Mental Health Supports: Moving Higher Ed Toward a Culture of Care

Sophie White: Hello everyone. Happy 2025, and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I am Sophie White, I'm a content marketing and program manager with EDUCAUSE, and I'm one of your co-hosts for today's podcast discussion. Jenay, do you want to introduce yourself?

Jenay Robert: Yeah, sure. I'm Jenay Robert and I am the other co-host. I am a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE.

Sophie White: So one of us is in Colorado and one of us is in Florida. And we were just saying you can guess which is which based on our outfit choice for today. But today we'll be discussing the 2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Action Plan: Mental Health Supports. And we're thrilled to have two special guests with us today in our virtual studio. I'll tell you a bit about both of them and then we'll jump into our discussion. So, we have Nicole Muscanell, who's a researcher at EDUCAUSE Nicole was trained as a social psychologist and has 15 years of experience in higher education as a researcher and faculty member. Her recent work explores faculty and student technology use workforce challenges, analytics and emerging trends, shaping teaching, learning, cybersecurity and privacy in higher education. We also have Jennifer Henkle from NASPA with us today. Jennifer is a director of Sexual Violence Prevention and Response.

She's a compassionate and dedicated social worker and student affairs professional with extensive experience in program development, research and advocacy, specializing in sexual violence prevention and response and mental health. She has a strong background in supporting students facing personal challenges and has worked in residence life case management, survivor advocacy, and respondent services. Jennifer has a master of social work from the University of Michigan and currently leads strategic initiatives for NASPA's Culture of Respect, working to create safer campus communities through education, development and collaboration with institutions of higher education. So thank you Jennifer for joining us too. I'm really excited about this Ikas NASPA collaboration. I did not tell you I've been a NASPA kind of fan girl for a while. I've been to the annual conference a couple of times and my last role and really loved it. So I'm psyched to cough to you today.

So, we really wanted to kickstart this conversation by talking about mental health in higher education and really how this action plan came to be looking at what EDUCAUSE does in supporting technology initiatives in higher education, technology, leadership. Mental health isn't a typical subject that we see ourselves addressing, but it's really important. So can you just talk a little bit about this action plan and how it came to be?

Nicole Muscanell: Sure, I'll kick it off. Basically, our action plans always are, well for the most part, our companion pieces that stem from our Horizon reports. If you look at our Horizon reports every year we report on trends and then also we have a section that's called Key Technologies and Practices. Those are practices, issues, technologies that panelists think are going to have the potential to either accelerate or mitigate some of the other trends in the report. And so for the 2024 Teaching and Learning Horizon Report, one of the KTPs was supporting mental health for all stakeholders at campuses, and we just decided that it was a very timely and relevant topic. And so we chose to focus our action plan specifically on that. And I'll turn it over to Janay because she can tell you a little bit more about the general purpose of the action plans and how we end up from the Horizon report to this specific spinoff report.

Jenay Robert: Yeah, people love the action plans, the Horizon reports because they give us this big picture view of all of the macro trends that are happening, and then it sort of nods to what we can do as a community to see the future or create the future that we want to see. But it doesn't necessarily give us this step-by-step instruction manual for what to do with those results. And so what we do with every single Horizon report is we publish a companion action plan. And I think it's not always fully obvious to the reader actually what the connection there is because it's not always spelled out that every action plan is specifically one of the key technologies or practices from the proceeding horizon report. So in this case, as Nicole explained, there was mental health brought up as a key supporting mental health as a key practice for supporting the future of higher education.

And so the spirit of the action plan then is to help readers sort of digest that very specific piece of the puzzle and think about what to do next. Insights are useless unless we can go to action. The other thing I'll point out just at a high level about the action plans is that every action plan has instructions for the reader to create their own action plan. And I always encourage people to really take that piece seriously. Not only can you use those tools to think about the future of, in this case mental health, but if you go back and you read the previous Horizon report and you say, yes, we need to take action in mental health, but there's some other things you want to take action on as well, you can really choose any topic you wish and carry out your own little action plan. So that's kind of the purpose of the action plan in a nutshell, just driving from insight to action.

