Welcome to Brazos Matters.

I'm Jay Socol, and co-hosting with me today is Avery Foster, a Texas A&M journalism major, and KAMU content contributor.

Welcome back to the studio.

Thank you.

It's been a while.

I know, I'm excited.

I'm excited too.

I'm glad you're here.

So with roughly 75,000 students, Texas A&M has one of the largest student bodies in the country.

And while the university offers countless opportunities like more than 1300 student organizations, the sheer size of A&M and all the options that exist here can feel intimidating and overwhelming for a whole lot of students.

So, to better understand how students are really doing, the university conducts a wish survey and which stands for wellbeing, identity, Stress and health.

And it's also known here as the Aggie Well-Being survey, which gathers data from thousands of Aggies about their mental health, their sense of belonging and overall well-being.

Our guests today will help us break down what this data reveals about the student experience at Texas A&M.

From trends in wellbeing and belonging to how programs like Fish Camp and other campus resources are actually working to support our students.

They'll also discuss how departments across campus use the survey insights to address and improve the experience for future Aggies.

So with us today we have two guests.

We have Darby Roberts, Director of Student Affairs, planning, assessment and research in the Division of Student Affairs.

And also Robert Tirso, who is a data analyst within that same division.

Thank you both for being here.

It's great to be here.

Looking forward to our conversation.

Great.

Go ahead Avery.

Thank you guys.

So much.

So before we start, could you just explain what your role is and I'll start with you, Darby.

Sure.

So as the director of student affairs, planning, assessment and research, which we affectionately call spar for brevity, part of my job is in the Division of Student Affairs to help our departments and student organizations find the answers to the big questions they have to improve the student experience at Texas A&M.

So that includes a lot of surveys, focus groups, other data collection that helps us understand the student experience.

And as a data analyst in that same office, my role is to essentially make sense of at least all the quantitative information that we collect through all those surveys, focus groups, other assessments, etc.. And so the well-being survey that we'll be talking about today happens to be a big chunk of that, because we've been collecting a lot of data, as you've no doubt seen.

And on that point, Robert, so what is the Aggie Well-Being survey and why does the university conduct it?

So the Aggie Well-Being survey is meant to be a brief, instrument that tracks just the most important well-being indicators across our student body, on a roughly monthly basis.

I do need to correct you earlier.

You introduced it.

It's called the Wishes.

Acronym stands for Well-Being Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings.

And then we've branded R's version of that as the Aggie Well-Being survey.

So thank you.

I just want to correct that for the record.

Thank you.

But we started doing this survey, about five years ago now.

And the idea was originally we'll use this will administer it roughly monthly to kind of keep our fingers on the pulse of the student body and how they're doing.

But since then, it's evolved into much more.

It's kind of become our go to source for any and all questions or information about student well-being and how the Division of Student Affairs and even other, even other programs more broadly at the university, impacts that.

And in the survey, what are some of the major trends that you're seeing right now?

Well, I'd say probably the biggest long term trend that we've seen is that, so we started the survey about five years ago.

Well, about six years ago was the pandemic.

And so when we started the survey, broadly speaking, student well-being was, not where we'd like it to be to, to put it mildly.

What we've seen over the last couple of years as distance from the pandemic has increased, as well as more focused efforts from the division on on trying to improve student well-being is a lot of these well-being indicators like psychological distress, overall health, flourishing, sense of belonging, these have all been gradually improving.

So distress is going down, flourishing is going up, belonging is going up, so on and so forth.

So that's probably the biggest long term trend is that, we slowly but steadily been improving in most of these well-being metrics.

I know one of the points that we talked about was first generation students.

So what are you noticing, in those students compared to others?

So among first generation students, compared to continuing generation students, the, that's a population that we see is often for to put it simply, they tend to be doing a bit worse off than their continuing generation peers.

They are a bit more likely to be experiencing serious psychological distress.

They're a bit less likely to be flourishing.

They are more likely to be in some sort of financial distress.

They tend to be less likely to feel like they belong at the university.

I wouldn't characterize these differences as massive, but they're noticeable and they're pretty consistent and persistent across a lot of these different indicators of well-being.

So that's something that's stood out to us in the data for sure.

And Robert, you you mentioned sense of belonging.

And this is really for either you or Darby.

But what are you seeing when it comes to how students really feel about their place on this campus?

I think nationally sense of belonging is a topic of conversation.

And I think at Texas A&M, because it is so huge, so many students that it can be challenging for students to find their place and to find their people and to really make it a smaller place for them to fit in and feel like they do belong.

And so I think that's something that we've seen as the university has grown over the years.

It just is a little more complicated for students to, find that that place as quickly as they can.

And I would say, you know, like I said, across the nation, that's a topic of conversation about sense of belonging.

