How to Improve Student Mental Health Counseling

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0:00:11.8 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today we’re joined by a student success leader at the University of New England, who talks about her work to infuse messages of hope, strength, and resilience into a new student mental health counseling framework at the university. All of this work followed, she says, from efforts to study existing approaches, to collect the right data, and to establish benchmarks that inform and measure progress going forward. She talks a lot about how she involved faculty and other stakeholders and about inviting parents into the conversation, too. It’s a fascinating story, so give these folks a listen and enjoy.

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0:00:56.2 Maggie Everett: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Maggie Everett, and I work with our research team here at EAB. One of my principal areas of focus over the last couple of years has been studying pandemic impacts on higher education. And as we all know, student mental health was severely impacted. However, to be frank, student mental health was not exactly a higher ed success story even prior to the pandemic. Today we’re going to examine some new approaches to student mental health and well-being within the university setting. And joining me to talk about that is the University of New England’s Dean of Students and Vice President of Student Affairs, Jennifer DeBurro. Jennifer, would you mind telling everyone a little bit about your role at UNE?

0:01:33.1 Jennifer DeBurro: Of course. And let me start, Maggie, by thanking you. I appreciate the opportunity to participate in this today. So I look forward to our conversation. As you noted, I am the Dean of Students and the Vice President of Student Affairs at the University of New England. I’ll just offer the context that the University of New England has two campuses on the lovely coast of Maine, and we’ve also got a site out in Tangier, Morocco. We’re a mid-sized institution, and my role actually is to oversee units within the division of Student Affairs that are fairly standard, consistent with what you might find at other institutions. So our counseling center, student access, which works with our students with disability-related accommodations, housing, orientation, outdoor recreation, student engagement. So again, a fairly standard portfolio of student affairs units. Today, I’m joining you because I did participate in the Mental Health Collaborative that EAB hosted, and I’m excited about what I’ve learned from the collaborative, but also to share with folks some of the things that I’ve learned that may be applicable to institutions in the work that they’re doing.

0:02:42.2 JD: And so a lot of what we’ll talk about and how we’ll frame our conversation is in challenging colleagues to think not about the before times. I’ll explain that in a second. But instead to be looking forward into thinking about what the needs of our students are right now. And so in my role overseeing those units, I sit on a number of institutional committees and obviously talk on a regular basis with the folks that lead the units within my division. And I often hear folks talking about the before times. And by that, they’re referring to the pre-pandemic years. And those years, they were wrought with their own tension points. We are all looking ahead at this enrollment decline, the demographic cliff that we’ve read and heard so much about, a lot of internal pressures, external pressures, financial obligations that we need to meet, and yet inflation, rising costs, all those things. So we look back at those times as sort of what we think we’re going to get back to. And my thinking has really evolved. I think instead what we need to be doing is thinking about the here and now. Some of the things that were actually occurring in the field and in our K through 12 system pre-pandemic, and how those factors have been exacerbated, and how they’re presenting on our college campus. So I think that informs a lot of what we’ll talk about together today.

0:04:04.7 ME: That is such a great point, Jennifer. And there does seem to be a shift in the way that colleges are talking about meeting student mental health needs, and that is important, particularly when you consider what the data are telling us about that crisis. However, I think you would agree that there is an enormous gap between recognizing the problem and then mobilizing the right resources and pointing them in the right direction to help. Jennifer, you co-wrote an article for Inside Higher Ed last fall that explored the need for colleges and universities to change their thinking on this issue. That might be as good a place as any to start our conversation today. The title of the article is, More Than Just Counselors. And I think I understand what you mean by that, but would you mind explaining what you mean by the headline and maybe give us a short summary of the suggested changes that you and your co-author wrote about?

0:04:52.1 JD: Sure. Let me begin by acknowledging that we are very well aware that there is this burgeoning crisis of mental health in our young people. We don’t argue that at all. My co-author and I, the co-author being the president of the University of New England, Dr. James Herbert. There is an ongoing crisis as evidenced actually by the Surgeon General’s recent guidance about screenings for mental health in young people as part of their ongoing care protocols. What’s also been recommended actually, is that we add to our counseling centers, and again, that’s not something that we dispute in any way. And as a matter of fact, at UNE, we have added resource to our counseling center, and I’m proud of that. But more importantly, what we argue is two things. One is we have to frame this work in such a way that it engages students in thinking about hopefulness, that if we spend too much time in the crisis, that we’re missing the next part of the conversation.