Sophie White: That's awesome. Thank you for the background on the action plans. And I would love to hear before we dive into specifically some of the actions detailed, why is mental health so important right now in 2025? Why are we making an actions plan about this and dedicating so many resources to this topic?

Jenay Robert: Maybe before I crack a joke about how I would just talk to my therapist about everything this year, it's like every other sentence coming out of my mouth is I need to talk to my therapist about that. That is my off-the-cuff answer, but I think Jennifer's going to have a serious answer for us.

Jennifer Henkle: I think it's always been an issue. I've been on campus or was on campus for a long time prior to coming to NASPA and it was certainly something that we saw across the board as a growing concern for our students and our faculty and staff. However, people weren't paying as much attention to it for some reason. And then the pandemic hit and things got compounded, got a lot worse, and suddenly we were paying attention to it. And now it's a hot topic, which is exciting because it means that we're actually paying attention, we're actually doing things about it. We're putting our resources, putting our money where our mouth is and actually doing the work. And I think, like I said, I think the pandemic was kind of a catalyst for that, which for all of the terribleness of that cause that was at least a silver lining I think.

Sophie White: Yeah, that's a great point. And I do like what you're saying too about now we're taking it seriously. I feel like for a while mental health was kind of this loose thing that was brought up in conversations, but things like this action plan are, let's actually look at solid ways that we can address mental health and do it at scale at our institutions, which is really exciting, but speaks to the problem and how important it's to. Absolutely.

Jenay Robert: I think it's too, not as much of a, I dunno how I want to word this, but when I was working at an institution, when I was teaching students for example, I always felt like, yes, this is really important and really committed to it, but it's not my area that's expertise. And I think that in higher ed we have such a culture of expertise and putting importance on staying in your lane and you're such a deep expert in one thing that sometimes we just sort of shy away from some of these other areas that now we're realizing just doing the best I can do is what I need to be doing when it comes to mental health with my students because it doesn't matter if I'm an expert or not, they really need me.

Nicole Muscanell: I would like to add that I think too for institutions who are really paying attention to statistics about who their students are and what they're like every year when you look at all the data coming out on mental health, we see really staggering numbers of how many young people are really just struggling with a whole host of things, anxiety, depression, and it's actually impacting their, in some cases, their choice to even attend college in the first place. Or if they do attend, it's impacting their ability to actually make progress towards their degree and to retain those students. So I think any institution who really is seriously following those numbers realizes, Hey, bottom line, this is a big impact on our retention and enrollments and we can't ignore this. We can't keep enduring this. We really actually have to pay attention and start acting on it now.

Jenay Robert: Are you seeing that Jennifer from your members? Is that something that's surfacing for Absolutely ASPA members talking about the data,

Jennifer Henkle: We just did a top issues. We looked at the top issues in higher education across our members and found that wellbeing in general was at the top of that list. We surveyed a bunch of different issues and the top five had multiple wellbeing, but including mental health. And so yes, our folks are seeing that it's no longer just anecdotal. They're actually, like you said, Nicole, getting the data, looking at it and seeing that retention is tied to wellbeing and wellness and mental health as a whole.

Sophie White: And I realized before we get too far in, we mentioned you were from naspa, but for folks who are unfamiliar, can you just explain what NASPA does and who your members are?

Jennifer Henkle: That's a great question. So NASPA is a student affairs organization. We work with folks across the board. We work with some students as well. We have a lot of grad student members, we have undergraduate student members, but we're a members serving organization and we do a lot of professional development, which is where most people know us. We have our NASPA annual conference every year in March, but we have a series of other events like the one I'm responsible for, our NASPA strategies conference, which includes the mental health conference. We have a student success and higher education conference, which focuses a lot on first generation student success. And yeah, we just provide a lot of resources and we're growing our resources outside of professional development. We have an entire arm that is health safety and wellbeing that does a lot of work specifically with some states. And that's where my work with culture respect comes in, where we work directly with colleges and universities to implement different policies and practices in order to improve the well-being experience for students, faculty and staff, the entire campus community.