Anything you want to add, Robert?

Yeah, I'll just add that, like other metrics that I briefly mentioned, that's something that we've seen improving over the last couple of years since we've been doing the survey.

But there's still room for further improvement.

And that's something that has received a lot of attention and is something that a lot of us in the Division of Student Affairs try to address and and help foster that sense of belonging among our students.

Yeah.

Quantifiable data, I know, drives the survey's findings and maybe even the university's response to those findings.

But what kind of room is there for anecdotal evidence, of emerging problems?

And, Robert, start with you and Darby, if you want to add to that.

I'd say, you know, we a lot of the data that I work with in when with regard to the survey is quantitative in nature, but the survey also collects a lot of qualitative data too.

And you know, ironically enough, we do quantify how often certain qualitative themes appear in those qualitative data.

But that is a source of anecdotal evidence.

If you will.

You can actually we have all the survey results publicly available on our department's website.

And on that website, you can essentially look through a list of comments students have provided.

They were asked on the survey, whether they feel like they belong at the university.

And then based on that response, they're asked to essentially explain why they answered that way.

Why do you feel like you belong at the university, or why do you feel like you don't belong at the university?

And so in there you can find a lot of stories that students have written, essentially.

And some of them are kind of pull on your heart strings, especially if you look at the ones from the students who feel like they don't belong.

A few that stand out to me that I've read years ago now.

But, I can't forget our students who describe that, you know, they have no friends.

They cry on the bus ride to and from classes because they just haven't formed any connections and they just feel totally alone.

And so to what extent is that a general trend among the student body?

It's a little hard to quantify, but there are certainly those anecdotes in the data.

And, yeah.

Darby, what what stands out, anecdotally.

And what do you do with that?

Yeah.

And not just the Aggie Well-Being survey, but the other assessment that we do, we do get a sense of that from the different programs that the division puts on, and we collect assessment data there.

We'll sometimes ask those qualitative questions to really get a good understanding of that.

And then I will also say for all of our departments, they are always having the pulse on what students are saying and having individual conversations with students about how they're doing, their sense of belonging, what resources they might need.

And so I think a little bit informally, we are continually assessing all the time and getting that anecdotal feedback from students about how they're doing, what resources they need, how well they're flourishing or if they're struggling, and how we can help them.

Are there specific comments that have stuck with you over these five years?

Oh gosh, I don't know that there is just one.

But as someone who has gone to this institution as a student and remember my time here, it does break my heart to hear students who say, I haven't made friends, I haven't found something to do.

I'm alone and lonely.

That I think is really challenging for us in Student Affairs two to say we want everyone to have a good, successful career at Texas A&M and really fit in.

So when I hear things like that, I just, I struggle with that and want to help every student that comes along.

But the way the survey is structured, is there room or an opportunity to capture those more positive, flourishing stories?

Yeah, I'd say absolutely.

Like I said earlier, we ask the same question of students who said they feel like they belong as well, and those comments and those responses vastly outnumber the ones who say they don't belong.

It's I looked, this morning and the ratio is about 6 to 1.

We've got about 6000 different comments from students talking about why they feel like they belong at the university, and about 1000 comments from students who are talking about why they feel like they don't belong.

And, you know, there's a lot of students in there who are like, you know, I was born for A&M and I love it here.

And this is just my dream come true.

So, you know, yes, there is some negative that really, pulls on your heart strings and, you know, as somebody looking at the data, there's a part of me that's like, man, I just part of me wishes I could, like, reach out and tell that student like, hey, everything's going to be okay.

You know, we obviously we can't do that for, variety of reasons.

But there's still plenty more comments for every one of those.

Negative.

That is positive.

And I assume the way this the survey structured, those who respond remain anonymous, technically confidential.

So we send the survey out to a randomly selected sample of students, five times over the course of an academic year.

And so everybody who's a student at College Station gets the opportunity to take the survey at some point in the academic year.

With that, we technically do know whose responses are from which responses are from whom, but we keep that information confidential.

Nobody is ever told who takes the survey and who did didn't, and nobody's ever shown an individual.

Students responses to the survey.

The reason we keep it confidential instead of anonymous, is we can use those identifiers to then link that survey data with a variety of other data sources at the university.

So we're able to look at, for example, students who attended fish camp, compared to the students who were in that same freshman cohort who did not attend fish camp.

And then we can see, okay, well, what differences are there in the responses so that we can get some insight into what impacts, fish camp might be having on student well-being and extend that same logic to a variety of other DSA programs.

So that's why we have the survey set up the way that we do.

And I know when we were talking about the survey, you also said that, students could, decide if they wanted someone to reach out.

Could you talk about how that works?

Yeah.

So towards the end of the survey, we have a question that asks students, is there anything that you would like somebody from the university to follow up with you about any kind of concern you might have?

