Institutions participating in THE Collaborative for Wellbeing are expected to administer the Wellbeing Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings (WISHES) at least twice per semester to facilitate learning and improvement. THE Collaborative for Wellbeing will provide support to institutions on building the foundational knowledge, skills, and practices to successfully administer WISHES, conduct basic analysis of the data, interpret and visualize the data, identify insights, and share their data with key stakeholders.
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Why Use WISHES?
WISHES is a brief survey, available at no cost, that provides colleges and universities with timely and actionable data to adapt and improve institutional norms, structures, and processes to enable all students to thrive and flourish.
WISHES is an integral tool for advancing student wellbeing and mental health efforts across campus.
WISHES is a complement to existing in-depth health and student experience surveys. It’s short; most students complete the survey in less than 10 minutes. WISHES can be administered multiple times per year to quickly assess student experiences and the campus conditions that impact wellbeing.
As of April 2024, 30 institutions have used WISHES, including five institutions in Texas, and over 100,000 students have completed the survey. Institutions have used to WISHES to:
- motivate leaders, faculty, administrators, and students to work collaboratively to improve campus systems.
- understand the associations between key student experiences and the impact these have on equitable wellbeing
- build an understanding of the root causes of wellbeing disparities
- shorten cycles of learning to accelerate improvement (i.e. learn as quickly as possible that a change you tried didn’t work as expected)
- understand and address the variation in student wellbeing throughout the year
- respond in (close to) real time to emergent conditions that impact students’ wellbeing
- assess trends over time
- benchmark data with other colleges and universities
Participating colleges and universities:
- have immediate access to their raw data
- choose their own sampling and administration methods
- can add unlimited custom questions at no charge (however, adding too many custom questions will negatively impact response rates).
- receive a password protected dashboard with their institution’s key experience and outcomes metrics graphed over time
What Does the Survey Measure?
WISHES was developed by ANEW through a nominal group process that engaged over 100 diverse opinion leaders in higher education to assess importance, actionability, and feasibility of dozens of possible measurement domains. Where possible, existing, validated scales that are publicly available for use at no charge were identified to operationalize the most important and actionable domains. The survey is divided into three types of measures.
The measure domains are listed below:
How much does WISHES cost?
WISHES is available to institutions at no cost.
How can I request the WISHES instrument?
The Wellbeing Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings (WISHES) instrument is provided to institutions at no cost after the Terms of Use is signed and returned to wishes@nyu.edu.