Sophie White: Thank you for that. And I think it is kind of an interesting multilayered conversation because we're looking at students on one side and how our staff at institutions and faculty can support the students. And then at the same time, we have kind of these workforce conversations about how to support employees at the same time as they're supporting students. So it's definitely very complicated and I feel like some of the things I was seeing in the action plan are just how to differentiate those two groups. You can't have a one size fits all approach to mental health, but you have to be able to customize and create flexibility in both those scenarios too. So thinking about the action plan, are there any specific recommendations or takeaways that you two wanted to highlight to get started? Any that you think are especially groundbreaking or exciting that you want our listeners to know about?

Nicole Muscanell: I don't know, Jennifer, or do you want to go first?

Jennifer Henkle: Sure. I think to some extent what Jenay was saying about it's not groundbreaking, but I think it's really important to reiterate is that piece about faculty being a part of this work. We say this a lot at NASPA, and I know my supervisor said it countless times, we can't hire ourself out of the mental health crisis that exists, so we can't hire enough counselors, they don't even exist enough in the community to serve community needs outside of our campuses. And so we really need to create skills and resources for our faculty to be able to do this work as well to mental health first aid, for instance, so that they can feel confident in responding to crises and referring students in the right direction. And I note that was a piece in the plan that I thought was, again, just really good to reiterate. As much as we may know it, it's so important.

Nicole Muscanell: That was an area that was really interesting to me as a former faculty member. And I'm just kind of reflecting on my past experiences if with students would come to me and I definitely felt a pretty comfortable with directing them and whatnot, but I think it's more or less because I had to teach psychology courses, and so mental health is just embedded into those. But I definitely know I probably a lot of my colleagues and whatnot would not feel as comfortable handling those situations. And so I'm wondering, Jennifer, maybe you have some perspective. For the most part, are faculty on board If we're going to take this approach where we're training faculty as frontline supporters, are they on board for this and how do we make this feasible? For me, I'm like faculty are often already burnt out and have a lot of responsibility, so how do we train them and get them to become these frontline people who can really be that first point of contact for students without only adding to their already crazy workload and responsibilities and overwhelming them even more?

Jennifer Henkle: I think that was another thing that came out of this was that piece about self-care and wanting to make sure that we're modeling behavior as faculty and staff for students. I think that's a really great first place to go. So making sure that we're taking care of the wellbeing of our faculty and staff first so that they're able to be present. That's probably one of the most important things to me. I know we focused a lot on it when I was on campus and it truly makes a difference.

Sophie White: I'm going to go on a tangent for a second, but we had a Shop Talk conversation a few months ago about AI with Paul LeBlanc who was the former president of Southern New Hampshire University. And one of the things I thought was fascinating that he said was, with the advent of AI that we'll start to automate maybe some of these even teaching functions of faculty members, maybe things like practice exams and giving feedback on papers or things that used to be done by faculty members. And now that it's making the human component of the support for students of this person that a student or other staff members can talk to, even more important than it used to be. So I feel like that's only the direction we're going in as maybe some of these other functions get automated or create efficiencies with ai. These human functions might be even more mandatory for our faculty members.

Jennifer Henkle: That's a really good point, and I hadn't thought about the AI component of that as much as AI is everywhere that we look these days. I am not on campus anymore, so I'm not thinking about as many of the implications of it.

Nicole Muscanell: And I was thinking of it not from that perspective. So I'm glad you pointed that out, Sophie, because I was thinking of which came up in the report is leveraging technology as a form of mental health supports, but totally not thinking about the, well freeing up some of these tests so that now faculty and staff could be more available. So I think that's so interesting too because we're now going to be having these younger generations coming in and they're very digitally oriented. And so I'd be curious to see now with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, is their preference going to be for more technology driven supports or are they going to actually prefer human face-to-face sort of resources overlap?

