How to Build Belongingness to Boost Student Mental Health

0:00:12.3 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today’s episode is the final installment in our three-part series on student mental health. The focus today is on ways to help students build a sense of belongingness. It can be really challenging for staff to identify students who may be struggling in this area, given the wide variation in how important or not it might be for any young adult to feel like they’re fitting in and being accepted. As it turns out, there’s a surprisingly simple way to find out whether a student is struggling to feel they belong, and that’s by asking them how they’re doing. As you’ll hear, asking them in the right way at the right times can be surprisingly complex. Give these folks a listen and enjoy.

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0:01:01.9 EV: All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of EAB’s Office Hours podcast. My name is Ed Venit. I serve as a managing director here at EAB, and I lead a lot of our student success research. Recently, we’ve been thinking a lot about mental health, and this is the next in a series of podcasts that we’ve done on mental health strategies for students. Very needed right now. If you look at the data, you will see that mental health concerns among undergraduates has definitely gone up, I’m sure among graduate students as well, since the pandemic, but was actually on the rise before the pandemic as well. In the undergraduate space, specifically, we’re concerned about this from the standpoint not only of supporting students, but also of supporting student success. If you are not feeling your best, your likelihood to remain in school, well, becomes a lot harder.

0:01:50.8 EV: As part of that work, we’ve convened a group of EAB-ers who have backgrounds in mental health and wellness to see what more we can do with our technologies and offerings to support our partner institutions in supporting their students. I have two of these folks with me here today and I’d like them to introduce themselves. We’re gonna start off with Jess King.

0:02:11.3 Jessica King: Thanks so much, Ed. My name is Jessica King, and I serve as an associate director on the strategic consulting team here at EAB. And I’ve been at EAB for about two years. And before coming to EAB, was primarily in campus-based roles, and I think the root of my interest in student mental health really started at the time when I was an academic advisor. It planted these ideas of how and when do students need space held for them, what does that look like in the context of holistic student support? And that continued to be a thread throughout my career prior to coming to EAB and was absolutely part of my research in pursuing belongingness as a protective factor for mental health. So I’m excited to talk about those things. Excited to be here with Becky doing that today.

0:03:02.7 EV: Thanks, Jess. My other colleague we have here today is Becky Carpenter. Becky.

0:03:08.2 Becky Carpenter: Thanks so much, Ed. I am Becky Carpenter again, and I have been with EAB almost a year now, and I work on the Starfish Services team. Part of our role is to help partners implement Starfish and the additional features and provide one of the many cohorts and learning opportunities. Before coming to EAB, I have a background primarily working with students with disabilities. I spent a couple of decades working in the K-12 sector as an occupational therapist, and then moved into higher Ed as the director of learning support services, continuing to work with students on accommodations and accessibility, and also covering things like Starfish, which is how I got here and tutoring and other things.

0:03:49.4 BC: But I also, I feel like part of what interests me in this area is my own children. I have two kids that are currently in college, a rising sophomore and junior, and then a stepdaughter who has an associate’s and has stepped away. She’s struggled to find her place in higher Ed. And then my oldest stepdaughter has succeeded, if you will, in higher Ed spaces. She has a performance doctorate in Oboe, which is no small feat, but is now working not as a classical musician, but in a coffee shop. So, there’s a lot of personal factors as well as the professional background that contribute to my interest in belonging.

0:04:31.2 EV: Thank you, Jess and Becky for being with us today. We really appreciate it. Our prior two podcasts on mental health have been about the eight dimensions of wellness and about help seeking behaviors. If you’re interested in either of those topics, go check those podcasts out. Today we’re gonna be talking about belongingness, student belongingness, belongingness on campus. It’s a key component to feeling, well, like you belong and wanna stick around. Both Jess and Becky have a lot of background in these two areas, which is why I wanted them to be with us today. Maybe we can ask you guys, so Jess, why don’t you start off, why don’t you define belongingness for us in this context so you can give the listeners a little bit of a background on this?

0:05:14.7 JK: Sure, absolutely. So, if we think about belonging, it’s a universal human need. So if we start for a second with a general definition, it’s that feeling of deep connection with social groups. That can be about collective experiences. It can be about how we feel in physical spaces. And so, I’d like to just start by reminding everyone that belongingness is something we’re all searching for and seeking. When we apply it to the college context and the college environment, I love to reference Strayhorn here. His definition relates to students’ perceived social support on campus, their feelings of connection and their experiences of mattering, feeling that they’re cared about, that they’re connected to the community, to others on campus, whether that’s faculty, fellow peers. So we see, in that kind of definition, that belongingness, while it is universal, there’s a really personal element, the student’s perception of their social connections and their support that they have.

