Mindfulness and Student Outcomes: A Megastudy

US college students frequently experience anxiety, stress, and feelings of isolation, with over 40 percent showing at least one symptom of depression. These mental health struggles can significantly impact students’ well-being and academic performance. The stakes are high—one in four full-time students leaves college without earning a degree, and nearly 20 percent cite mental health challenges as a key reason for dropping out. We aim to tackle this issue via a randomized controlled trial intervention encouraging first-year college students to develop and maintain a mindfulness meditation practice through the use of an app, called Healthy Minds. Our intervention will be a part of a megastudy launched by the Behavioral Change for Good Initiative (BCFG) in 2025 that will simultaneously test eight innovative interventions designed to boost college student success and retention across 33 public universities, engaging over 90,000 student participants. Our intervention encourages meditation app usage through monetary incentives for downloading the app and maintaining app engagement during the 2025 Fall term. We conducted a similar pilot study among UC Santa Barbara students in the 2024 Fall term to help us refine the intervention design, and we will study whether this mindfulness intervention affects academic performance (GPA) and college retention in the larger megastudy.