Capturing the College Experience: A Four-Year Mobile Sensing Study of Mental Health, Resilience and Behavior of College Students during the Pandemic

We tracked two cohorts of first-year students at Dartmouth College for four years each, both on and off campus, from their first days of college to graduation, in what is, to our knowledge, the longest continuous mobile sensing study of the same participants to date. Using passive sensor data, weekly self-reports and interviews, we capture student behavior and mental health before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings reveal the pandemic's lasting imprint: depression, anxiety and stress rose during the pandemic and remained elevated after students returned to campus, while some behaviors recovered and others did not. We describe the study, its principal findings, the engineering lessons of keeping a sensing app alive for nearly five years and the public release of the de-identified College Experience Study dataset.