0:06:16.5 EV: Becky, could you go a little bit deeper on this concept of social connection and how it relates to belongingness?

0:06:22.7 BC: Well, I think one of the things that is important to tie it back to really is also how it interplays with mental health, the belongingness, and there’s more and more research providing evidence of this. Stephen Porges is one of the researchers who’s looking at the Polyvagal Theory, and he’s been able to demonstrate some neurological evidence that when students… Not students. When all of us are in a safe space, then we’re able to form connections, and that that can have a very protective measure on our mental health and our ability to remain calm in the face of challenges. So I think, intuitively, we all get it, but I think there’s also, there’s evidence behind this concept of belonging and social connection and the impact on mental health. So it’s belonging and something we can do to support our students’ mental health.

0:07:24.0 EV: So when we’re talking about students, we got to understand that some students are gonna feel like they belong right from the start, others will not and can be brought into the fold. And of course, this is a big moment of transition for many students who are entering adulthood or have been out in the workforce and are entering a new environment. So you’re gonna get a lot of heterogeneity in this space. I wonder if you all could weigh in a little bit, how do we know who is struggling with belongingness? How does it express itself? Or how could our listeners who might be working with students, what should they look for? What tools do they have?

0:08:03.1 JK: Ed, that’s a great question. So we mentioned that belongingness is universal. This desire to belong is something that we’re all seeking out. But where it gets really interesting is that each of us as unique human beings, have these varying thresholds for how our belongingness needs are met. So what the social connection need to be for me, that’s likely different than what it is for you, Ed, or what it could look like for you, Becky. And the idea here is that if those thresholds are met, we feel that we belong. And if they’re not met, we run the risk of then having some of those mental health related concerns or feeling loneliness or feeling disconnection.

0:08:46.1 JK: And so it’s the unmet need for belongingness that we need to try to evaluate or unearth when we’re working with students. How can we learn what their threshold is? How do we get there and then do something about it if there’s an unmet need? And because it is subjective, the absolute best way to learn how a student is feeling is to ask them. And it sounds overly simplistic in some ways, maybe still a little bit complicated in others, but we can ask students how they’re feeling, and there’s some really interesting ways that we can get at doing that.

0:09:22.7 EV: So, Jess and Becky, you were a part of this task force that we put together that was asking for our current features from our technologies navigating Starfish that we apply in the student success space. How could we take some of the things that we’re doing there, which are largely around academic struggles, or maybe you have an administrative concern, like a virtual hold, or something along those lines, and take those tools and apply them to a broader problem, the mental health and wellness concerns that a lot of our partners are feeling? And I recall that we specifically were looking at polls and surveys as a great option when it comes to belongingness.

0:10:00.9 EV: And Jess, you shared very early on in these conversations that we actually know quite a bit about the kinds of questions we should ask in a poll or a survey, potentially very early on in a student’s career at our institutions to surface those concerns and also reliably find students who might be less likely to be retained. So talk to me a little bit about these questions that we could be asking and why we know that they’re reliable indicators.

0:10:29.4 JK: Absolutely. So when we think about the kinds of questions that we can ask students, I like to start with referencing the National Survey of Student Engagement Data, otherwise known as NSSE Data. And they’ve pulled together three questions into a scale that really does correlate with students’ intention to return. So we start to see that direct interconnection with student success. And the three questions that help them get there are, I feel comfortable being myself at this institution. Having students respond to that statement, I feel comfortable being myself at this institution, I feel valued by this institution, and I feel like a part of the community at this institution. Each of those three questions correlate with students’ expressed intention to return.

0:11:15.0 JK: And there’s nothing magical about those questions. And we’re not saying belonging, do you feel that you belong at this institution head on, but we’re finding ways to ask students those questions and to bring that information into our follow-up. And so I think, again, we see the simplicity and the possibility of being able to ask these questions of students at scale, as you said, Ed, through tools like polls and surveys that exist in our technology and other data sources already available on campus.

