Well-being Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings
The Well-being Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings (WISHES) is a brief survey (takes around 5 minutes to complete!) that provides UCSC with timely and actionable data to adapt and improve our institutional norms, structures, and processes to enable all students to thrive and flourish.
WISHES supports UCSC to:
- Motivate leaders, faculty, administrators, and students to work collaboratively to improve campus systems.
- Understand the associations between key student experiences and their impact on equitable well-being.
- Build an understanding of the root causes of inequitable well-being among historically marginalized groups of students.
- Shorten learning cycles to accelerate improvement (i.e., learn quickly when a change didn’t work as expected).
- Understand and address variations in student well-being throughout the year.
- Respond in (close to) real time to emergent conditions affecting students’ well-being.
- Assess trends over time.
- Benchmark data against other colleges and universities.
What does the survey measure?
Conditions for well-being | Intermediate outcomes | Long-term outcomes |
Financial security | Loneliness | Flourishing |
No experiences of discrimination | Belonging | Psychological distress |
Excited about learning | Mental health treatment engagement | Self-reported overall health and mental health |
Engagement in extracurricular activities | Binge drinking | Health and academic risk |
Mentorship | Life evaluation | |
Supportive friend | ||
Caring professors |