Jennifer Henkle: I will say in speaking to some colleagues who are on campuses doing this work, ABCs ABPs, they're actually seeing that a lot of their students want more in person. And so they still have the apps, they still have the counseling that's available online for those who need it, but they're shifting away from that to some extent because the students are just, they want that in-person experience of counseling and therapy.

Jenay Robert: When you brought up the AI angle, Sophie, I thought for sure you were going to talk about mental health chatbot because I've been on a bunch of panels over the last year and at least two, three times the subject has come up. And I've been on some panels where different panelists have very, very different views on this matter, and we'll kind of argue it out in the panel, which I think is great. I think that's a much more engaging panel than everyone just nodding and smiling all the time. But I think I can see both sides of the argument, the one side where we don't have enough resources to reach everybody, people desperately need support, and if we can create a chatbot that does job, then we should expand support. But then the other side is there's no way a chat bot can actually support mental health, and there's no way we can put in the right guardrails and whatever guardrails we put in will just make it ineffective at the end of the day anyway. As in addition, just protecting the user that will also decrease the effectiveness. So I don't know, where do you all stand? And also I'm wondering if anyone has heard, maybe Jennifer from the mental health community or from student services, where are people on the ground landing on this? Anyone have a send to that?

Jennifer Henkle: I think it's still as annoying as this is in not answering your question, it is still up in the air. People are still trying to figure it out. At our strategies conference this year, we have a lot of sessions focused on AI and really focused on the understanding the impact. So not just understanding how AI functions, what it is, but what it means ethically, what it means for clinicians to be able to do this work. And so people have the questions and they're trying to find the answers, but I haven't seen or heard many answers yet, but have given people enough reason to go, yes, AI or no AI. Right.

Sophie White: Yeah. I noticed in the action plan, there's one goal for the future state related to technology driven mental health solutions play a pivotal role in expanding access to services and supports across campus. Diving into that a little bit more, I read some of the examples from the Teaching and Learning Horizon Report, and I think a couple that stood out to me were even use of virtual reality for mental health type of work. So I think there was one example from an institution who used a virtual reality scenario for firefighters so that they could practice having these, maybe dealing with these emotions while on the ground, fighting a fire or talking to the folks who are affected by the fire in a less intense way. So I thought that was really cool, but I can also see that technology isn't a solution for everything and that folks may tired of that if they want more in-person human support too. So I guess based on the action plan, do you all have specific examples of technologies that you think are most promising as it relates to mental health support at institutions?

Jennifer Henkle: There's some great programs that look at, again, overall overarching well-being, not just mental health and really helping with feelings of belongingness and looking at, I'll call another drug prevention and misuse and do a holistic look at a student. And I think those programs are really promising because it is about so much more than just mental health when we're talking about this and especially when we're talking about retention.

Nicole Muscanell: I'm so knowledgeable about specific tools. So, I will say I feel like it's going to be interesting to see how as the technology advances though, we know with AI and whatnot, things are going to be more personalize-able and more realistic so to speak. So if we're talking about these simulations or maybe even having some sort of virtual counseling and whatnot, those things are going to get more advanced. So I don't know how it's going to go, but I feel like there are going to be positive developments that a lot of people can benefit from with some of these tools.

Jenay Robert: I was going to say that I really appreciated the way you framed the question, Sophie, because I think this is something that we talk about a lot with technology interventions as a whole, where people see these cool new technologies and want to figure out how to implement them, whereas what the advice is at EDUCAUSE, and I'm sure our colleagues at NASPA and others we're often saying, start with the problem space. Think about where you need to solve problems, as opposed to, I want to try this cool new technology. Where can I apply it? Start with, here's our challenges. And then from there, are there any appropriate technologies that'll solve that problem and that will help guide you towards actual useful solutions as opposed to just playing in the playground of technology and potentially wasting quite a bit of money. So I think anyone looking at this action plan, implementing this action plan, creating their own action plan, my advice is make sure you're starting with the problem, starting in the problem space and creating that ideal future you want to see that creates, that solves those problems. And then what are the technology pieces that'll help you get there?

