A just-released study of more than 24,000 students at 14 colleges and universities in Minnesota confirms what CSHAL has been tracking:  stress levels among college students are reaching epidemic proportions.

About 7 out of 10 students reported experiencing stress, with close to half that number believing that the anxiety was having a negative impact on their grades.  Those students not experiencing stress had a 3.37 average grade; those who said they had experienced anxiety and felt that it affected their grades, had only a 3.12 average.

The wide-ranging health study also found that those students who did not get enough sleep, did not exercise much, engaged in drinking or smoking, or used drugs all suffered from lower grades than their counterparts.

A student group called "Mindfulness for Students" plans activities to help students relax, and appears to have had some positive impact on helping students cope with stress.  We will be exploring the effectiveness of peer groups like this one to develop recommendations on how students can better cope with stress.

And we will be analyzing the survey in more detail in coming blog posts, so stay tuned.

Public colleges and universities are already starting to face some real financial challenges given the deteriorating economy and tightening state budgets. And families are getting hit hard in their 401(k)s and 529 plans, often used to help fund college.

At the University of Maryland, the budget cuts have translated into a hiring freeze, causing a position for a staff psychologist to be vacant come January.  Kelly Kesler, the assistant director of health promotion at Maryland, is quoted in the school newspaper “The Diamondback” as saying that, “Normally we would run a search for a permanent replacement, but we can’t unless [the hiring freeze] is lifted in time.”

Fortunately, there are possible solutions.  One approach to dealing with the budget cuts and rising fees while preserving a high quality of care is to accept a family's current health insurance policy.  

The University of South Florida health center has recently started accepting multiple insurance providers “in network,” and “this means that going to the clinic will be cheaper for students,” according to the “Oracle,” the college paper.  To reduce administrative costs associated with processing claims, USF teamed up with its medical center, USF Health.  We’ve written about how Ohio University dealt with a $400,000 shortfall by also accepting a family’s insurance policy at the health center.

We think that more schools need to embrace creative solutions to keeping costs in check while providing the best health and wellness services to our students.

One of our priorities at CSHAL is to help students reduce their stress levels.  We've found that the stress felt by college students is significant from the data and analysis drawn from our "Improving Student Health Survey." Specifically, we found that more than one-quarter of students (27.5%) felt they were doing either “poor” or “very poor” in managing stress. We've put together a task force of experts to make progress on this front. 

We try to pass along good approaches we come across to try to reduce these troubling numbers, and are impressed with the approach taken by the University of Texas in its "Stress Recess" initiative.  It includes an online quiz, and encourages students to reduce their stress levels by embracing their program, one small step at a time.  Take the quiz!  Explore their resources to reduce stress on your own, and don't forget to take one step at a time.

On Wednesday, I attended a very well-organized, dynamic conference on next-generation personal health records organized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  At CSHAL, we have a particularly big interest in this topic.  We believe that college students will be among the early adopters and heaviest users of these innovative applications.  Why?  For two primary reasons: 

1.  This demographic’s comfort level with the Internet and social networking tools; and,

2.  The potential of these applications to improve long-term “wellness” by assessing exercise and activity levels, stress levels and moods, and diet.

The day was also valuable in terms of raising the profile of CSHAL with key healthcare organizations, and we had a lot of very productive side-bar conversations.  Over 250 people attended the conference.  The majority of people there were from universities working on PHR applications; health-related foundations; healthcare organizations and providers; and, technology companies.  The agenda can be found here.

Nine university teams provided demonstrations and reports on their efforts to design next-generation personal health record applications.  In addition, there were panels covering key policy and privacy issues associated with PHRs, and a discussion of the “open platform” technology approach taken by all of the teams.  Continue reading...