There, you know, it's a yes or no question.

If they say yes, there's a follow up question that asks them, okay, well, what's the nature of this concern or this issue?

Choose all that apply.

There's options like a physical health concern, something about living on campus, mental health, academics, finances, you know, a whole laundry list of potential issues.

So we have some idea of roughly like who should we direct the student to for help?

And we take all the students who said yes to that question.

And we send that information to our, student life, our student Assistance Services office.

So they have case managers who are able to and experienced in reaching out to specific students to, follow up with them about.

Okay.

Hey, you said, you know, you had this concern about, something and you wanted to somebody to reach out to you.

What's going on?

What can we do to help?

And so there is this optional opt in follow up piece where and again, this survey goes out to every student over the course of the academic year.

So in this way we are at least trying to outreach individually to every single student asking them, you know, is there anything we can do to help you essentially good time for reintroduction.

So if you just tuned in, I'm Jay Socol.

Along with Avery Foster, you're listening to Brazos Matters.

Our guests today are Darby Roberts and Robert Tirso.

So we're talking about what the Aggie Wellbeing Survey reveals about student wellbeing, stress and sense of belonging at Texas A&M.

Yeah, and when we're talking about psychological stress, I think report showed that about 1 in 3 students report having it.

So how does the university respond to this data?

I would say that the Texas A&M has a lot of resources to help students with mental health issues.

Crisis.

Really getting into some of those deeper emotional issues that students might have.

And so we with the University Health Services has mental health services as well as physical health services that students, as part of the fees that they've already paid, can access these services.

And then, student assistance services and student life and really any other department in student affairs.

If students reached out to you, we'd find them the right place to get, them the right help that they needed or the resources that would really help them.

So I think Texas A&M really is committed to helping students through challenging times.

So you mentioned Fish Camp just a little bit ago, that it's linked to students feeling a stronger sense of belonging here at Texas A&M.

Darby.

Is there any determination of which parts of Fish camp seem to make the biggest difference in helping students feel like they belong here?

I think one of the strong points of fish camp is making the institution feel a little bit smaller.

And so, students are put into smaller groups with some upper class students as guides, and they spend a good amount of time while they're at fish camp in those small groups.

And so then when they come to campus, they have a group of friends somewhat already created.

They have some upper class students that they can rely on and serve as mentors.

And part of the I would say the other strong point of fish camp is really introducing students to the resources that are available on campus.

So we do have a lot of departments that go up there and talk to students about what they do, and then introducing students to the programs and events and traditions at Texas A&M that make Texas A&M a unique experience that students feel identity with and towards for their their college career.

And so I think really honestly, the strong point of Fish Camp is making a huge institution a little bit smaller.

And I know something that I love about A&M is the faculty and staff.

And are these faculty and staff being encouraged or even trained to support students and well-being and sense of belonging?

I would say in the last few years, the institution has paid more attention to that.

Within the division, we have a fair amount of training, really thinking about how we serving students in any number of ways.

And then, faculty also have the opportunity to take workshops from University Health Services to say, here are some, resources available.

Here's how you can help students.

Here's conversations that you can have.

And then, student life, in particular, student assistant services and even university health services will talk to specific faculty who contact them and say that they have a challenge with a student.

They're not quite sure what to do.

And we have people who can talk them through that experience to say, here's here's some things, here's the conversation to have with the student who might be struggling and you're unsure how to help them.

Here's a format for you to be able to do that.

So the institution, I would say really in the last probably five, 5 to 10 years has really spent more time saying it's really everybody's opportunity to help students.

Robert, you mentioned some of this as you reached back to the pandemic, but what are some things that immediately come to mind for you as being measurably better for students now than when this survey first launched?

Here?

Right.

I'll say the first thing that comes to mind is, percentage of students who are experiencing serious psychological distress, which actually ever you mentioned earlier that it started at about one in every three students, back in like the early fall 20, 21 days.

Well, as of right now, that's roughly one in every four.

So it went from about 33, 36% down to 22 to 25%.

Now, so that's a pretty substantial improvement from pandemic days.

Sense of belonging has ticked up as well.

It's I would say that the improvement in sense of belonging has been a bit slower and smaller than in psychological distress, but it's still a noticeable trend across time.

Same thing with flourishing.

The percentage of students who meet the threshold on the survey for being classified as flourishing as opposed to not So those are some pretty clear trends when you look at the data across time that like, wow, we've you know, it's taken a little while, but we've definitely made a lot of progress since those relatively dark days of five plus years ago.

Yeah.

I'm I'm curious about the future of this survey and what the next iterations of this look like, or does it need to be, a rinse and repeat so you, you have consistent data for the same sorts of, things you're trying to measure.

So, a lot of the survey is relatively set in stone.

