four years, which means we're not equipping them for success on those days when they're struggling.
I, over the years, have run several research studies with college students, particularly first-year college students, and I'll often interview roommates at different times, and each roommate will tell me some version of the story that their roommate has it all figured out. They've found their friends.
They're settled in. If only they could have that. And then I'll hear the flip side. But they're not talking to each other. And so one of the things that I train my student affairs folks to do who are in my classrooms is open up the conversation about what is hard, to name and normalize that as we are in this moment of figuring out our way and this new place, it is going to be hard, and that's normal and natural and expected, and you're not doing anything wrong
Elliot Felix: I think the point about ex- and managing expectations is just so critical, and it is certainly true that we come in with these expectations. And that mismatch between expectations and delivery is the root of so many issues, and one of my favorite examples of that is , maybe a little too far afield, but we'll see.
But, who has higher in-store satisfaction, Apple or Costco? And it turns out it's actually Costco
Alexis Redding: Okay
Elliot Felix: in part because you get exactly what you expect. Whereas
Alexis Redding: Oh, interesting
Elliot Felix: You get volume and lines and frenzy and cardboard. And that's exactly what you thought you were gonna get.
You go to an Apple store, you might have two wildly different experiences. You might not want someone to talk to you, and you're annoyed when they do, and you wanna just do self-service or you're just there to browse. On the other hand, you might wanna talk to someone and be left alone. And because the experiences are so varied, so are the expectations, and
Alexis Redding: Yeah
Elliot Felix: meet them. And I think, the better job we do of helping students understand what to expect to normalize that it's hard, that you may not feel like you belong, I think those are all steps in the right direction
Alexis Redding: Absolutely, and I think what it also does is it tamps down the sense of panic, not just for them, but for their families. When they call home and they're starting to question partway through that first semester, "Do I belong here? Did I pick the wrong school? Maybe I wanna take a gap year." If we don't know that happens for most students, usually halfway through the fall semester, then we panic as the caring adults, and for faculty and administrators as well.
We can actually do a much better job of designing programs for the moments that we know students are going to be struggling in these ways. So I teach all of my students about the W-curve, which is this predictive model of starting at the honeymoon phase, the big excitement over the best four years, and then there's a dip of culture shock, of recalibrating, and how we have these natural sort of ebbs and flows.
What we do now as colleges and universities is we front-load all of our programming during orientation and in those first couple of weeks, and then we figure students have found their people, they've settled in, we don't need to keep hosting events. We actually do, because partway through the semester, those early friendships have fizzled.
As you had mentioned, the sort of promise of the roommate being your best friend, that relationship might sour. The complexity of the schoolwork, navigating day-to-day life, all of those things get harder at exactly the moment that we stop showing up and inviting them for pizza and conversation. And so it's a really simple way that we can rethink our budgeting and our programming calendar, that there are times when students need this even more than those first couple of weeks.
Elliot Felix: I love thinking about the, the student journey and the ebb and flow and the W and maybe spreading things out. So it's it's the same way that learning design has changed from just in case to just in time. And and I think it, it only makes sense that you'd apply that to college. What are some of your favorite interventions besides, spreading out the programming? What are some of the other things you found in your research that help with these transitions?
Alexis Redding: One of the things that I find really interesting, and this isn't a program per se, but it's something to know in designing programs. And I'll backtrack by saying when I designed my dissertation study years ago, I decided that I was going to follow three cohorts of first-year students throughout the arc of their entire first year.
And what I wanted to see is how what happened during orientation shaped their understanding of the community, their role in it, and how that played out across the nine months that they would be in their first year. And these were campuses, one was in California, one was in the mountains in Vermont and one was here in Massachusetts.
So I was traveling back and forth for nine months. And I thought that I needed that amount of time to see the impact of what happened during orientation. The reality is, within 10 days, you could actually see the difference between those cohorts of students. Because when they were in the moment of transition of starting college, everything that happened in that first week and a half landed so strongly.
It's if you get on a plane and have the privilege of visiting a different country. As soon as you get there, you're hyper-aware of the norms of the place, the smells, the tastes, everything about it. Our students are open and receptive in those first 10 days to what it is that we tell them we believe, how to be a member of this community, what are the norms around academic integrity, which is one of the things I was looking at.