Jennifer Henkle: I really appreciated that about this process. I hadn't quite seen the process before, at least, obviously not firsthand. And talking about those ideal futures and thinking about first yourself in ten years and where you're going to be as a professional, but then moving forward and thinking about the actual work, it was a really cool experience getting to be there in the room as these subject matter experts were doing this work. And I was trying to do a little bit of it on my own, but wanting to pay more attention than play as much. But I appreciate that method a lot.

Jenay Robert: Nicole, do you want to pull the curtain back a little bit on what happens behind the scenes in those action plan sessions? Or if you want, I can run through some of the things we do. I think people will find that interesting.

Nicole Muscanell: Yeah, sure. And just feel free to jump in and fill in any gaps. Sure. Jenay and I have both worked on action plans. So for the action plans, we find a panel of experts. Usually, it's about eight to ten experts. In this case, because we did such a specialized topic that we don't typically do, we had a smaller panel and I believe that Jennifer was our main contact who helped us find some of our panelists for this specific plan. So she helped us recruit some of the subject matter experts, and we had, I think just about five that ended up being on the panel. And we basically have just a two hour or so, couple hour session. And we start off by asking panelists to get into this future mindset, thinking about a ten-year horizon. What is your preferred state of mental health supports in ten years for higher education?

What would that look like? And so the first part of the action plan is just we mapped out specific goals or preferred states that the panelists said, this is what we would like to see in ten years when it comes to mental health supports. And then from there, we actually then start doing the action work. And so we ask panelists to identify specific actions at different levels that institutions can take. So the way that we break them out now in the report is actions that individuals can take. So this could include faculty, staff, and other stakeholders. And from there we just look at the unit and department level and then multi-institution level. And I think I'm leaving one out actually

Jenay Robert: Individual department or unit institutional and cross institutional.

Nicole Muscanell: Cross institutional collaborations. And so basically we lay out, or the panelists identify specific actions at those various levels that they think institutions and stakeholders at institutions can take to get to that desired or preferable state in the next upcoming years. Am I leaving anything out today important?

Jenay Robert: Something that doesn't explicitly come through from the report, but that we usually take panelists through is asking them to describe threats and opportunities when it comes to their preferred future. So once we generate that preferred future, we ask them to think about, okay, what are the things happening right now that threaten that preferred feature? What are some things happening right now that we can leverage as opportunities to accelerate progress toward that preferred teacher? That kind of helps you work towards concrete actions because then those actions are really all centered around leveraging strengths and then mitigating weaknesses or mitigating threats. That's one piece that I think doesn't obviously come through that we do. The only other thing I would really point out is that all of this research, this is all research, it's qualitative research, it's research that we do in the horizon reports and the horizon action plans is all informed by a research methodology called strategic foresight.

So for all the fellow research nerds out there who are listening or watching this on YouTube, you can Google strategic foresight and dive into this whole nerdy research area that I adore that I never knew existed until I started working for EDUCAUSE. We on the research team all get training from the Institute for the future iftf.org. I'm not being sponsored to say that I just really love them and what they do, so I'm happy to recommend them to anybody. But yeah, that's something that again, I think doesn't always shine through in reading the report that we are drinking our own champagne here, that we believe in the value of research and research informed practice. And so we do use this whole research methodology to inform these products.

Sophie White: That's really helpful. And now you piqued my interest a little bit. Were there any threats or opportunities since that didn't come through in the report that stood out to you when we're talking about mental health in higher education, any major threats that you think will challenge these goals that we have and any highlights in terms of opportunities that we can face those threats with?

Nicole Muscanell: I can think of some, but I can't remember if explicitly the panelists came up with some of these, but I'm sure. So for me, what comes to mind is just kind of the stigma surrounding mental health. And again, I can't remember if the panelist actually brought that up, but I feel like that's definitely a big challenge that's been longstanding. And it's not going away necessarily, even though we're increasingly recognizing how important mental health is, that stigma that goes along with culture is just, I think it's hard to break that down. And I think that's going to be something that institutions are all going to have to work on figuring out how do we reduce this and start changing norms so that people will not only utilize resources and just engage in more discussion around, I guess, open discussion so that we can start to put practices in place.