It's a standardized instrument that we basically sign an agreement to use.

And as part of that, we have to administer certain questions on that survey.

But we do have the freedom to add custom questions to our liking.

So we have several custom questions on there that we've rotated on and off depending on.

You know, we want to experiment.

Try collecting data on something new or shifting priorities.

That question that we talked about earlier about, is do you want anybody from the university to reach out to you about a concern that you might have?

That is something that we decided to add as an institution to this survey?

We've also just recently added questions on there asking about, essentially to to what extent do students feel like the institution, A&M is too big of an institution to care about them as an individual?

Or to what extent they feel like the support services staff that they interact with care about them as an individual.

And so we have the initial results from those questions live on our website.

We've also done some internal analyzes looking at how that predicts responses on these other well-being metrics that we've talked about since belonging, psychological distress, flourishing, etc.. And we see some pretty strong correlations there.

Granted, they're just correlations.

That's not evidence that these there's a causal relationship here.

But it's certainly a very encouraging picture to see.

So that's a relatively recent addition that we might be exploring that more in the future.

Yeah.

What about the delivery of the survey to the students to to maximize the number of responses?

How are you doing that now?

What sort of course corrections may be required moving in.

Right.

So right now the survey is sent to, as I said, a randomly selected sample of students each month roughly.

One of the things that we've done this year to try to improve response rates and get people to participate in this is we've partnered with dining Services and our VP of Student Affairs.

Essentially, we're able to offer the students who take this survey the ability to enter into a raffle, where we select six of them at random to have lunch with Dr.

Bill Kibler, our VP of Student affairs at, the University Club over in Rudder Tower.

So they get a nice, relatively fancy lunch and a place with a really nice view, and they get to chat up the VP of Student Affairs, talk about any concerns that they might have, or just learn more about how the university or student affairs in particular operates.

And the VP appreciates this because he really enjoys getting to talk with students and learn about what their experience is like.

Yeah, yeah.

And his email, that delivery method, is that how you put it in front of the student?

That's correct.

We've been using email.

Unfortunately, students tend not to look at their email as much as we might like.

But if we want to do a random sample that's representative of the student population at large every month, that's kind of what we have to do.

So everyone's email, the way to reach you?

Absolutely.

I have three of them.

Oh, okay.

That might be too many.

And, you know, my last question would be for the future.

Are y'all expecting to see these trends slowly go down?

Especially maybe not more so than negative ones, but the ones the students maybe experience negatively.

So when you say negative go down, you basically you mean improve?

Yes.

Actually.

Yeah.

So like well-being go up.

But you know, sense of longing go up as well.

That's the hope.

You know conceivably at some point you reach the point where, you know, 99.9% of students feel like they belong, and it's just becomes impossible to make that point 1% feel like they belong for whatever reason.

I don't know that we'll ever improve that much.

But my hope and expectation is that we continue to see slow but steady improvements as we as an institution, as a division, try to make changes to for continuous improvement.

And I will say that the more we get this information out to other people in the division, our departments that are student facing, then they can look at this data and say, what are the things we can do to engage students, to create a sense of belonging, to create a better environment here.

And so the more we can get the data out there, the more people can look at that and say, what are the things we can actually make a change with?

So as we have a couple minutes left here, let's get a little bit instructive.

If somebody would like to go out and sort of browse the survey data that is online, how do they find that?

So you can go to our department's website which is sapar.tamu.edu and find it from there.

But we also have a direct link to that web page where we put everything on.

And you can access that by going to wishes.tamu.edu thats wishes.tamu.edu and everything that we've made publicly available about these data is available from there and any quick tips for when somebody gets there, how you would suggest they start navigating through it?

Yes.

Take your time.

There's a lot of information there.

So, you know, it's you might be overwhelmed at first, try to stick to the summary reports or the, overall results page of our interactive dashboard.

And that can answer most of your questions that you might have about well-being data without getting too lost in the weeds.

Okay, Darby, any final comments about either this particular survey and the results you're seeing or something else that you guys may be working on right now?

Well, I would just say one for our department.

We collect a lot of information from students about their student experience and try to get that out to our clients and the university at large.

I will say, for well-being is it's everybody's responsibility, or they have the opportunity to help students with well-being and mental health and sense of belonging.

So there's there are things we can all do.

Okay.

Darby and Robert, thank you so much for being here.

Pleasure to have you both.

And, Avery, great to have you back in the studio.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Brazos matters is a production of Aggielands Public Radio, 90.9 KAMU FM, a member of Texas A&M University's Division of Community Engagement.

Our show is engineered and edited by Matt Dittman.

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We would love for you to rate and review and even subscribe so you never miss an episode.

For Avery Foster, I'm Jay Socol.

Thank you so much for watching and listening.