Jed Satow was a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Arizona in 1998 when he took his own life. His parents, Phil and Donna Satow, met with the university’s president afterward.
“He put a question to the family, which was: There’s more than 30,000 students here on this campus — how does one support the mental health of that many students?” remembers John MacPhee, who became CEO of the foundation created in the late student’s name. “What does that mental health safety net look like? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
The Satows formed the Jed Foundation in 2000 to answer those questions. Over the past decade, the nonprofit reports it has partnered with more than 380 higher-education institutions that have served more than 4.5 million students.
Several nonprofits specialize in mental health in high education, such as Active Minds, which supports student-led chapters focused on mental health at hundreds of colleges, and the Steve Fund, which provides workshops and training to help students of color on campus. But Jed is the largest nonprofit working directly with colleges to transform their mental health policies and practices — and it has been growing at a steady clip.
Its expansion is built on philanthropic support, including a $15 million gift from billionaire Mackenzie Scott in 2022. That grant brought the nonprofit’s budget to an estimated $24 million this year, according to MacPhee, compared with $10 million just three years ago. With those resources, Jed is now seeking to bring its model to high schools and school districts across the country.
Mental health has remained a pervasive problem for young people before, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. Four in 10 college students reported experiencing depression and more than one-third dealt with anxiety, according to a 2023 study from the Healthy Minds Network, a youth mental-health research nonprofit. Greater awareness around the issue during the pandemic fueled philanthropic giving, MacPhee says, though he fears that grant makers are becoming less interested.
Jed did not start working directly with college campuses until 2013. Its initial goal back in 2000 was to create a model that colleges and universities could adopt to prevent suicide on campuses. During that time, Jed found one promising approach from an unexpected place: the Air Force.
In 1997, the Air Force started to combat rising suicide rates by addressing stigma and improving access to mental-health services. Research in 2003 indicated that approach decreased suicide — and the rates remained low years later, according to a 2010 follow-up analysis. The study showed that the Air Force program reduced suicide rates over the course of 11 years, except during one year in which the program was applied less rigorously.
While college campuses and Air Force bases are different, there are similarities that indicated the model could work in higher education. Students and service members are of similar ages, and both live in contained environments.
Jed brought together experts involved in developing the Air Force model, researchers from the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, mental-health clinicians, and higher-education professionals to adapt the approach for colleges.
Its model includes seven principles — developing life skills, promoting social connectedness, identifying students at risk, providing mental-health and substance-misuse services, increasing help-seeking behaviors, restricting access to potentially lethal means, and following crisis-management procedures.
The overarching idea is everyone on campus is responsible for mental health and suicide prevention: students, faculty, staff. That’s in contrast to the approach higher education institutions have taken historically, which left mental health to the counseling centers.
Creating a Norm
Jed’s college program, called Jed Campus, is a four-year partnership designed to enable higher-education institutions to develop a set of recommendations and practices based on Jed’s seven principles. Four-year institutions must pay a $62,000 fee to participate, though the nonprofit also offers a pared-down, 18-month alternative for $18,000.
Jed Campus starts with a school administering a survey from the Healthy Minds Network. The survey assesses the prevalence of mental-health challenges on campus and students’ awareness about mental-health services. Colleges then convene a team of faculty, staff, and students who implement Jed’s recommendations based on the survey, which is re-administered toward the end of the partnership.
Anissa Moody, interim director of the counseling center at Rider University in Lawrence Township, N.J., says her institution, which completed the Jed Campus program this year, used survey feedback to create support groups for students of color and LGBTQ students.
“Race, ethnic identity, gender identity, gender fluidity, sexual orientation, religiosity, first generation — students reported [these identities] as being impactful to their lives and how they participate in their educational institution,” she says.
After evaluating the survey data, Rider’s counseling center formed partnerships with other university offices focused on helping students of color, low-income students, and students seeking accommodations for disabilities, to refer them for services. One-third of new students, among a student population of 4,000, were referred to the counseling center, thanks to those partnerships.
Dartmouth College, which is in the middle of its Jed Campus partnership, hired two additional counselors to provide mental-health services and promote suicide prevention and in November partnered with Uwill, a telehealth company. As of May 29, more than 1,000 students, from a population of 6,700, had created accounts with Uwill and have attended 2,763 counseling sessions.
Matthew Duncan, an assistant professor of psychiatry and special adviser on student mental health at Dartmouth, says Jed is a helpful resource because it can be difficult for colleges to determine mental-health best practices.
“You can really find yourself quickly diffused into all sorts of maybe helpful, maybe not helpful activities,” he says, noting that because Jed works at a national level with many partners, the program offers a sense of “cohesion.”
Ben Locke, co-founder of the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State, says it can be helpful to work with outside consultants or groups on issues where colleges lack expertise, but the colleges must have buy-in.
“If you’re going to go through a consultation process, with Jed or anybody else, make sure that you are institutionally and financially committed to trying to follow through on recommendations,” says Locke, who currently serves as chief clinical officer of the mental-health company Togetherall.
Locke said schools also shouldn’t expect to fix mental-health challenges just by bringing in outside groups.
