Fascinating Four-Year Dartmouth Study Tracked Student Well-Being During the Pandemic

How do students’ self-esteem and mental health fluctuate during four years at university? Dartmouth researchers were determined to find out, following over 200 undergrads in the classes of 2021 and 2022 throughout their four years of college, an article on the university website reports.

They have just released the results of a four-year study, which used an app that tracked data from student smartphones to measure physical and social activity, phone time, video and music usage, sleep, and more. Students also completed weekly behavioral surveys to add to the phone data collected. Some students participated in post-study interviews.

The study captured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to changes in student behavior that “persisted as a ‘new normal’ even as the pandemic diminished, including students feeling more stressed, less socially engaged, and sleeping more.”

The paper’s senior author Andrew Campbell, Dartmouth’s Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor of Computer Science, says that the study’s findings give college and university administrators tools to be more attuned to changes in student mental health throughout the course of a school year. Campbell leads the StudentLife project, an ongoing mobile-sensing study of student mental health. The College Experience study was the longest-running study of its kind.

The research team has made their anonymized data set publicly available in order to further research into the mental health of students in their undergraduate years.

What did the researchers find?

The study identified groups that were more likely to experience stress or lower self-esteem than others, as well as certain times of year that stress was most evident. It also tracked the ups and downs of student well-being during the pandemic and subsequent return to campus.

Key findings from the study, excerpted from the article, follow:

First-year students

First-year students are particularly at risk for high anxiety and low self-esteem.
After students arrived at Dartmouth, the self-esteem of first-year students dropped to its lowest point in the first weeks of their transition from high school to college.
Self-esteem then rose steadily every semester until it was about 10% higher by graduation.
“We can see that students came out of high school with a certain level of self-esteem that dropped off to the lowest point of the four years. Some said they started to experience ‘imposter syndrome’ from being around other high-performing students,” Campbell says. “As the years progress, though, we can draw a straight line from low to high as their self-esteem improves. I think we would see a similar trend class over class. To me, that’s a very positive thing.”

Female students

Like first-year students, female students are at particular risk for high anxiety and low self-esteem.
Female students—who comprised 60% of study participants—experienced 5% greater stress levels and 10% lower self-esteem than male students, on average.
Significantly, according to smartphone data, female students tended to be less active. Male students walked 37% more often than their female counterparts.

First-generation college students

According to a similar paper Campbell’s research group published in 2022 based on StudentLife data, first-generation students (the first in their families to go to college) experienced lower self-esteem and higher levels of depression than other students throughout their four-year college experience.

Pressure to socialize

Sophomores had a more expansive social life than freshmen, but it did not always equate to greater happiness. One student in a sorority shared that having pre-arranged activities “kind of adds stress as I feel like I should be having fun because everyone tells me that it is fun.”
Another student observed that after the first year, “students have more access to the whole campus and that is when you start feeling excluded from things.”

Student stress

In a novel finding, the researchers discovered an “anticipatory stress spike” of 17% experienced in the last two weeks of summer break. While this peak was lower than mid-year academic stress, it showed up summer after summer.
Some students shared in post-study interviews that returning to campus early for team sports was a source of stress.
Others students who had reconnected with family and friends at home lamented “leaving behind the comfort and familiarity of these long-standing friendships” as the break ended, according to the report.

The effects of the pandemic

When the pandemic began and students returned home, the researchers found that self-esteem actually increased by 5%. Self-esteem went up by another 6% afterward when life became more normal.
One student attributed the bump in self esteem to growing more confident as they grew older. Others cited more time for socializing during online schooling, by spending quality time with friends on the phone, on social media, or streaming movies together.
During the pandemic, phone usage—measured by the duration a phone was unlocked—increased by nearly 33 minutes, or 19%.
At the same time, time spent in physical activity dropped by 52 minutes, or 27%.
By 2022, phone usage declined from its pandemic peak to just above pre-pandemic levels.
Student physical activity had recovered to exceed the pre-pandemic period by three minutes.
Despite expressing higher self-esteem, students’ feelings of stress increased by more than 10% during the pandemic.
When in early 2021, students returned to campus, coronavirus concerns were overwhelming, as was social anxiety about transmission. “There was the first outbreak in winter 2021 and that was terrifying,” one student recalls. Another student adds: “You could be put into isolation for a long time even if you did not have COVID. Everyone was afraid to contact-trace anyone else in case they got mad at each other.”
Female students were 13% more concerned about the coronavirus than their male peers, often due to the social implications of accidentally passing it on to others.
By the time the study ended in June 2022, stress had barely inched down from its pandemic peak––by only 2% ––indicating to researchers that the experience had a long-lasting impact on student well-being.

In summary

“This is a foundational study,” says Subigya Nepal, first author of the study and a PhD candidate in Campbell’s research group. “It has more real-time granular data than anything we or anyone else has provided before. We don’t know yet how it will translate to campuses nationwide, but it can be a template for getting the conversation going.”

Read the full article here.

Or read the published study in its entirety.

Learn more about the StudentLife Study and download the data set.

Kelly, Morgan. “Study Tracks Shifts in Student Mental Health During College.” Dartmouth.edu, 14 Mar 2024, https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2024/03/study-tracks-shifts-student-mental-health-during-college.