0:05:50.7 JD: And so what I mean by that is we have to amplify messages of hope. We have to amplify the work that we do to build skill development and resilience in our students. Because if we don’t do that, we’re actually, we’re failing our students, right? And the way that we do this is through comprehensive and coordinated efforts across the academy. So that what unit… What one unit done is understood by other units as being an integral part of the student wellness equation. And thus, that if we’re all speaking the same language, we’re all making appropriate referrals, we’re connecting our students in ways that are helpful, and again, help them to build that resilience and to build the skills that are gonna be so critical for them once they graduate and they move on to the next thing.

0:06:36.6 ME: Now, the article ends with two sentences that I think sum up the challenge and the fundamental principle that I believe should guide our work moving forward. And I’d like to read those sentences and then ask if you could expand on those two ideas a little bit. “We must be intentional and consistent in communicating messages of hope, strength, and resilience, rather than those suggesting pathology and fragility. And we must do so in the context of multifaceted, coordinated networks of support and opportunities to grow students’ coping skills.” Now, so much has been written about the need to destigmatize discussions around mental health and to normalize the idea of saying, “I’m hurting and I need some help.” And we still have a long way to go on that front, but I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on the ways to balance that with the need to build resilience and coping mechanisms, especially among our younger population. That’s a difficult tightrope to walk in a university setting. And so how do you think about that challenge and how does that inform your approach at UNE?

0:07:31.6 JD: Sure, sure. I wanna provide this with an image. Consider that at some of the youngest of ages, right? The youngest formation of memory. One of the things that many of our young people are capable of reflecting on, we would probably have to prompt them with a very specific question. But consider that we hand over a little box from a fast food chain, and we call it a happy meal. We have led our young people to believe that there are ways we’re supposed to feel all day, every day. And we have added into the equation this notion that things like stress, anxiety, depression maybe aren’t as normal. And so all of this work that we’ve done to destigmatize and to talk about stress, anxiety, depression, the whole host of mental health issues, that’s super. That’s mission-critical. We have to do that because our students won’t access resources. But as we argue in the article and as is reflected in the quote that you pulled, it’s also really important for us to help students build coping skills. And one of the most important parts of that actually, is to begin to challenge the notion that life is not without challenge. That there are no moments when we will feel stress, maybe even chronic stress or anxiety or a whole host of feelings that don’t fall in the spectrum of happy or joyful.

0:09:00.4 JD: And so, to some extent, in the destigmatizing of the language, we also have this follow-up work that is to be done, which is to normalize a wide range of emotions. Now, I wanna be careful here. I’m not talking about toxic positivity. I’m also not talking about diminishing the mental health challenges that our young people are faced with. My fear, though, and the caution that I bring into as many conversations as possible is this notion that we have to talk about next steps. Again, it comes back to those messages of hopefulness. It comes back to therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy that helps our young people to develop skills and to right-size expectations they have about what it means to walk into a high-stakes exam. It is normal for us to feel a high level of stress walking into a high-stakes exam. And so there’s so much that we need to do to normalize the messaging around, again, a host of emotions while also showing up for our people, our young people who are hurting. The data is clear on this. And so what I may not be articulating very well is that there is a spectrum here that we are talking about.

0:10:11.4 JD: And so when the Surgeon General encourages us to increase screenings, which is good because hopefully we will catch more young people sooner and make appropriate diagnoses and connect them with resources and when it’s recommended that we beef up the work of our counseling centers. I also wanna add that there’s a lot that our campuses can be doing to also develop continuums of care that hit students along a continuum of their experience, that helps to right-size expectations for what the experience looks like on campus and how we’re here to support them. And that comes in a lot of different ways. It doesn’t just occur in our counseling centers, and that’s been a big takeaway for me and part of why we were involved with the Mental Health Collaborative that EAB provided.

0:11:00.1 ME: Thank you so much for that context, Jennifer. And I’m curious, how has participating in the Mental Health Collaborative helped inform your approach to mental health and wellbeing on campus?

