Harvard Flourishing Survey conducted to assess student well-being at UNC

Throughout January and February, undergraduate students received five emails from the Office of the Provost encouraging them to participate in the Harvard Flourishing Survey. 

The three-part survey, based on items developed by The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, had an estimated over 10 percent response rate by Feb. 26. The Human Flourishing Initiative at UNC wrote in an email to The Daily Tar Heel saying the survey is now closed.

Ben Yates and William Cook, juniors at UNC, founded the Human Flourishing Initiative on campus after taking Larry Goldberg’s Honors 390: Elements of Politics course during the spring of their first year. The class revolved around famous literature deemed “The Great Books,” leading to seminar discussions of Aristotle, Shakespeare and Machiavelli texts.

“I think it was the first time that we had been in a context, like a formal context, to discuss those kind of deeper questions about life and purpose and humanity and all those kinds of things,” Yates said.

Once the semester ended, the pair decided to create a space to continue the conversations that began in Goldberg’s class.

In December 2023, an adviser to the Human Flourishing Initiative, Madison Perry, connected them with his former Duke University graduate school classmate Brendan Case, the associate director for research at The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. 

Case said the students shared their idea of doing a survey at UNC to assess how well students are doing at the University. His team at Harvard was working on a related project called the virtues for academic flourishing initiative.

He said that most student assessment measures at universities are deficit-oriented, meaning they are focused on identifying which students are struggling. To supplement important mental health questionnaires, he said a survey that distinguishes which students are “just doing OK” and which are flourishing can be really useful.

“We developed this new survey which was designed to assess the extent to which students were flourishing as students and the academic institutions to which they belong were flourishing as academic institutions,” Case said. “And so I suggested that it might be interesting to try to find a way to collaborate in introducing the survey onto UNC’s campus.”

Cook said it was helpful to have Case walk them through conversations with administration. After meeting with Provost Christopher Clemens and then-interim Chancellor Lee Roberts, the University agreed to administer a campus-wide survey.

The first part of the survey is the 12-item human flourishing index, which Case said has been administered millions of times across institutions. This section asks students to respond to items like “Overall, how satisfied are you with life as a whole these days?” on a 0 to 10 scale.

The second component, Yates said, is the community well-being index, with 20 items. For example, “Those in leadership truly care about the well-being of everyone in UNC at Chapel Hill” being ranked from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

The final section consists of 24 questions specifically developed for this initiative. Case said that this is the first large-scale administration of this section, which consists of questions such as, “To what extent has university life helped you to treat everyone respectfully?”

“All of the traits that we’re asking students to reflect on are intrinsically valuable in themselves," Case said. "So it’s just good to be a just person. It’s just good to be wise or to be honest. But they’re also arguably right at the heart of the core mission of any university or college.”

Following the survey closure, Yates said there will be in-depth interviews conducted with some students to understand why they responded in certain ways. 

Case said The Human Flourishing Project plans to provide analytical insights and conduct academic research when given the data from the survey.

“We’re just hopeful that the data from this will — because [administrators] say it will — influence policies and be for the better of all students, freshman through senior year,” Cook said.

Case said it would be valuable for colleges and universities around the country and world to use a common approach, like this survey, to have comparable data.

“I mean, you spend four years here, right? That’s turning you into a particular kind of person, and that’s probably going to vary depending on what community groups you are [in], what major you are, all that kind of stuff,” Yates said. 

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