0:11:45.4 EV: It struck me when we looked a little bit closer at those NSSE questions. Well, two things really struck me. The first was, the students who agreed with those statements, who said that they felt like they belong, were also indicating an intention to return that was nearly 100%. They really were engaged and they were really coming back. Those who said maybe that they did not agree with those statements were less likely to come or to express interest in coming back. The thing about NSSE is that it’s administered typically in the spring semester. So we will already have lost students along the way who are not feeling a sense of belongingness, perhaps as early as the first couple weeks of school.

0:12:24.6 EV: And so while we look at these numbers, I couldn’t help but think actually the situation might be a little bit more stark than this even, and these might even be more reliable indicators of some of our retention challenges going forward. And of course, we would need partner institutions to do a little bit of exploration on their own, applying questions like these in their early intake and polling that they might do with their incoming students. Now, Becky, one of the other things that we’ve talked about with regards to belongingness is the very close relationship with our equity work. Obviously, you can see the overlap between these two things. Everybody may feel at some point in their life, a sense that they don’t belong.

0:13:03.9 EV: If you’re already feeling like an outsider or you’re already feeling like you’re from a minoritized population, then belongingness is gonna be even more of a hurdle if you are getting into an environment that is unfamiliar to you. So, can you drill in a little bit on that? Explain to me a little bit more about that connection and why belongingness is so important for supporting your equity work on campus.

0:13:27.5 BC: Sure. And I think I just wanna really say, I love what Jess said about asking the students, going to them and using tools like surveys and polls to do that. I think one of the things that I saw when I was working in higher Ed is some assumptions that we make because of our intentions to support students and our beliefs, and I think that sometimes we forget that students come in to our doors with a whole host of messages that they’ve heard before they ever cross our doorstep. So it’s remembering that those messages are part of what’s contributing to their sense that they might not… Their sense and the questions and the comments students have told me that I worked with about, I’m not sure I belong here, I’m not sure I can do this.

0:14:08.7 BC: And then I think there’s things like I think that how those of us who have a master’s or a doctorate degree might feel about ourselves, might not be the same way that students feel about us. They might see us as people that are intimidating just by the very fact that we have done the thing that they’re dreaming and hoping they might be able to do. So there’s a hierarchy there that I think, you have faculty that are dressed real casual. They’re trying to convey an informalness, but there is a formality just by the merit of what they’ve accomplished. That I think can exacerbate that lack of a sense of belonging that some of our students come to us with. And that’s not related to us in the equity piece, but I think that’s a broad piece for a lot of students. So we can come back to the equity…

0:15:03.7 JK: And Becky, I just wanna add one piece to that that you were just making me think about. So many of us come to work in higher Ed because we felt a deep sense of belonging on campus because that was our space. This felt natural and important to us, and we have to appreciate along the way that many students are showing up on campus, hopefully seeking that as well, but really looking for a degree, looking for outcomes, looking for the pathway, and the belongingness may not be the fit that we naturally felt when we started on our career journey, is what keeps us on campus.

0:15:39.4 BC: I think that’s so true, Jess. And I think that that’s all the way through our educational system. We have people that have generally succeeded in education, that are presenting education as a great option, and that this is the path forward, which is one of the things my oldest daughter has experienced. Classical music is a difficult field. It’s not just get a doctorate and you’ve got a job. But I think going back to that diversity issue, I think that one of the biggest things that can be really helpful with that is I think that sometimes that can be as overwhelming as mental health, as far as where do you start? And I think disaggregating your data is a really important piece of that because what one institution might need to address is gonna be different than what another institution will need to address.

0:16:30.0 BC: And so, going back to asking the students, if we can desegregate the data and find out which of our students are not, which subgroups of students are not making it to graduation, are not being retained, we’re losing them before they ever get through that first semester, like you mentioned Ed, then we can more thoughtfully send out surveys and find out what those students need, listen to them, and then build what they need to succeed. So I think that that’s one of the places that also the technology can be helpful. And so that’s kind of what I would say about the equity piece.

0:17:09.8 EV: In these conversations, I’m always reminded about how subjective experience can be. An interaction with a person or an interaction with a message could be interpreted by one student very differently from another student. We’ve heard this often just in the context of an advising conversation. Some students, perhaps those that already are feeling comfortable in their environment might very much appreciate outreach from someone like an academic advisor or a coach. Somebody else who maybe was not feeling that they belonged could feel that was a little bit like getting called to the principal’s office and feel completely different from the exact same conversation, the exact same moment.