0:11:11.3 JD: I can’t speak highly enough about the collaborative. I think what it allowed me to do personally was to really begin to wrap my head around what had been sort of nagging at me, which was this ongoing conversation that was being had about harm. And again, I don’t dispute harm done by the pandemic. At the same time though, eyes wide open, it was very clear to me that the way of always doing things, how we’ve always gotten the job done, really wouldn’t be applicable now. There’s a lot that we can bring with us into the future, but there’s also a lot that we needed to do, in essence, to push a reset button, to really rethink what we’ve been doing and how we might right size that based on current needs. So what the collaborative allowed me to do was to really start to create some examples of things that I wanted for my team, programs that I wanted to create for our students. And then this Impact Report that we created, which was a feature of some of the conversations we had within the context of the collaborative.

0:12:11.9 ME: So what did you originally hope to accomplish by creating that Impact Report?

0:12:17.1 JD: Thank you. So the Impact Report itself is something that I’ve sort of dreamt of for years. It’s a mechanism for reporting for both internal constituents as well as external constituents. And so what I mean by that are our faculty and staff, and then externally the families that are a part of our UNE community. And so I wanted to do this because I think too often, especially folks within divisions of student affairs, I’ve heard this for the over two decades that I’ve been in the field. There’s often this lament expressed about who we are as a division and what we tend to do to support the student experience and student success. And in those conversations, as I grew into the field, it occurred to me that we would complain, and I’m guilty of it myself. In my earliest years, I would complain that senior leadership just didn’t understand what we do. But it really requires us to think for a minute about what we’ve done to improve the understanding of our community, of who we are. It’s very easy to minimize it as some have to suggest that we are pizza parties and heads and beds. We’re quite a bit more than that. And anyone who’s worked in student affairs can articulate how much more of a contribution that we make.

0:13:30.0 JD: But again, can I really hold others accountable or even express frustration if I myself haven’t worked to change that. And so my dream of creating this Impact Report was really to use it as a mechanism, not just to talk about the trends that we’re seeing year over year, but also the resources that exist and the ways in which we address those trends. And so we published our first Impact Report this fall and got some really amazing feedback on it because it’s helping me to articulate the value proposition of the Division of Student Affairs at UNE. So we’ve shared that out with our faculty and staff. Again, even our board of trustees, and have gotten some really great feedback on what they’ve learned about us.

0:14:17.9 ME: Congratulations on getting that done. I’m sure that that was a big undertaking. I’m curious how difficult it was to get the data that you were… That you felt that you needed, and what surprised you the most in terms of what you learned in the process of creating that report?

0:14:31.0 JD: Sure. Recognizing that this was our first, I really tried to go in with as few expectations as possible. This was a blank slate for us. And whatever we did with it, it was going to be an improvement on what we’ve done in the past, right? We’ve never had one. So whatever we did was gonna be nice. I looked at examples of these sorts of reports that exist out there. A lot of our state institutions had some really nice reports because it’s part of the funding they get from the state, and they have to provide this. So I looked at a number of examples, and rather than go looking for very specific data points, I simply prompted leadership within each of the units of the division to share with me the data points that they did have. I asked them to share humble brags about the work that they’ve been doing, to share with me some of the trends that they’ve seen, and then what we did, having compiled all of that, is we sort of picked out what are some of the stories here, or what are some of the… Gosh, I’m struggling to find my words. What are some of the elements that would be helpful for us to share out? And so we actually broke it into some chunks. We talked a little bit about recreation and student engagement. We talked about wellness, student wellness at large, and then we talked about preparation skills.

0:15:52.9 JD: And so we talked about our student leadership program, the number of work-study students, and things like that that we have. So again, I didn’t go into this seeking very specific data points, which I’m hoping for the team made it a little bit easier a task to engage in because they really helped inform it. I trust that they know best their units. And so we started by looking at the data that we had, and we built a story around that.

0:16:17.6 ME: I love that approach. And so you created this big document with analysis and facts and figures, and how did you take that Impact Report and use it to make actual change on campus?

0:16:26.5 JD: Sure. And so, as I said, I had been for years wanting to do this and so in my mind, some of the decisions that I was making sort of in the back of my head were already informing this report. And so one of the things that I did at the start of last year, which informed what we did last summer, was to redesign our division. And so I basically broke us into three hubs. So I mentioned that we have two campuses in Portland or rather in Maine. Our Portland campus, which is about 20 miles north of where I’m currently located, they are a graduate and professional campus. And so one of our hubs is Graduate and Professional Student Affairs. They deal very directly with the students in those programs and some of the unique needs that our learners in those programs have. We then have a health and wellness hub and a student engagement hub. What I did and why that was so important, and again, felt very validated by my experience with the collaborative, is it allowed me to take units who were all sort of… I liken it to a train depot. We’ve got lots of trains and they’re all heading in a direction as were our departments. They’re all heading in these great directions, but they were on different tracks. And yet many were trying to accomplish the same thing. So an example of this would be our housing office and our student engagement office, which oversees all of our clubs and organizations, student government, our first-year experience.