“I think the biggest umbrella problem is the idea that we can ‘cure’ mental health,” he says.
Finding solutions is especially difficult given that colleges have limited resources to serve their students’ mental-health needs. They also often lack the financial resources to expand counseling programs. And even if those funds are available, finding enough mental-health professionals remains difficult.
Jed has drawn steady attention from philanthropy. The Morgan Stanley Foundation, through its youth mental-health initiative, provided a five-year grant of $9.9 million to Jed starting in 2019. Those funds were aimed at expanding Jed’s partnerships with higher-education institutions and developing a high-school program, which began in 2021.
“It was really appealing to us — the idea that you could you make the Jed Campus model the norm for all colleges,” says Joan Steinberg, president of the Morgan Stanley Foundation.
Jed currently works with more than 70 high schools using an adapted approach developed with support from the College Mental Health Program of McLean Hospital, which takes into account differences between high schools and colleges and their students. Jed has also partnered with the School Superintendents Association to create a model for school districts.
Individual donors and foundations, such as the Poses Family Foundation and the Jolene McCaw Family Foundation, have also played a role in the growth of Jed Campus, says MacPhee. Giving from individuals, foundations, and corporations account for more than 90 percent of the organization’s budget; fees for programs and consulting made up 8 percent of its funding in 2021.
No Easy Fixes
In May 2021, Dartmouth students gathered on the campus’s main lawn to mourn four of their fellow classmates. Three of them were first-year students who died by suicide during a six-month period while Covid-19 raged.
Grief turned into outrage, as students protested the college’s mental-health policies, specifically its medical-leave policy, which barred students from living or spending time on campus during temporary leave. Students argued that the policy disincentivized people from seeking help because they didn’t want to move off campus or feared they wouldn’t be able to return. This has been a challenge at elite colleges across the country, such as Yale University, which is facing a lawsuit from two students who say its medical-withdrawal policy is punitive.
On May 21, 2021, as pressure mounted, Dartmouth’s administrators announced a partnership with the Jed Foundation.
But not all students were happy. In an October 2021 op-ed in the Dartmouth, then-student Spencer Allen argued that the decision to partner with the Jed Foundation was “a waste of time and money” and called on the university to pause the Jed partnership, get rid of involuntary medical leave, give students more academic leniency, and dedicate more funding to mental-health counselors.
Two years later, Allen says he still feels the partnership is a “reactionary measure to a string of student suicides” and “was not the best thing for the college.” The fact that the partnership runs for four years means students who were on campus in 2021 largely would’ve graduated by the time it was completed, he says, limiting accountability for its results. Still, he says, his greatest concerns lie with Dartmouth’s implementation of the Jed program on campus, not Jed’s approach.
Duncan, the mental-health adviser at Dartmouth, says the college must make changes carefully and strategically.
“We, too, would love more concrete action sooner,” he says. “This is a problem decades in the making that does not have a 12- or 24-month solution.”
In September, Dartmouth College announced a new policy, which allows students on medical leave to keep their financial assistance for up to a year, access public spaces on campus, and use Uwill’s telehealth services. However, it kept in place involuntary medical leave, which it said is “rare” and would only be done after “going through a very detailed process.” Incoming President Sian Leah Beilock also announced the college will hire a chief health and wellness officer who will report directly to her.
Speed is one of the challenges Jed and its higher-education partners face. Mental-health problems among young adults are both pervasive and difficult to quickly fix. Research from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State found that, as of 2022, social anxiety and a history of trauma have increasingly become challenges for students.
Schools also often have limited resources, which makes it difficult to implement some best practices.
“The dominant narrative right now in higher education is this idea that if you’re in distress, you should go see a professional,” says Locke of Togetherall. “That’s a problem in higher education because there aren’t enough professionals.”
College counseling centers serve, on average, about 12 percent of their student populations, according to a 2022 survey of more than 300 centers from the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. That’s far lower than the number of students who report mental-health challenges.
“Even the institution that has opened its doors the widest is still missing the need,” Locke says. “And so what do you say to an institution that can only serve 10 percent of the student body?”
Kent State University in Ohio, which completed its Jed partnership in 2019, had to strike a balance in the provision of its counseling services. The university no longer provides long-term mental-health care to students, instead focusing on immediate, urgent needs. While that shift means some students may have to get care off-campus, the university has been able to eliminate its counseling-services waitlist.
That increasingly common approach comes with tradeoffs, such as higher caseloads for counselors who have to see more students, according to Brett Scofield, executive director of the Center for Collegiate Mental Health.
“When counselors carry higher caseloads, students in treatment receive less care and experience less improvement in symptoms, which ultimately increases their likelihood of dropping out of school,” he wrote in an email.
Still, Jed’s rise is indicative of changing attitudes among college administrators. Increasingly, higher-education officials have understood mental health is a problem for everyone on campus.
“If we go back, let’s say 10 or 20 years, and even now on some campuses, the campus looked to the counseling center for everything surrounding mental health,” says Harry Rockland-Miller, former director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s counseling center, who isn’t affiliated with Jed. “But the counseling center can’t do it alone.”
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call or text the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741. Go here for resources outside the United States.
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