And what's really interesting is they then hold us accountable for that, as they should. That what we promised, what we told them it would be like to be a student here, if we fall short of that, that is the moment where we lose them. And so just in thinking about designing programs, we want to really capitalize on those first 10 days and make sure that we are showing up authentically and telling them a story about what it truly means to be a part of this community
Elliot Felix: So as you're thinking about, you're conducting this research better inform the transition to college, and you're understanding things like the importance of the 10 but then also spreading things out and setting and managing expectations for these transitions. W- what's the role that transitions play in student success?
Like, how does it set students up for success? And Do you have a framework or an approach to this or some mnemonic we should be thinking about, which is this is our checklist, belonging, expectations, schedule equals I don't know. But what's your approach to designing these transitions?
Alexis Redding: So you've cued in again on what I think is the most important thing, which is building that sense of belonging. Because what we actually know is that every single positive outcome that we want to help facilitate in colleges and universities can be tied to a sense of belonging. That's academic performance, but it's also how students are doing emotionally, whether or not they are getting help, and whether or not they are persisting to the other end.
Our, our one lever is sense of belonging, and the reason is that when students are struggling, if there are people who they are connected to, even if they don't share that they're struggling, other people will see that, and they are then able to recommend, "Have you tried the tutoring center?" "Here's a resource that's been helpful to me," or, "Let's study together."
The risk is the student who doesn't have the sense of belonging and who is having that typical feeling of loneliness and disconnection, nobody necessarily notices that. And so belonging is the way that we ensure that the struggle gets noticed, and so we can connect students to the help that they need.
Elliot Felix: When I at the data or I visit campuses or work with campuses, it's very heartening to see much recognition there is on the centrality of belonging. And I know Maslow's hierarchy is a little bit outdated and to some degree debunked, but it still to me plays an important role in understanding that, so many of the things build on that. And I wonder, how do you break down belonging or how you, how do you measure it to know- how well the transition's going? Is it as simple as asking them, "Do you feel like you belong here?" Or know in the Gallup Q12, do you have a friend at work? But what's your way of getting at that as a leading indicator?
Alexis Redding: I think it's whether or not you have someone on campus with whom you feel that you can be some authentic version of yourself, and that does not necessarily
Elliot Felix: interesting
Alexis Redding: have to be a peer. That can be a residential assistant, a teaching assistant, a faculty member. Being seen and known and valued for who you are is such an important part of the identity development that happens during the college years, so that is really important.
I think also the more that we see, and this is something that we can count, whether or not students are showing up for office hour conversations or drop-ins, having those points of connection where we can level set, where we can ask targeted questions about what's going on, and where we can also get to know students well enough to see when changes are happening so that we can begin to flag, "I think there might be something going on that isn't great here," so we can make sure that they are not falling through the cracks, and they are- they're starting to connect.
One of the cool things that I get to do here at Harvard is I I co-lead the Transition to Adulthood Lab, which uses archival materials that go all the way back to the '40s of interviews with college students. And what we have seen in those interviews from the '40s, which are just in this one particular school, Harvard Radcliffe, with all of its quirks and uniqueness, but what we see is the way students were talking about the loneliness that they felt in particular during the transition were absolutely captured by those same researchers in the 1970s, and they are absolutely captured by r- my research today in the 2020s, that there is something consistent about that feeling of loneliness.
And so the more we can be very aware that this is reality, that this is going to be new for most students, and that part of tamping down on that sense of loneliness is just being in community that is really important.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, and you're also in doing that, you're coupling subjective and objective data, which I think gives you a good picture, right? 'Cause are they-- how do they feel and how do they-- Well, and feelings are data, but how do they feel, but also what are they showing up to? And then you can put those together, which I think is really great. And I think NSSE asked about belonging
and they had three components, and I think one of them was like, "Can I be myself?" Something like that. Do you have some kind of national instrument that gets at that
Alexis Redding: So I think we don't need a national instrument. I think it's something that we can measure on our campuses for ourselves. And indeed, being able ... I'm a qualitative researcher by training, so it's not just about surveys.
It's about having focus groups in which, we bring in the good pizza and the fresh berries and all of the things that are great enticements when you've been eating dorm food or dining hall food for a long time, and carve out the space for students to tell us what are the ways that they feel connected to the institution, how do they feel a sense of longing, and what are the ways that they don't?
And what I've seen in my research is that we are too quick to dismiss some of those stories as not being relevant, and it is to our detriment when we do that. I'll give you an example. I was out at a, a rural college campus, and students kept mentioning that the dryers did not work well. And the first couple of times I heard it, it was in the ether, like that's something the students are bothered by.