0:18:00.4 JD: They’re all really trying to accomplish the same things. Building community, getting students engaged with one another. It seemed to me sort of a no-brainer. We needed to take these units that were all traveling in a similar direction and bring them together on that same track because now we can share the expertise across units, we can share some resource which might make us more effective in the long run and create opportunities for community where while we’ve had it… And I think we’ve had some good collaboration, it actually does it in a much more intentional way. And so that’s a great example of something that we did that was happening at the same time that we were working towards the development of a First Impact Report that really helped actually inform the outcome of that report.

0:18:46.5 ME: That’s a powerful visual that you gave, and I’m curious if you’ve shared that Impact Report yet with families, and are you at all concerned that you might be signaling to parents and the public that UNE was somehow unique in a bad way in terms of how serious the student mental health situation is?

0:19:04.0 JD: Right, thank you for that question. First and foremost, we have not shared it with families yet, we’re getting it up on to our website, which is actually undergoing some redesign itself, but more importantly, we’ve got accepted student events coming up here at the end of this month, we’ll be sharing it with interested families at that time and also during our summer and fall orientation, so that’s really the families of prospective students, I think for them, it’s mission critical at this point, especially seeing some of the gaps that our students are coming in with in terms of their social and academic readiness.

0:19:39.1 JD: So I don’t have a reaction at this point from families, however, I can say I’m not concerned that having done this, what we will signal to families is that at UNE somehow things are worse off than they are at other institutions, actually the voice of this is to demonstrate all of the things that we do to best address the needs of our students, and so they’re no worse off at UNE than they are anywhere else, but we are eyes wide open, we are aware of this crisis, we are aware of the challenges that our students are experiencing and all of the messages that they hear every day from various, whether it’s family, whether it’s the news, whether it’s peers, we are here, we are providing these resources because we are wide awake to them. And we want to be responsive. So my hope actually is not to signal that things are worse, in fact, what we do is something that’s highly responsive to the needs that we understand our students have.

0:20:35.2 ME: I think that raises another interesting question, which is what role should parents of college age students play, and to what extent can and should the university invite parents into that relationship between the university, mental health professionals and their students, which of course aren’t actually kids anymore?

0:20:53.3 JD: They’re in that in-between spot. Those prefrontal cortexes aren’t fully developed and yet we need them functioning independently while they’re at the institution. I really appreciate this question, and actually, I’m curious to hear what you are learning from other institutions about the relationship with parents. I feel very strongly that parents and guardians, I wanna be clear, because not every student who joins us has a biological or adoptive parent that has helped them to join the community, for our parents and guardians, they really are part of that three-legged stool, and that is the institution, the student, and then those parents or guardians who help our students to be a part of the community, I think it’s critical, if any one of those doesn’t exist, I think the system begins to tip in a way that’s not helpful, so what we know from the research and actually EAB has produced this research, they can actually demonstrate for you, have demonstrated for us that students now name parents, increasingly over the past handful of years, as one of the top five resources that they look to when making their decision about college going.

0:22:02.4 JD: And so recognizing that… I did look at that research from EAB, and I’ve looked at that research that’s been… I think College Raptor and others have similarly produced these research projects. Knowing that parents are such an integral part of that selection, it’s again, it’s a no-brainer that we want to involve them. I think what I’ve tried to do with the team that I get to work with every day is think very strategically about what that involvement looks like, I want it to be clear for both parent, guardian, and student, that our role is not to do for students. And this is a debate that’s out there in parenting, right, doing for versus with. We are here to do with. We’re here to do with the students. To do with the family member, the guardian, because at the end of the day, what we all want is to help our students be more successful. So we have long offered a parent orientation session. That’s not uncommon, many institutions do, but we’ve often received lots of phenomenal feedback about what we do to prepare parents and guardians by way of our orientation program, but now we’re also adding additional elements, so we’ll be publishing soon our first Dean’s newsletter, which is a newsletter that I put together with the help of folks within the division. I’ve got a real communications team that helps me with that.

