Dr. Jessi Gold, Assistant Professor and the Director of Wellness, Engagement, and Outreach in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, joins the Quadcast to discuss campus-wide mental wellbeing. As a clinician who sees students, faculty and administrators, she has a unique perspective into the mental wellbeing of all campus stakeholders and how those populations interact with one another.

Kelsey Matthews, a mental health advocate and member of MCI’s new National Youth Council on College Mental Health, joins the Quadcast to share her powerful story of perseverance that defined her path to a college degree. Youth Council Chair Carson Domey co-hosts with Dana Humphrey in an episode that touches on resilience, the first-generation student experience, and the impact of college affordability on access and wellbeing.

This week’s Quadcast features a conversation between LearningWell Editor in Chief, Marjorie Malpiede, and Executive Writer for LearningWell, Nichole Bernier, on what she learned while writing her recent article: “How to Build a Career You Love.” In the article, Bernier reports on how colleges students are applying design thinking to reexamine traditional career paths through a personal, purpose-based lens. This new twist on career development is inspired by Stanford’s Life Design Lab and the best-selling book based on it, called Designing Your Life.

Quadcast hosts Dana Humphrey and Marjorie Malpiede discuss new content in LearningWell magazine, including “Bringing Wellbeing into the Classroom” a profile on the Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning at Georgetown University. The hosts talk about how and why they wrote the stories, bringing insights and information about their subjects that may not have made it into the magazine.

On today’s Quadcast, Boston Globe correspondent Kara Miller comments on the new report by Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman, Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges, which points out the disproportionate admission of affluent students at elite colleges in comparison to students of comparable profiles with less means. Miller questions whether the hyper focus on who gets into so few schools takes away from the broader issue of opening up more opportunities across the board.

A conversation with Richard Miller of the Coalition for Transformational Education and Marjorie Malpiede of the Mary Christie Institute on the debut of their new joint publication, LearningWell.

In this week’s Quadcast, Ann Curzan, the Dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA) at the University of Michigan, and Joslyn Johnson, Assistant Dean at LSA, discuss a new initiative at Michigan’s largest school where mental health ambassadors work in curricular and co-curricular settings, doing research and making recommendations for environmental improvements for student mental health and wellbeing. The Mental Health and Wellbeing Student Advocates are two new professional positions dedicated entirely to understanding and improving the institution's impact on mental health and well-being and making systems-level changes in support of student wellness. Curzan says, it is another (big) example of the wellness work taking place at the school, which recently joined the Okanagan Charter.

A new paper by Dr. Jeffrey Arnett, released last week by the Ruderman Family Foundation, suggests that the mental health of people between 18 and 29 has, and continues to be, disproportionately affected by the global pandemic. Arnette, a psychologist and scholar who coined the term “emerging adults” in his previous research, shows that the age group that was least at-risk physically from the virus was most vulnerable to it from a mental health perspective. MCI Executive Director Marjorie Malpiede discusses the findings with Dr. Arnette and Sharon Shapiro, Trustee at the Ruderman Family Foundation.

On the latest episode of the Quadcast, MCI executive director Marjorie Malpiede speaks with Stephanie Marken, partner of the education division at Gallup, and Dr. Zainab Okolo, former strategy officer at Lumina Foundation and current senior vice president of policy, advocacy and government relations for The JED Foundation. Together, the two experts discuss the results and implications of a recent report co-produced by Gallup and Lumina, called: “Stressed Out and Stopping Out: The Mental Health Crisis in Higher Education.” Among its findings, this survey reveals the critical barrier emotional stress poses to not only enrolled students finishing their degree but prospective students enrolling at all. The response from colleges and universities, Marken and Okolo suggest, must focus on developing a culture of care on campus that can see students through to graduation.

This week’s guest on The Quadcast is Jen Hamilton, the director of counseling at Nobles and Greenough School, an independent middle and high school in Dedham, Massachusetts. With MCI reporter Mollie Ames, Jen discusses her experience teaching the curriculum for Yale Professor Laurie Santos’ class, Psychology and The Good Life, to secondary students. While Professor Santos is in the midst of adapting her curriculum for high schoolers, Jen was a pioneer in bringing the course to a younger audience. For years, seniors at Nobles have enrolled in her elective to learn about strategies for reducing stress and promoting wellbeing. “We would love for our kids, when they graduate Nobles, to have a toolkit for not just how to handle bumps in the road as you’re on your journey to get to college, but well through college,” Jen said.