But it didn't seem to be a puzzle of belonging or connection or what we were doing in terms of student success. The third time I heard it, the student told me why, and the why was everything. What was happening is that the students who were on financial aid were finding that they were required to essentially double or triple the amount of money that they had budgeted for doing laundry in order to run the dryers multiple times so that they could dry their sheets and towels.
And so the, result of that is that they were having to string clotheslines in their dorm rooms where they were hanging up the sheets and towels. And it was this big visual announcement to their classmates that the amount of money that they had budgeted for laundry had run out. And so suddenly it was actually an equity puzzle.
It was a way that they were being, feeling singled out by the institution when they were saying, "This is a problem." But nobody asked the follow-up question of why is it a problem. And that's actually something we can fix, right? And so that institution in particular has fixed that problem. But I ... It is always the perfect example for me of we have to ask the why.
So when you start hearing, "There's an issue with the textbooks," what's the why? We can probably guess. The textbooks are too expensive. Like, where ... Exactly. So make sure if you don't know the why, ask, because the students will tell you. And we can change those things.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, it's such a great point. And, you need the quantitative data, but you also need the qualitative especially to understand it. And A similar-- One of the anecdotes in my book, the assessment chapter, it talks about an institution was getting low satisfaction in parking. And so they were like, "Okay, we're gonna add more parking." Satisfaction went down. And then they finally asked the students, and they realized it wasn't the amount of parking, it was the quality of it. so adding more of what they didn't want was like a slap in the face. And everyone thought they were doing a great job, but they didn't have-- they didn't know the why behind the dissatisfaction.
A lot of these things, it only takes 10 students. You can,
you c- a, a small N will still give you huge insight
Alexis Redding: Absolutely.
Elliot Felix: why behind,
Alexis Redding: Yes. And I think even in the instances where we don't have students reporting, we can experience our institution through the lens of a student. So one of the things that I love to train my student affairs- students to do is I give them a, a series of 15 questions. You are a student at X institution, and you need to know these 15 things: the hours of daycare, the parking, how much it costs to get a transcript sent somewhere.
And I ask them to use the website and click through. And the question is: how hard is it to get from the first click to the piece of information? And it is amazing the obstacles that they instantly surface. And we need a web designer to fix some of them, the broken links or the thing that's buried under seven, different clicks or leading you astray.
But it's amazing how quickly you understand why when a student says, "I don't know how to do X," and you're like, "But that's on the website." Is it? Or is it accessible on the website? And we can do those things. We can do our own audits of, is the shuttle schedule actually aligned with when the dining hall is open, and are those things aligned with when classes start?
Because all of those start to impact how the student is navigating the institution. And they're, again, tweaks that we can make that don't require months of study and groups of, faculty and administrators working together. It's, "Oh, if we change this by 10 minutes," and think about the impact. If these faculty are able to change their schedule by 10 minutes, does that help the student show up and be there on time and be fed and safe and all of those things?
Then that's worth considering
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Elliot Felix: Absolutely. So we've been talking about the transition to college and the role it plays in student success, and I think we've been having a great discussion about belonging and expectations and schedules and all these different factors. But we've been focused on today, and I would love to see you shine up your crystal ball a little bit and give us a sense of how these things might be changing in the future. How might the transition to college change, get harder, easier, different?
Alexis Redding: I think the more we tell honest stories to not just young people, but anybody starting college, and that can be at any age, the more we prepare them to navigate our institutions, and the better we have equipped them. And I do feel like that conversation is changing in important ways. In some ways, that conversation is actually being very much benefited by social media, and I know most hot takes about social media start from a negative lens, but what I'm seeing from students on social media who are posting about college, over the past two years in particular, they have been much more honest and candid about what it is that is hard about college.
And so they are starting to debunk some of that mythology about the best four years, talking about loneliness, talking about how hard it is to find friends and to meet people and to build connection. I think all of those things will serve us well.
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Alexis Redding: I think the other thing that is changing, and that I hope our book is helping to inform, is that we are starting to have a more nuanced conversation about mental health for college students. And the driving mission of our book is that we are trying to decouple two things that are happening simultaneously that we have accidentally started to conflate into one thing, and that is that there are students who are struggling in typical ways that we have seen for generations with loneliness, building friendship, the kind of things we've been talking about, and then there are students who are having clinical mental health challenges, and we wanna make sure that they get the clinical care that they need.