Sophie White: Yeah, I saw a couple notes about funding too, so I appreciated that. At the beginning of the action plan, you mentioned a few just backup resources, why supporting mental health improves academic performance, improves campus culture, retention, resilience, all of those. But I feel like for institutions who are strapped for resources, that's always a conversation of how do you spend these resources and how do you allocate these resources towards mental health? So I appreciated that there is a basis for that backs up the importance of it in the report.

Jennifer Henkle: Jennifer, did you have any other, I was actually going to mention resources, just being, I believe that came up and just thinking about as the enrollment cliff that we've been talking about for I don't know how many years actually legitimately approaches, we're seeing it now as there's risk at the Department of Education or with the Department of Education and funding for higher education. I know that was a concern. If we don't have funding coming into the institution, where is it going to go? Yes, mental health is important. So are the academics, that's the point of the institution. Where are those very limited resources going to go?

Sophie White: I also noticed that one of the goals mentioned leadership, accountability and commitment as cornerstone. So at Bulls EDUCAUSE and NASPA, we work with a lot of folks in leadership roles at institutions. I guess, what would you say to leaders, what did your research and conversations related to leadership prerogatives around mental health look like? Why can leaders play such an oversized role in supporting the mental health of the institution? And are there any tips you can give for leaders for how to support their staff as well as students?

Jennifer Henkle: I think buy-in is so important for any of these things that leadership buy-in. Just knowing that your leader cares about this, you're more likely that the next person in the hierarchy is more likely to care about this. So I think that's incredibly important. I don't know, you mentioned the research. I don't know if Nicole maybe has a little bit more to say about that.

Nicole Muscanell: No, I think overall, I mean buy-in is probably the biggest thing, but also getting leadership, I think to be more in a, okay, let's really be now proactive and go beyond mental health awareness thing is really the big thing I would say to leaders at institutions, everyone's doing mental health awareness and we really need to move beyond that because what we're talking about and the whole report is really about this. We're talking about creating a new culture. So a culture of care is something that we talked about over and over again. The panelists really we're advocating for this culture of care. And so for that to happen, you need to have leaders who are saying, okay, I'm going to lead the way and actually start putting these things into place so that norms start to change and we can start to see the culture shift. And people are actually now not just talking about mental health or saying we are aware that people are struggling, but we're actually engaging in practices that are both preventative and also helping people who are struggling to deal with their issues.

Jenay Robert: And I wasn't a researcher on this project specifically, but I can say that from sort of the general body of knowledge we have around institutional change, because that's really what we're talking about here when it comes to shifting culture and these kind of really big moves. This is not something that happens that we need happening only in isolated pockets. We need institution wide shifts. And that requires, we know from the research base and institutional change that this requires both top down and bottom up efforts that we have to have a coordinated commitment. And that's what makes it so hard. You can't force your leaders to care about something. You can't force your frontline staff and faculty to care about something. It has to be organic and it has to happen at the same time. So there's a bit of magic involved in institutional change.

Sophie White: I liked how in those different groups of actions, we broke it down into the individual unit and department and then multi-unit. Some of the actions were individual. I loved the one that was related to promote emotional intelligence and positive leadership. That emotional intelligence is actually part of training for being a leader that you learn how to do that because I think that's just such an essential part. Jenay, back to your point, I think I would have to do a lot less therapy if everyone knew about emotional intelligence and I just didn't have to worry about others. But it's such an important leadership skill and I loved that. On top of that, developing these policies that at the unit and departmental level can encourage everyone to be using these tools and developing policies that support their staff too.