0:17:51.2 EV: And it is something that’s come up across the course of many years. I’ve seen it again and again, people who think that they’re doing something very well-intentioned, because as you both have noted, typically most of our listeners here are going to have, I’m doing air quotes right now, one higher education. And our students are still in the game, so their outcomes are still up in the air. And I think it’s very important, as both of you have noted, to remember who you are in this conversation and how you’re maybe projecting yourself, and are you creating a sense of safety and belongingness for the students that are across the table from you or in that group with you, or that you’re just trying to reach out to?

0:18:31.3 EV: Speaking of outreach, let’s turn our attention to that. I mentioned earlier that with the NSSE survey being administered a little bit later in the first year, there are opportunities perhaps earlier on to get into this discussion with students perhaps as soon as they arrive on campus. So let’s talk a little bit about that. When and how should we be outreaching to students? In your experiences, when it’s this a useful intake moment? I can’t help but think about my first few weeks in college in these moments. But help me relate to that. You all have been much closer to the field and been practitioners in this subject much more recently than I have, so I’m hoping that you can provide a little bit of guidance for our listeners who may be curious about doing a little bit of extra surveying. When should they do it and what’s the best way to do it?

0:19:27.8 JK: So, Ed, I think that you can really get started in this through the student onboarding process. It’s really never too early to start to ask those kinds of questions about students anticipated sense of belonging through their first engagements on campus, that opportunity to come to new student orientation, to ask questions and follow up to that absolutely during welcome week and the start of a new semester or a new term. And what I’m driving towards there is that the beginning is important. But we also don’t want to assume that if a student feels an initial sense of belonging, that that will persist, because these moments of belonging uncertainty can creep up at any time. A student could have a very negative interaction mid-semester or a challenging experience, and that could compromise that feeling.

0:20:18.2 JK: And so, if we can build additional touchpoints, maybe even each term, maybe even in each advising appointment, how do we weave those intentional thoughtful questions in, we can keep a steadier state track of how students are feeling and belonging over time, and then begin to learn from that and give them real time support as well to help correct and adjust and support their experience in the way that they need that to happen.

0:20:46.8 BC: I just wanna kind of build on what Jess is saying there with, I think that there’s also students who aren’t gonna feel psychologically safe at the start of the semester to join in as many things, especially when you’re talking about students facing mental health challenges. And so I think that Jess’s suggestion about continuing to do outreach throughout the semester or over multiple terms is a really important factor, whether it’s that they’ve not yet developed that sense of belonging, or whether it’s that there might have been a shift.

0:21:17.6 EV: It’s also a really good opportunity, if you’re going to do multiple surveys across time, to see a positive impact. There will be some students who simply take a little bit of time to, as you noted, get their feet under them, find their place, find their people, find the oboe club, if that’s in fact what they’re trying to do, or whatever it might be. Some people just take to it like fish to water, others need a little bit more time to go, but it’s really nice to be able to see positive change in students. And if you have someone who was expressing some concern before, you help them, a few months pass, you go back and ask them again, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m feeling great now. I found where we’re supposed to be and, and this feels like my home now.” We all know anecdotal stories about this, but it’s nice to collect data on that as well.

0:22:05.7 EV: Another aspect that we’ve talked about over time in our discussions on our task force is essentially what’s in that message, right? So the tone language, even the medium we use to communicate with students to collect this sort of information, it really matters. So Becky, I’m wondering if you can go… Tell us a little bit more about this, and especially within the context of a growth mindset language rather than deficiency.

0:22:32.1 BC: I think that that matters so much, and it could potentially be one of the low hanging fruits on things that we can definitely improve in connecting with students and helping them feel belonging and included in the environment when the messaging is growth mindset-based and respectful. I think that links are really important for this Gen Z population. They’ve grown up in a time when technology is really intuitive, and so when we don’t include things like links and when we make it hard for them to figure out why they have a hold on their account, that can be extremely frustrating for them. One of the students that I worked with when I was the Director of Learning Support Services, she talked about, she called college, it was like an escape room. She said, she’s like, “I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing.”

0:23:22.7 BC: And I think that that speaks to the message that you’re bringing up here, Ed, in that we really need to be more thoughtful around how we’re communicating our processes to students. And the first time I participated in an escape room was in DC in May, and we did great, but I think a lot of that had to do with the support that we all provided each other. And I think that that’s a really good way to view what we need to be doing for our students, is, not that it’s an escape room, that was kind of devastating to hear, but at the same time, I think she brought up a valid point.