But what has happened during the pandemic and after is that because this is such a sensitive conversation and it is so high-stakes, we have all started to panic in response to every student who tells us they're having a hard time, and automatically, no matter what they say, refer them to the campus
And the counseling center is great at the things it is supposed to do, which is helping students who are on the verge of crisis or in crisis. They're not great at the student who's having roommate conflict. That's not what they're equipped to do, and they don't have the time and bandwidth. And so what we are trying to do is empower faculty, staff, and administrators with the knowledge so that they don't have to panic, and they can take five minutes to have a conversation and figure out, is this something that is critical and clinical, or is this something developmental and expected where I can refer a student to the tutoring center or to career services?
And so one of the things that I talk a lot about is how to respond to the fact that students are using a lot of clinical-sounding language and terminology that they are getting from social media. So if a student comes in and they tell me they're having panic attacks or they have chronic PTSD, my instinct, if I don't stop and pause, is, "Oh, no, that is something that absolutely needs the clinical mental health center."
But if I take five minutes to have a conversation and I ask them five questions- I can figure out if that's true. And what we know is most of the advice students are getting on social media about mental health concerns is wrong. Rather than critiquing them for using the wrong terminology, let's just generously say they're asking for help.
It doesn't matter what words they're using. So the first question we ask is, "What does that mean to you?" And then, "How is that showing up in your life?" So if a student tells me they're having panic attacks, and I say, "What does that mean to you?" And they say, I'm really just overwhelmed with the amount of work that I have, and, I'm working late into the night, which I don't love doing, and feeling stressed about it," that sounds typical to me.
I still wanna interrogate. I have other questions to answer. But that's very different from the student who says, "I can't get out of bed. I am struggling to walk down the hall and take a shower. I can't show up to class. I wrote my paper. I can't hand it in." Then I can hear in what they have said that there's something more serious, and that's beyond my capacity.
So I ask, "What does that mean to you? How is that showing up? How long has that been going on? What kind of supports do you already have, and how can I help?" And then I am much better equipped. If I'm in any sort of doubt about what's going on, I'm going to refer them either to Student Affairs or to the Mental Health Center because I don't wanna get it wrong.
But if I get a response from them that tells me they're having a typical struggle with coping with the workload and scheduling and this new place, then I don't have to refer them. And if I don't have to refer them, that means I can have a conversation. I can connect them to the incredibly well-trained resources that we have and make sure they have what they need, but also keep lines of communication open.
And what happens if a student is having a typical challenge and we refer them is we shut down the avenue of communication. They don't always then seek help, and we might have panicked them in the process. And so just taking the time to ask these five questions, whether or not we get to the referral on the other side, at least equips us with the knowledge.
And if it is a referral, we also have that information to share in the warm handoff to our colleagues so that we can say, "This student is sharing with me that this problem has been happening for two months. Here's how it's impacting them. I need you to see them right away." And maybe I walk them over to Health Services if they need it or to the dean's office or have them make the call, while they're with me and set up the appointment.
Elliot Felix: There's both a greater awareness of mental health challenges as students transition, but there's a hope for greater nuance in understanding those and dealing with those challenges short-circuiting the mental health equals more counseling to take a more like holistic view
Alexis Redding: We never want to underreact to a student in crisis. We never wanna minimize what they're going through, but there is a more humane way to have these conversations, and when we take a couple of minutes to interrogate what's happening, we are just better equipped to help them
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Do you think doing that is also gonna require a different kind of culture around liability and risk? 'Cause I f- I feel like that's sometimes what stops-- You know, if somebody approaches their professor those kind of concerns and they don't feel, feel semi-equipped to have the conversation, but they don't wanna get it wrong the one time that with the one student , that can't get out of bed or I guess if they got out of bed, they wouldn't be talking, but what has to change in order to have that more nuanced view and conversation?
Alexis Redding: So what we know, and there was a study that came out of Boston University and Healthy Minds Network around 2021, so pandemic times, but the data seem to be holding true. About 80% of faculty reported having conversations with students where the student mentioned a challenge around their mental health and wellbeing.
30% of those faculty members felt equipped to have that conversation, which means we have a huge gap. Our faculty may be the people who see students most consistently over time, and these conversations are landing in our offices. And so it is not a question of should I be involved in this conversation or should I not be involved in it?
You are involved in this conversation, and your responsibility is to make sure that student gets the help that they need. That might mean referring, and in any moment where you have a sense of doubt, refer. Pick up the phone, call the dean of students, the student affairs office, call the campus mental health center, call 988, the crisis helpline.
Those are all opportunities that we have to get more information. But what we don't want to do is say, "I don't wanna open a door to liability, so I'm not going to be involved," because you are involved. You are part of that student's life. You are part of that journey, and you are more likely to see what's going on than almost anybody else on campus.
