2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

During the COVID-19 pandemic, emotional loneliness, insomnia, and stress are specific common psychological reactions reported by college students. In addition, remote learning environments, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, are becoming more and more popular even after the pandemic. Many college students faced this change without a familiar routine and support to provide a sense of stability and coherence. Commonly observed effects of such reactions and changes on college students include drugs and alcohol use, anxiety, depression, acute stress, and low academic motivation leading to a drop in attendance and retention. However, there appear to be some differences regarding the utilization of mental health services among college students. Several factors contribute to the underutilization of mental health services, such as inability to recognize the need for services, cost of services, to name a few. In addition, many college campuses are not sufficiently equipped to support students’ growing mental health needs. University counseling centers nationwide are struggling to cope with this increase demand for their services. With the support from the U.S. Department of Education, the authors implemented a collaborative program between academic units and university counseling services to provide mental wellness training to minority students in STEM majors in the last three years. STEM students were recruited to participate in the program to completed a set of mental wellness activities or training. The psychological measure, titled the Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms (CCAPS), was used to measure students’ mental readiness before and after they completed the mental wellness program. CCAPS is a multidimensional instrument that covers a variety of psychological conditions, including Depression, Generalized Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Academic Distress, Eating Concerns, Family Distress, Hostility, and Substance/Alcohol use. Therefore, CCAPS is efficient and cost-effective. More important, the instrument is specifically normed for the college student population and has strong psychometric properties. The CCAPS results showed significant changes on several psychological conditions after students completed the mental wellness program. In this paper, the authors will first discuss the detailed design and implementation of the mental wellness program. Then, the pre- and post- CCAPS results from more than 50 students will be reported. In addition, the academic performance of these students, including their GPAs, retention rate, academic progress or graduation timeline, will be analyzed together with their CCAPS results. The authors will specifically compare the analysis results between Engineering students and Non-Engineering students to discover any noticeable patterns.