Beyond all the concrete things schools can offer - academics, research opportunities, sports, dining halls - is something both basic and hard to define: a sense of belonging. Factors such as race and gender can influence how at home a student feels on campus, contributing to their overall well-being. But my research highlights the role of religion and spirituality, too: how support for students' worldviews - whether they're deeply religious, atheist or somewhere in between - shapes their campus experience.
The Healthy Minds Survey was conducted at Harvard in spring 2025. With a response rate of 25 percent, more than 5,900 students across undergraduate and graduate Schools completed the 25-minute survey. Healthy Minds, a national initiative launched in 2007 by the University of Michigan, administered the survey, which is designed to gather information about mental health on college campuses. Since its inception, more than 850,000 students at 600 colleges and universities have participated, including Stanford University, MIT, Tufts University, and Boston University.
Trevor Traina, a tech entrepreneur from San Francisco, attended Princeton University before pursuing advanced degrees from Oxford and UC Berkeley. His son Robby (not his real name) is a varsity athlete with a 4.0 grade point average who is off to college this year-and wants nothing to do with his father's alma maters or, for that matter, any other Ivy League school. Robby chose Wake Forest in North Carolina instead.
Many students reported experiencing racial microaggressions in classrooms and social spaces, including being mistaken for service workers, being made to feel like outsiders, or feeling a need to suppress aspects of their racial or cultural identity to 'fit in.'