And so we need to train faculty members, and they need to understand they're in this conversation whether they want to be or not because that's who students are turning to.
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Elliot Felix: That just makes a ton of sense. And as we wrap up, in addition to the, all the great advice you've already shared, but what's your best advice on helping institutions adapt to this future and design better transitions to college?
Alexis Redding: I think my simple advice is get more student voices in the room. Because there is no one-size-fits-all, here's how this should work for all colleges and universities. Every institution is unique and different. Whether or not you have a fully residential community, a fully online community, all of these interactions are going to look different.
And so have conversations with your students. Have it while they are students, have it after they have graduated, get their voices into the room, and really listen to what they are saying, because they will tell you the ways that you can make things better for them in the moment or from for the people who are following them.
The problem is when we solicit that information, we don't always listen to it, and so that's the key. What are they telling us? Why? And how can we change it?
Elliot Felix: So you have to be hearing about the dryers.
Alexis Redding: You have to be
Elliot Felix: and you have to be hearing, and then you have to act
Alexis Redding: Yes, there's so much opportunity here to make daily life better for students if we get their voices centered in the conversations, and that does not mean spend an entire semester in a committee coming up with a plan and then running it by a group of students. It means that's the starting point.
Elliot Felix: With them, yeah
Alexis Redding: Exactly, getting their voice at the beginning so that we design things that actually meet them where they are and that actually make a difference. It preserves our resources because we're not wasting it on things that don't help, and it also means that our students feel seen and heard and valued because we want to do better by them, and there's an opportunity to do that
Elliot Felix: Alexis, great stuff and also great book, "Mental Health in College," which I just applaud the directness of that title. As somebody who wrote a book called "How to Get the Most Out of College," I just love calling things what they are. So thank you for your work and your book, and we'll, folks should check that out. They can get that through Harvard. What? Through
Alexis Redding: I...
Elliot Felix: Education Press?
Alexis Redding: Yes, and wherever books are sold. But thank you, it was wonderful to be in conversation today
Elliot Felix: Awesome. Thanks, Alexis
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Alexis Redding: So you've cued in again on what I think is the most important thing, which is building that sense of belonging. Because what we actually know is that every single positive outcome that we want to help facilitate in colleges and universities can be tied to a sense of belonging. That's academic performance, but it's also how students are doing emotionally, whether or not they are getting help, and whether or not they are persisting to the other end.
Our, our one lever is sense of belonging, and the reason is that when students are struggling, if there are people who they are connected to, even if they don't share that they're struggling, other people will see that, and they are then able to recommend, "Have you tried the tutoring center?" "Here's a resource that's been helpful to me," or, "Let's study together."
The risk is the student who doesn't have the sense of belonging and who is having that typical feeling of loneliness and disconnection, nobody necessarily notices that. And so belonging is the way that we ensure that the struggle gets noticed, and so we can connect students to the help that they need.
Elliot Felix: When I at the data or I visit campuses or work with campuses, it's very heartening to see much recognition there is on the centrality of belonging. And I know Maslow's hierarchy is a little bit outdated and to some degree debunked, but it still to me plays an important role in understanding that, so many of the things build on that. And I wonder, how do you break down belonging or how you, how do you measure it to know- how well the transition's going? Is it as simple as asking them, "Do you feel like you belong here?" Or know in the Gallup Q12, do you have a friend at work? But what's your way of getting at that as a leading indicator?
Alexis Redding: I think it's whether or not you have someone on campus with whom you feel that you can be some authentic version of yourself, and that does not necessarily
Elliot Felix: interesting
Alexis Redding: have to be a peer. That can be a residential assistant, a teaching assistant, a faculty member. Being seen and known and valued for who you are is such an important part of the identity development that happens during the college years, so that is really important.
I think also the more that we see, and this is something that we can count, whether or not students are showing up for office hour conversations or drop-ins, having those points of connection where we can level set, where we can ask targeted questions about what's going on, and where we can also get to know students well enough to see when changes are happening so that we can begin to flag, "I think there might be something going on that isn't great here," so we can make sure that they are not falling through the cracks, and they are- they're starting to connect.
One of the cool things that I get to do here at Harvard is I I co-lead the Transition to Adulthood Lab, which uses archival materials that go all the way back to the '40s of interviews with college students. And what we have seen in those interviews from the '40s, which are just in this one particular school, Harvard Radcliffe, with all of its quirks and uniqueness, but what we see is the way students were talking about the loneliness that they felt in particular during the transition were absolutely captured by those same researchers in the 1970s, and they are absolutely captured by r- my research today in the 2020s, that there is something consistent about that feeling of loneliness.
