An Evaluative Review of Outcome Research on Universal Mental Health Promotion and Prevention Programs for Higher Education Students

Abstract

Objective: This review is the first large-scale attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of universal promotion and prevention programs for higher education students on a range of adjustment outcomes. Participants/Methods: The current review examined 83 controlled interventions involving college, graduate, and professional students, with a focus on 3 main outcomes: social and emotional skills, self-perceptions, and emotional distress. Results/Conclusions: Skill-oriented programs that included supervised practice demonstrated the strongest benefits, thus showing promise as a successful mental health promotion and preventive intervention. In comparing different intervention strategies, mindfulness training and cognitive-behavioral techniques appear to be the most effective. Furthermore, interventions conducted as a class appear to be effective, suggesting the potential for exposing higher education students to skill training through routine curricula offerings. This review offers recommendations for improving the experimental rigor of future research, and implications for enhancing campus services to optimize student success in psychosocial—and thus ultimately academic—domains.

Keywords:

• adjustment
• college students
• higher education
• mental health
• prevention
• promotion

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Fred Bryant, Alexandra Kirsch, Ashley Rolnik, Alison Stoner, and the many research assistants who made this project possible.

Notes

Throughout this report, “higher education students” refers generally to students receiving postsecondary education in 2- or 4-year colleges and universities, trade and vocational schools, or various graduate and professional programs (eg, medical or law school).

A listing of the computer databases, search terms, and journals searched is available from the authors by request.

Because reaching significance at the .05 level, which we used as an index of effectiveness for the interventions, is dependent on sample size, we compared the sample sizes of skill-oriented interventions with and without skill practice and psychoeducational programs. After removing an outlier with a sample size over 4 standard deviations above the mean, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed no significant differences, F(2, 81) = 1.649, p = .199.

The number of social and emotional skill outcomes within psychoeducational interventions (n = 7) was so small that it impacted the p value of the Fisher's test (p = .105), despite a very strong effect size favoring supervised skills practice over psychoeducational interventions (OR = 6.375).

This analysis excludes the “Other” category, which contained just 1 outcome.