Jenay Robert: And when we talk about helping faculty understand the importance of these issues and training them for them, this happens, I think needs to start happening in graduate school. If you're in a graduate program, you want to be a faculty member, that should be an essential part of your training. We leave a lot out because of our structures in higher ed. If anyone listening or watching knows my story, I started my journey in higher ed because I really wanted to become a professor of chemistry, my undergrad degree is in chemistry. And once I started thinking about what it really means to be a professor, I realized that there were a lot of supports missing from my training and eventually through an early life crisis, decided I was going to work as someone in changing higher ed itself. But that was part of my awakening was when we are preparing people to be professors, it's really all about the skills and their discipline and very little about how to teach, how to support students holistically, how to work in an institutional environment. So I think if I'm at an institution thinking about how do I affect the next generation, it's really that earlier intervention. How do I support graduate students who want to be professors to understand that supporting students in a holistic way is part of their job.

Jennifer Henkle: I think that's also part of the reason those silos need to come down between student affairs and academic affairs, because we focus on that in the higher ed programs. We focus on that in the social work programs, and it's a key part of it. So it's so funny to hear not being on the side that you've been on, but that's not integrated into the curriculum at all.

Jenay Robert: No, I don't tell this story often, but I think there's enough anonymity at clouding the experience that when I was a graduate student in chemistry, I asked one of my faculty members in that department, how do I know how to teach? That was my first concern. I'm going to be a professor, how do I teach? And he said, we don't teach you that. You figure that out. We're going to teach you chemistry and you will figure out how to teach. And kind of what stands out to me about that experience was in my mind, I had a true mental image of the education building, which was the three buildings down the street. And I thought, aren't there researchers working on this? Aren't there experts in this? Isn't there something in that building over there that will help me be better as a professor or know at least what to do? So those silos are so poignant for my personal experience. Absolutely. And completely changed the trajectory of my entire career because I needed to go seek that knowledge.

Nicole Muscanell: And I think that's a majority of graduate programs, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think it's the norm to train to formally train graduate students to become instructors and faculty members. You're just kind of thrown into it. I somehow magically had the experience of being in a program that did actually give us formal training, but I was just one of the lucky ones. But I don't think that's super common.

Sophie White: And the 2025 Top 10 report, which is our EDUCAUSE report that talks about the top ten technology issues in higher education, the theme of it this year was rebuilding trust in education. I think we're in a current landscape where the public is skeptical of higher education among many reasons. I think one of them is making sure that the value, the high cost of education is worth it for the teaching and learning experience that they get. So I think it's even more crucial that we think about where can we transform this pedagogy experience and make sure that we're training our faculty members on these really important topics. I have a good friend back on the east coast who is a high school art teacher, and she just got a special certification in mental health counseling as an art teacher. So her job is not supposed to be mental health, but I was thinking about that before this conversation about how this was a supplemental certification that she could do as part of her role. What if we added something like that to higher education? If it doesn't exist already, maybe there are incentives for it at the department or the institutional level so that the reward for faculty members for enhancing their mental health support experience benefits them as well.

Jenay Robert: This is our expertise culture coming back to bite us, right? It's one of our greatest strengths is that we develop all this expertise and then I think it's also one of our greatest weaknesses. So think about being in the shoes of that chemistry professor who I said, but there's research on this and that. That professor was just doing their job. They were just like, well, look, I'm an expert in chemistry. What can I tell you? So I get it, but we do have the power to change the culture, and that's what I love so much about the horizon research is that we really are putting insights into reader's hands that will help them affect change. And every time I talk about the horizon research and specifically the action plans at a conference or in a webinar, I really try to emphasize this point that this preferred future section is so important and it's aspirational. And it's aspirational on purpose because if we're not aiming at anything, we're definitely going to hit nothing. But if we're aiming for this aspirational future, which yeah, it might be quite lofty and it might be completely unrealistic, we'll at least get a lot closer to that than if we were not aiming for it at all. It's just the optimistic nature of the action plan is something that I really love about the project.

Sophie White: Yeah, I think that's great. I'm looking at the multi-unit collaboration elements of this action plan right here too, and just talking about our conversation, the idea of embedding wellness accountability and performance reviews I think is so powerful as we look at individual contributors and leaders, how they can be held accountable for creating a culture of wellness, creating a chief wellness officer role, I think that seems aspirational. I have not heard of a chief wellness officer maybe that exists at institutions, but how would that be if someone is in charge of that cultural shift?