And so the more we can be very aware that this is reality, that this is going to be new for most students, and that part of tamping down on that sense of loneliness is just being in community that is really important.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, and you're also in doing that, you're coupling subjective and objective data, which I think gives you a good picture, right? 'Cause are they-- how do they feel and how do they-- Well, and feelings are data, but how do they feel, but also what are they showing up to? And then you can put those together, which I think is really great. And I think NSSE asked about belonging
and they had three components, and I think one of them was like, "Can I be myself?" Something like that. Do you have some kind of national instrument that gets at that
Alexis Redding: So I think we don't need a national instrument. I think it's something that we can measure on our campuses for ourselves. And indeed, being able ... I'm a qualitative researcher by training, so it's not just about surveys.
It's about having focus groups in which, we bring in the good pizza and the fresh berries and all of the things that are great enticements when you've been eating dorm food or dining hall food for a long time, and carve out the space for students to tell us what are the ways that they feel connected to the institution, how do they feel a sense of longing, and what are the ways that they don't?
And what I've seen in my research is that we are too quick to dismiss some of those stories as not being relevant, and it is to our detriment when we do that. I'll give you an example. I was out at a, a rural college campus, and students kept mentioning that the dryers did not work well. And the first couple of times I heard it, it was in the ether, like that's something the students are bothered by.
But it didn't seem to be a puzzle of belonging or connection or what we were doing in terms of student success. The third time I heard it, the student told me why, and the why was everything. What was happening is that the students who were on financial aid were finding that they were required to essentially double or triple the amount of money that they had budgeted for doing laundry in order to run the dryers multiple times so that they could dry their sheets and towels.
And so the, result of that is that they were having to string clotheslines in their dorm rooms where they were hanging up the sheets and towels. And it was this big visual announcement to their classmates that the amount of money that they had budgeted for laundry had run out. And so suddenly it was actually an equity puzzle.
It was a way that they were being, feeling singled out by the institution when they were saying, "This is a problem." But nobody asked the follow-up question of why is it a problem. And that's actually something we can fix, right? And so that institution in particular has fixed that problem. But I ... It is always the perfect example for me of we have to ask the why.
So when you start hearing, "There's an issue with the textbooks," what's the why? We can probably guess. The textbooks are too expensive. Like, where ... Exactly. So make sure if you don't know the why, ask, because the students will tell you. And we can change those things.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, it's such a great point. And, you need the quantitative data, but you also need the qualitative especially to understand it. And A similar-- One of the anecdotes in my book, the assessment chapter, it talks about an institution was getting low satisfaction in parking. And so they were like, "Okay, we're gonna add more parking." Satisfaction went down. And then they finally asked the students, and they realized it wasn't the amount of parking, it was the quality of it. so adding more of what they didn't want was like a slap in the face. And everyone thought they were doing a great job, but they didn't have-- they didn't know the why behind the dissatisfaction.
A lot of these things, it only takes 10 students. You can,
you c- a, a small N will still give you huge insight
Alexis Redding: Absolutely.
Elliot Felix: why behind,
Alexis Redding: Yes. And I think even in the instances where we don't have students reporting, we can experience our institution through the lens of a student. So one of the things that I love to train my student affairs- students to do is I give them a, a series of 15 questions. You are a student at X institution, and you need to know these 15 things: the hours of daycare, the parking, how much it costs to get a transcript sent somewhere.
And I ask them to use the website and click through. And the question is: how hard is it to get from the first click to the piece of information? And it is amazing the obstacles that they instantly surface. And we need a web designer to fix some of them, the broken links or the thing that's buried under seven, different clicks or leading you astray.
But it's amazing how quickly you understand why when a student says, "I don't know how to do X," and you're like, "But that's on the website." Is it? Or is it accessible on the website? And we can do those things. We can do our own audits of, is the shuttle schedule actually aligned with when the dining hall is open, and are those things aligned with when classes start?
Because all of those start to impact how the student is navigating the institution. And they're, again, tweaks that we can make that don't require months of study and groups of, faculty and administrators working together. It's, "Oh, if we change this by 10 minutes," and think about the impact. If these faculty are able to change their schedule by 10 minutes, does that help the student show up and be there on time and be fed and safe and all of those things?
Then that's worth considering
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to elliotfelix.com for more information about my book, the Connected College articles I've written and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download information on upcoming events and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.