0:23:24.4 JD: The goal of that actually, each time it’s produced, is to identify a theme, and in this case, we talked about wellness, but then also to take that theme and attach it to resources on campus, so recognizing that we were discussing wellness, what we didn’t wanna do was default to what seemed the easiest, which is send your student to the counseling center if they’re having a hard time. What we did actually is we presented some of the research on what, getting outside for literally five to 15 minutes a day, the research tells us that getting outside, getting some of that good vitamin D from the sun can actually help you to be more focused in your study, and bring greater clarity.

0:24:04.9 JD: We talked about utilizing the resource, so in that respect, we talked about outdoor recreation, we linked it back to our website so that parents and guardians could see all of the equipment that we have that students can literally take out in order to get out into the great outdoors, and to take advantage, again, of what the research tells us are great outcomes of that sort of activity, we also amplified messages around fitness, and so we offered direct link back to the list of all the different fitness classes that we offer on campus, because again, the research supports that 20 minutes of physical exercise, especially when you’re hitting that block, that moment where you just can’t either motivate enough to get the work done or to find the clarity that you need to make the statement that you need, a brief period of physical activity, research tells us again, feeds success.

0:24:53.1 JD: And so when we’re talking about this larger wellness ecosystem that we’ve worked to develop, such an important part of it is making sure that our parents are aware of it, that our guardians are aware of it, so that when they’re hearing those messages of angst from their students, when they’re hearing how stressed out they are, now they can actually speak with great authority about some of what we do at UNE and direct their student towards appropriate resources. And again, the resource isn’t always the counseling center, it’s other things that their students can participate in like some of the club and organization activity that we sponsor at the university. They can speak, again, with some authority about what those events are, what the resources are, and direct their to student to it. So by doing this, I’m hopefully doing a better job of informing parents so that when they’re hearing the distress signals, they can show up for their students in much the same way that we might, but now it’s informed by what I’ve shared with them.

0:25:55.9 ME: That definitely tracks with what we’re hearing at EAB. Institutions are viewing robust mental health and wellbeing support as an essential not just for serving their current campus population, but also as a component for being a part of the competitive enrollment landscape with prospective students, and more parents and guardians of both current and prospective students are saying, “What do you offer for support? What investments are you making?” And there’s a sense that people want the proof of what schools are actually doing to improve mental health and well-being on campus. And it’s credible for institutions to remain competitive and schools will be left behind if they don’t invest here.

0:26:32.2 JD: Yeah, that tracks with what we see.

0:26:34.7 ME: Jennifer, this is such important work. And we can talk about this for hours, but I do wanna be respectful of your time. Before we go, I understand that you applied for a grant, and I’m wondering if you could tell us briefly about the work that you would undertake if you did win those funds.

0:26:50.2 JD: Sure, thank you. Again, if I can reflect briefly on the Impact Report, in trying to tell a better story about what it is that we do, why we do it, the research that supports it, in so doing, we also identified, I don’t know that I would necessarily call them gaps, but we identified areas where we would love to add more. You heard me reflect on an ecosystem, a wellness ecosystem. We have applied for $50,000 grant, again, as a result of our involvement with the collaborative, as a result of all the work that we did to start to organize our story and to identify where we can do better. And we identified some elements that we would love to add on to the work that we’re already doing. There’s so much that’s happening, but we also realize that in order to have a true ecosystem, it needs to have lots of different elements to it. And so one of the things that we do already at UNE, actually, is we provide pre-orientation recreational opportunities. There’s some great research to support how that helps students build connections and transition in a healthy way to the collegiate environment.

0:28:00.9 JD: If we win those dollars, actually, we’re going to build out that program. And so we’ve already got plans in place. We know what we would love to do. If we get the dollars, we’ll add on to it. Those opportunities have largely been recreation-based. This would actually give us the opportunity to take a group out to New York and do some sort of adventuring together as a group. It still builds connection, but maybe it’s an easier on-ramp for students that are interested in hiking, sleeping in a tent, getting out on a river in a kayak. So with those dollars, the New York trip is an example of how we would diversify our offerings in that respect. Again, creating more on-ramps for student engagement in that program. We also partnered with an organization called Campus UnLonely. And I’m really proud of this work. Jeremy Nobel, Dr. Jeremy Nobel has been looking at the topic of loneliness on campus, and so he actually has developed some really amazing programming that he’s taking to colleges and universities around the country, and one of those is the Colors & Connections program. Big plug here for Dr. Nobel and that program. What he has done actually is develop sort of this just add water template, whereby you take an art-based program to students, you give them some prompts to reflect on, and they do that in art. They’ve got a canvas that they work on, they do some reflecting by creating the art and then they discuss it with their peers.