Jennifer Henkle: We are seeing it more and more, which is really exciting.

Sophie White: That's great. There's so much to talk about related to mental health, I feel like. Are there any other elements of this action plan that you all want to make sure we touch on today? Is there one that you think is the most important to start with in terms of the actions that we're looking at?

Nicole Muscanell: I think the thing that I thought was the most important is that if institutions really want it to be not only effective but sustainable and help their sustainability as an institution, I feel like it should be a pretty holistic approach. We know now that so many things impact mental health. So just taking the approach of, okay, if you have anxiety or you have depression and we're just going to try to treat that, that's fine. But we know that there's so many other areas. Physical health, for example, is strongly tied to mental health, willingness, your social interactions, your financial stability and security, and your network of people that your family or loved ones, and then all of these experiences that you might be more likely to experience. And I'm going to just, for example, we know that there's a rise in eating disorders for certain age groups. You might be exposed to sexual harassment or violence increasingly as you attend college or certain situations. So I think in order for this to be effective, institutions really need to be like, okay, we're not only prioritizing mental health, but wellness overall and trying to target all of these other many factors that directly impact mental health. It can't just be like, we're only focused on these disorders. We have to look at people's wellbeing as a whole. Really,

Sophie White: I think that's so important. Even if you don't have a mental health diagnosis, all of us have different seasons in our life where we're dealing with different things, and that can affect your ability to work at the same level that you are used to or your ability to be a student in the world. You might have illness, family issues, all of these different things. So it's so important to look at the whole person. Jennifer, anything you want to add to that?

Jennifer Henkle: No, I think that's great. I think as well, another thing that really stood out to me was the part about cross campus collaboration and the importance of sharing those best practices. I don't think institutions intentionally do not do that, but there's some schools doing really great work out there, and not everybody knows about it. They're not shouting from the rooftops, they're doing the good work, but we're not sharing it from school to school. And that is really important. We need to start doing that again, there are ways to do it, but I think we need to find other methods to make it a little easier for institutions to do it as well.

Sophie White: Oh, go ahead, Jenay.

Jenay Robert: Well, my take on this, I was going to say something that kind of aligned with what Nicole said. In a way, Nicole is talking about how there's so many things that influenced mental health. And on the one hand, this is super overwhelming when you're at an institution and thinking about, how do I solve this problem that's multifaceted. But on the other hand, it's helpful to understand that every single individual at the institution controls something that could impact students' mental health in some way. So if I'm an individual at an institution, a frontline staff member or a faculty member, and I am thinking, well, I don't have the power to implement institution-wide policy, my leader, I can't influence my leaders, maybe whatever it is, well, think about your sphere of control and what is it in your sphere of control that has some impact on students.

If you're a faculty member, your course policies, for example, are a great thing to think about. Are they flexible enough to help students who are struggling or who could face challenges, or are they going to add another barrier for students who are trying to be successful in higher education? If you're a staff member, think about the policies and procedures that you do have your hands on. Think about the times that you are student facing. And I would say if you're sitting on a campus and you're hearing this and you think, I really don't have any way I can impact this, then reach out to somebody on your campus who is working in an office like a mental health office or an equity and inclusion office or something along those lines to say, I want to move the needle in some small way. What can I do? And I guarantee you, you'll find mentorship programs, you'll find committees you can be part of. So I always try to emphasize the potential for individuals to take action because our institutions do comprise a bunch of individuals, and it can feel very challenging to move the needle on some of these big issues. So think about your sphere

Jennifer Henkle: Of control. Yeah,

Sophie White: I think that's so great. And if you are still struggling, feel free to reach out to all of us. Our EDUCAUSE profiles and contact information will be linked at the end of the episode. We'll also link some examples of case studies and research that we've mentioned today, as well as these examples from institutions who are doing good work as it relates to mental health supports in higher education. So thank you to Jennifer and Nicole for being our guests on today's Shop Talk episode. This was a really important conversation, I think, as we kick off this new year in 2025. And we appreciate all of your work on the Mental Health Supports Horizon Action plan as well.