Why this matters

Institutions of higher education serve as hubs of life, learning, work, and play for more than 2.275 million Texans, including over 2 million students enrolled in postsecondary education in Texas each year and 275,000 faculty and staff employed by postsecondary institutions in Texas. Many of the core values of institutions of higher education–pursuit of learning and new knowledge, empowerment of learners, civic engagement, cross-sector collaboration, service, building belonging and community, and lifelong flourishing–closely align with national action areas for fostering a culture of health and wellbeing. As such, these core values, coupled with the number of Texans supported by postsecondary institutions, uniquely position colleges and universities to influence the trajectory of lifelong flourishing for a large segment of the Texas population.

The challenges

Higher education nationally and in Texas have yet to realize this potential. The optimal state of college student wellbeing is hindered by the following challenges:

  • There is a concerning trend of significant increases in students struggling with mental health issues, significant decreases in students who are flourishing, and widening equity gaps.
  • Students’ worsening mental health contributes to stress and burnout among faculty, administrators, and clinicians.
  • Over the past decade, many colleges and universities have significantly increased their investments toward student health, mental health and wellbeing. These investments have yet to substantially reverse the concerning trend of worsening mental health and wellbeing outcomes among students.
  • There is a dearth of evidence-based, high-impact practices to improve student health, mental health, wellbeing, and health equity outside of the clinical setting, and even less pragmatic evidence to support effective implementation.


The relationship between education, wellbeing, and health has significant societal implications for the betterment of all three. The causal pathways between these outcomes are highly complex; however, individual-level interventions, institutional systems, and research often over-simplify this complexity, which contributes to failed attempts to bend the trend of worsening mental health and wellbeing outcomes.

Accelerating progress

The path to improvement is anything but straightforward. THE Collaborative for Wellbeing aims to accelerate transformational progress by:

While many academic institutions have significantly increased resources toward traditional student success, wellbeing, and health supports, particularly mental health services and initiatives, these resources are not meeting the increasing needs of struggling students, financially sustainable for institutions, or achieving widespread improvement of outcomes. THE Collaborative for Wellbeing expands institutions’ capability and capacity to redesign complex systems into new paradigms that create enabling conditions for wellbeing.

There is not widespread adoption of high-value, high-impact practices to improve mental health and wellbeing and address their impact on learning and academic achievement. Existing research, trends, and standard practice, together, suggest that institutions of higher education need new pragmatic evidence about what it will take to close these gaps. THE Collaborative for Wellbeing advances rapid design and testing of new practices and builds understanding of implementation considerations through its Changemaking Pathways to Better Outcomes and collaborative structure.

Many intractable challenges impacting college students are addressed as distinct and highly compartmentalized problems to be solved; yet, these challenges are interconnected and cannot be solved in siloes (e.g., we can’t improve degree attainment without addressing mental health, and we cannot improve mental health outcomes without addressing teaching practices and policies). THE Collaborative  is innovative because it brings these challenges together under a single network to build a deep understanding of the intersectional problems, the system that produces it, and a shared working theory and process to improve.