Students Say Mental-Health Breaks From Class Help Them Succeed. Here’s How Colleges Are Responding.

Eric Enriquez is a determined student. But some days, his mental-health challenges make it difficult for him to participate in class.

“There are some days for me, personally, where I’ve struggled with mental health and it’s hard to get out of bed,” said the junior psychological-sciences major at the University of California at Irvine. “My anxiety is so bad.”

When he’s feeling overwhelmed, he appreciates instructors who are flexible with attendance and assignments, or who provide remote-learning options.

Enriquez is one of many students who believe that colleges should scale up such accommodations for academic-related distress.

Across higher ed, there’s a growing recognition of the connection between students’ well-being and their success in the classroom. “Mental health affects how students perform academically, and the stress of academics, and certainly disappointments academically, affect students’ mental health,” said Sarah Lipson, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.

Some colleges and faculty members are creating or considering new policies to support students when they need a day to tend to their mental health. But providing the kinds of academic accommodations that many students are calling for –– such as reforms to extension and attendance guidelines –– requires instructors to shoulder new responsibilities and change old habits and standards that some of them value.

Campus officials and professors are debating how to balance academic rigor with increased flexibility for students, as well as who should be responsible for determining when students should get a break.

The issue is urgent: Seventy-two percent of student-affairs officials reported that mental-health concerns on campus worsened over the last year, according to a recent survey by Naspa: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. A new Center for Collegiate Mental Health report found that levels of trauma and social anxiety have increased among students over the last decade, and that academic distress has increased compared to pre-pandemic.

Lipson said she’s happy to see that colleges and professors are thinking about ways to make academics more accommodating to those experiencing mental-health challenges, but landing on the right solution is complicated. She recommended that colleges form their plans with student feedback.

“There’s going to be different solutions for different institutions,” Lipson said.

‘I Was Worrying the Entire Day’

Last summer, Northeastern University started a new program, in response to student advocacy, that gives students two excused absences per semester for any reason. But some students say the program doesn’t go far enough.

The idea for the program, called Wellness Days, came from the campus chapter of Active Minds, a mental-health awareness group. “The importance of a wellness day is if you’re having a mental-health crisis, you should probably be taking the time to come back from that,” said Jack Ognibene, a junior and psychology major who’s vice president of the group. “It’s a similar thing to if you are sick.”

Ed Gavaghan, a spokesperson for Northeastern, wrote in an email that student feedback in a recent university survey was “overwhelmingly positive.”

While Ognibene is pleased that Northeastern officials have embraced the program, he said that Active Minds had to make compromises on its design. The group conducted its own student survey about wellness days, and one common issue students brought up was a lack of accompanying accommodations, according to Ognibene.

“There isn’t much of a difference between taking a wellness day and skipping class,” Ognibene said. “All your assignments are still due on the same day, so you don’t really have the time to rest. You also have to play catch-up because you’re missing class, and professors aren’t really providing students with the notes from class that day.”

Rachel Umansky-Castro, a sophomore criminal-justice and journalism major and an editor at the student newspaper, The Huntington News, wrote an op-ed about her experience with the Wellness Days program, which made her anxiety worse.

“Thinking about all the assignments I would miss started getting me really nervous,” Umansky-Castro said in an interview. “I was worrying the entire day.”

Ognibene and Umansky-Castro said some instructors at Northeastern provide accommodations for students taking a wellness day, but others don’t.

Umansky-Castro said she’d prefer if Northeastern dedicated days for the whole student body to take wellness days together — similar to the Care Day program that Northeastern had in place before the opt-in system.

But Ognibene said Active Minds pushed hard for students to be able to choose their days off.

“You can’t really choose a day to have a mental-health crisis,” Ognibene said.

He said Active Minds would ask university officials to consider requiring professors to offer deadline extensions and to send copies of class notes when students take a wellness day, so all students have access to the same accommodations, regardless of their instructor.

Weighing Accommodations

At Rice University, students have advocated for a rule that would require faculty members to spell out a mental-health-accommodation policy in their course syllabi. The change would provide clarity and ensure that students in the same class received the same flexibility, said Alison Qiu, a computer-science major and student-government leader at Rice.

Faculty, however, worry that the measure would force them to make decisions they don’t feel qualified to make.

Last fall, Qiu helped author a student-government resolution recommending a mandatory-accommodation policy, as well as two other additions to the syllabi: a mental-health statement and a list of campus resources. Those two measures were endorsed by Rice’s Faculty Senate, but the accommodation policy was omitted.

An editorial in The Rice Thresher, Rice’s student newspaper, criticized the Faculty Senate’s decision and argued that explicit policies would “reduce the stigma around students asking for accommodations.”

Qiu said she believes including policies in the syllabus would hold instructors accountable. Lipson agrees.

“There’s also a lot of evidence that if a policy isn’t made explicit to students –– like how to request an extension or what the protocols are for accommodations –– there’s systematically certain students who do not feel comfortable asking those questions,” Lipson said.

Alexandra Kieffer, an associate professor of musicology and speaker of Rice’s Faculty Senate, said faculty care about their students’ mental health. But they’re concerned, Kieffer said, that requiring mental-health-accommodation policies in syllabi would put instructors in a position where they’d need to make their own assessments about students’ mental health.

“That would have required the instructor of a course to essentially make a determination in a particular case as to whether or not the student met some kind of criteria for the mental-health accommodation, as opposed to some kind of other blanket attendance policy or extension policy,” Kieffer said in an interview.

Kieffer wrote in a follow-up email that if students experience mental-health challenges, the Faculty Senate encourages them to seek resources at Rice’s counseling center and to request formal academic accommodations through the disability-resource center.

Qiu said she’ll continue to advocate for accommodation policies. “My goal is to continue to communicate with the Faculty Senate about either passing the third requirement or modifying it in a way that makes the most sense for both faculty and students,” Qiu said.

Lipson said that although most instructors aren’t trained mental-health professionals, they have a responsibility to understand campus protocols and resources and how they can best support students.

The University of California at Irvine hired someone last year to help faculty do just that.

‘Flexibility With Guardrails’

Called a pedagogical wellness specialist, the UC-Irvine position involves training instructors to incorporate wellness into their classroom policies and procedures. Theresa Duong, who was hired for the role, said her responsibilities include creating workshops, consulting with professors, and doing research.

“My job involves supporting faculty wellness through pedagogy, but also supporting students’ wellness through the practice of pedagogy,” Duong said. “So that means training the faculty to think about wellness in their courses and to integrate well-being strategies into their course design.”

Duong said she encourages instructors to apply a mind-set she calls “flexibility with guardrails.” Duong created a digital guide that includes advice on rethinking high-stakes exams, assessing workloads, clarifying deadlines, and providing assignment choices, among other things.

During her workshops, Duong has instructors brainstorm how their class could be a barrier or facilitator to their students’ wellness and then create an action plan.

Angela Jenks, an associate professor of teaching in anthropology at UC-Irvine and the vice associate dean of faculty development and diversity in the School of Social Sciences, works with Duong to help professors revamp their courses. In her own classes, Jenks said she has created “menus” that allow students to choose assignments, with a reduced emphasis on traditional-grading practices.

“By traditional grading, I think about an approach to grading that really focuses on sorting and ranking students,” Jenks said. “This type of approach tends to both produce enormous amounts of stress and anxiety for students.”

Instead of high-stakes assignments that receive letter grades, Jenks focuses on feedback, self-reflection, and opportunities to resubmit. “In my everyday job,” Jenks said, “nobody grades me.”