0:23:55.7 EV: I think that’s a really, really apt analogy. It’s a puzzle that you got to solve and sometimes you feel like you’re on your own. And if you’ve ever done an escape room, you know that if you get really stuck then one of the staff come on the intercom and kind of give you a little hint, “Do it this way,” or, “Look over there.” And that’s kind of the role that maybe many of our listeners feel that they play for their students. It’s important to struggle and learn about things, but at the same time, sometimes that lock just won’t open and you don’t know why.

0:24:26.9 BC: I love that. I like making it that easy, that it’s just like, it’s so simple in an escape room to just call out and they come over and give you a little hint. That’s kind of what we need to be thinking towards, I think. Is like, how do we make it simpler for them to get to their goal?

0:24:43.7 EV: In the prior podcast we’ve done on this, we came up with all sorts of analogies involving exercise balls and Domino’s pizza and things along those lines. So now we’ve got one for this podcast, too, the escape room.

0:24:54.6 BC: All right, glad to contribute.

0:24:57.4 EV: There’s a big difference between who we are personality wise. You both know me as a very extroverted and gregarious person. Not everybody is like me. And I know both of you might have different personalities as well in this regard. So there’s some students who’s a sense of belongingness is gonna be, they’re groupers. They wanna get into a club and activity, find that thing on campus, find the oboe club, if you will, or whatever it might be, and start to make friends, and that’s what it means to them. Other folks are gonna be more individualistic, solitary, maybe hey mac a little bit, maybe a little bit more introverted, does not also mean that they don’t need to feel seen, heard in the sense that they belong, even if they’re not actively participating.

0:25:47.2 EV: So I love to have a little bit of a conversation about that, particularly because the three of us do have diverse personalities on how do you navigate that space where one size does not fit all, and the right approach for some students is gonna be the wrong approach for others and vice versa?

0:26:06.7 JK: Ed, I love this question because you and I have talked about how our personalities are actually polar opposites. We come at things in very different ways and it’s that reminder that that’s true for everyone. So it takes us back to that personal threshold for belongingness, what that looks like, why we need to ask directly and seek to understand. So when we seek to understand and we’re listening to students about what they’re telling us, that gives us a foundation on which to build. But I sometimes think that belongingness and engagement or campus engagement in particular can be confounded. And there’s probably some level of overlap between those for many students, but they are not the same.

0:26:47.7 JK: So students could very well be engaged on campus and attending club or organization meetings and kind of checking those boxes, if you will, but then knowing personally on the inside that they don’t feel like they belong in those spaces. They’re there for an hour and they leave, but they’re not finding the connection that they’re looking for. So again, we wanna make sure that we’re asking and we’re not relying on other indicators and making assumptions about those. The other thing I start to think about as we come back to this connection between belonging and mental health is that, how many times are we still sending these blasts come to the student information fair, or log on virtually to learn about all of these things all at the same time. Come meet all of your new friends.

0:27:31.9 JK: We’re sending these blasts and inviting students to show up in spaces that are unfamiliar and meet people that they’ve probably never laid eyes on before, and we’re assuming that’s maybe the best way for them to get started and to jump in. And for a student who’s experiencing social anxiety or might be struggling with depression, that’s kind of a daunting ask. That’s not the kind of ask that I myself as a student could take folks up on years ago, but that’s often where we start. And so it’s okay to still do some of that, but how do we have different entry points to invite students in lower stakes ways or to create smaller connections that hopefully open those doors to the bigger connections?

0:28:15.7 EV: I’m especially struck with regards to the differences with Gen Z in terms of how they might be approaching what it means to be part of something. This generation is growing up quite a bit differently than the previous generations, both in terms of how they’re interacting in the world, which is a lot more digital. And also the fact that, well, during their formative years, there was a pandemic, in which we were quite isolated. So I’d encourage the listeners to be listening to your students in terms of how they might be expressing differences that are okay, but different in how they’re interacting with each other, what might constitute belongingness for them, especially because a lot of that activity might be a bit cryptic to us, especially if it’s happening in digital spaces, and a bit foreign if this is not the thing that we were used to.