0:29:38.5 JD: Now, I’m over-simplifying it. There’s a lot more to it. But partnering with him and learning a little bit about what he’s done in the film festival that he’s worked on through Campus UnLonely, additional funding will allow me to bring more of that programming to UNE without having to find new dollars at the institution. We know that when we’re able to make some of those things happen and build the case for how they support it, also does a better job then of helping us articulate for senior leadership. How we then sustain programs like that. So we’re doing that, we are hoping to add some peer leaders to the cohort of student leaders that we already have on campus, but get them certified, again, through funding. If we get through this grant, we’ll bring those to campus as well. So lots of things. Some stuff that we’re already working on would allow us to further diversify, and probably the most important thing there is find on-ramps for connections for students to better diversify how we do that.

0:30:38.7 ME: I love that you’re focused not just on more of the same, but you’re focused on diversifying to bring more students in. So we’ll keep our fingers crossed for you that you all do receive those funds. And last but not least, if you had two minutes for the student success leader from another institution, and they wanted to pick your brain about how to establish a more effective and coordinated mental health care system for students at their institution, what would you tell them?

0:31:04.9 JD: I love that. Right off the top, actually, I would challenge them to think about the narrative. How are we talking to our young people about the challenges that they face? Are we encouraging the No Bones Days? And I know some listening may be familiar. There was a YouTuber that had this cute little dog and he would pick him up each day, and sometimes the dog would get up and move and sometimes he just wouldn’t. He would sort of flop. And our college students thought that was hysterical. And so they would claim No Bones Days. When it comes to wellness, and we’re talking about self-care so much more than just No Bones Days, it’s about practicing the behaviors that can help us to feel the happiness and the joy that can help us better manage the stress. So I think, first and foremost, it’s about the narrative. What are the messages that seem to be amplified at your institution and do they support students develop the right skills and coping strategies to be successful? Or does it simply reinforce the harm narrative? So narrative would be the first.

0:32:11.7 JD: The second would be data. Again, we can’t rely on what we’ve always done and why we’ve always done it, and I know that when we talk about assessment, people sometimes get a little… They get a little nervous, because we often think too big about assessment. Instead I would prompt each of us just to think about those one or two really important questions, or those one or two really important learning outcomes, and then develop your data collection around that. We do not need to assess a dozen things every single year to prove that we’re being effective. Start small. Think about where your students are at, what the trends are that you see, and then collect the data that’s most relevant to that, and then make your decisions based on it.

0:32:53.0 JD: This is a no-brainer, and yet we so often get stymied because we don’t know where to start. So again, start with those two questions or the couple of learning outcomes, build the data, make the decisions based on what the data tells you. And then finally, tell that good story. Tell the story about what you’re doing, how you’re using that data, why it’s so important to your faculty and your staff. Make sure that your parents and guardians are hearing it too, because if we’re all speaking that same language, that’s the opportunity that we have to make real impact. That’s how we can set our students up to be the most successful. And so none of this is particularly groundbreaking, but what I hope is that it’s a reminder. There are some really key things that we can do. Some really simple things actually. None of it is particularly difficult to do, but there are things that each of us can do on our respective institutions that can help us to press that post-pandemic, well, kind of post, post-pandemic reset button, because again, if we don’t, we’re not doing good by this new generation that is faced with this hugely disruptive time.

0:34:04.4 JD: So the narrative, the data, and then tell that story. I think those are the three things I would tell anyone willing to listen to me talk all day long about what it is that we’re doing and why we find it so important.

0:34:17.5 ME: I loved hearing about what you all are doing at UNE. Thank you so much for your time today.

0:34:22.4 JD: Thanks for having me, Maggie.

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0:34:30.8 S1: Thank you for listening. Please join us next week when we examine the murky world of Gen Z stealth shoppers. We’ll share what we know about their motivations and behaviors and about how to engage this audience before they make their final decision. Until then, thank you for your time.

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