Project Summary:
Rates of mental health problems are increasing among today’s college students. The College
Student Mental Health Pathways study will help us better understand the trajectories of mental
health among college students, while also determining which combination of social and
emotional skills or competencies best predict stronger mental health outcomes. The results of
this study will guide efforts to improve behavioral health among college students by illustrating
the ways that mental health changes over time and will explore skills to be targeted for
effective and timely interventions. The first aim (AIM 1) of the project is to find out how mental
health changes over the course of an undergraduate’s career by tracking individual students’
progression across four years of college (for a total of six years of data collection, representing
six separate student cohorts, and two complete four year data sets). This project will test the
way that students’ race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and sexual orientation relate
both to their mental health and how their mental health changes over time, with the goal of
answering the question: who is getting better in college, and who is getting worse? Next, (AIM
2) this project will build and test a model of how the social and emotional skills that students
learned before they got to college (and those they learned since they matriculated) relate both
to their overall mental health and to the way that their mental health changes over time. What
combination of social and emotional skills (including skills like making and keeping friends,
appropriately expressing emotions, and reading the emotional state of others) is most
associated with mental health, and what skills are associated with distress? Further, this will
address whether the social and emotional skills students have determine the overall change in
mental health that students experience over the course of their college careers. Further, how
do demographic factors like race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and sexual
orientation influence the roles that those skills have? By using a large, multi-year dataset,
following students at two colleges over a total of six years, this project will provide unique
insight into the mental health of college students.