0:29:05.4 EV: So Jess, Becky, what kind of advice could you offer our listeners who might be trying to understand a little bit more about how Gen Z might be perceiving these messages?

0:29:16.4 BC: Ed, I’m glad you asked that, because I just want to say again, I think the best way to do this is really to ask them. I think one of the resources we have is student workers. We can ask them to review messages that we’re sending out, make sure that we’re communicating clearly what we want them to hear in those messages, that they know what we’re asking them to do. We can give them a clear call to action when we know that they interpret it that way.

0:29:41.6 EV: Okay. Well, this has been a very robust conversation. We’re running a little short on time. I want to thank you in two regards. One, for being with us today, and two, just overall educating me on a lot of these subjects. I’ve been in the student success space for quite a while, but mental health hasn’t been something that we’ve talked about a lot in this regard. It clearly needs to be something that we’re talking about a lot more now, and I’m glad that we’re moving in that direction. I’m also very grateful for all the contributions you made to our internal task force, and we’ll all get better as a result of this. Our firm will become stronger in supporting our partners, and our partners will become stronger in supporting our students. So that’s how it goes. To close this out here, I’m wondering, what are your big takeaways here that you might offer the audience just to sort of bring it all together in a bow?

0:30:35.2 BC: So, one of the things that I go back to is, again, one of those more intuitive things. Brené Brown is a researcher out of Texas that many people have heard of, and she recently wrote a book and did a series on the Atlas of Emotions. And one of the big things that she talks about is listening and believing people when they tell you how they’re feeling. And I think that’s kind of the context that we need to consider when we’re reaching out to students about belonging. Ask them and then listen and respect what they’re telling us, believe what they’re telling us and go from there and to kind of take our own assumptions out of it. Because as you said, Ed, this generation, it’s a unique timeframe that they’ve grown up in. So they are gonna have some different feelings than we might assume. So that would be what I’d say.

0:31:20.9 JK: I think another big takeaway here is that rightfully so, we are very worried about what we’re thinking about as a mental health crisis, the significant magnitude of the student concerns in the mental health space, and that’s important and critical. And I think as we bring that down to size wherever we can, we can think about belongingness as a way to support mental health in general. It’s the day-to-day ways that we can help students. We can provide a protective factor and a social connection that is invaluable. And so that would be a takeaway, that belongingness can be part of these protective factors that we all need to support our mental health and to take steps in addressing mental health moving forward.

0:32:09.5 EV: For me, it’s an even more global thing than that, but it builds on what you were just saying. My takeaway on this and from all of our conversations has been this isn’t a single activity that we do. Belongingness isn’t like a task and it’s not over, hey, we did the thing and so it’s over with. You might feel that way about like say, clearing a bursar hold or getting a student registered. Those are tasks that can be completed. Belongingness is more of a way of life for our student support folks and really for our campuses in general. So, a question to ask yourself as a listener is, what are we doing and how are our students perceiving this? Are we drawing them in or are we pushing them away? Are we eliminating or creating barriers to them feeling like they’re a part of our campus culture and community?

0:32:52.4 EV: How are the words that we’re using being perceived by them? How are the spaces we’re using being perceived by them? How are the media we’re using being perceived by them in this regard? And maybe what kind of blind spots do we have? I thought it was really interesting at the very beginning here where we were talking about how our perceptions of belongingness are gonna be different than many of our students because we made it to the end and we feel that we’re part of that community. So, that’s an important reminder for everybody who works in the higher education space that your students are still on that journey and don’t make the assumption that they’re gonna be viewing the world through the same lens that you are currently viewing it or maybe even viewed it as a student.

0:33:34.0 EV: So, on that note, I think we should probably wrap this up. Becky, Jess, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate, again, I really appreciate everything that we’ve done together on this, but I appreciate you taking some time out of your day to share your insights with our audience, and just thank you very much.

0:33:51.0 BC: Thank you, Ed.

0:33:53.4 JK: Ed, thanks for driving this conversation with us today.

0:33:56.4 BC: Yeah, it was fun.

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0:34:02.2 S1: Thank you for listening. Please join us next week when we hear from the folks at the University of Michigan who host an All-Access Fly-In Weekend every year for prospective students from underrepresented student populations and their parents or guardians. The All-Access Weekend has become a big hit with students who get to learn about the school and the curriculum while building relationships with highly motivated peers. Until next week, thank you for your time.