Study Overview
Depression and anxiety have risen sharply among U.S. college students, yet a large share of affected students receive no clinical care. A central barrier is navigation: students encounter fragmented/static resources with no personalized front-door, no adaptive-triage, and limited support before distress escalates. This study evaluates Flourish@Berkeley, a purpose-built AI wellness platform embedded in UC Berkeley’s University Health Services (UHS), in the context of an at-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) with 10,000 students. Treatment-assigned students gain access to an app with an AI companion, which delivers evidence-based micro-practices for coping, emotion regulation, problem solving, and positive functioning, scaffolding them into durable habits, and dynamically. routes students with conversational navigation to UC Berkeley’s campus resource ecosystem (e.g., financial aid, academic and peer support, wellness, UHS resources, crisis and clinical referrals). Students assigned to the control group retain full access to existing resources via traditional channels. The study tests whether low-stigma, institutionally integrated AI support reduces unmet need, improves validated survey measures of depression, anxiety, well-being, and cognitive functioning. We will also measure the impact on administrative measures of academic progress, service utilization (i.e., changes in who reaches which types of care) and longer-run labor market outcomes. The zero-infrastructure solution minimizes adoption frictions; the deployment model would be directly scalable across the UC system and other U.S. colleges, including community colleges with more limited services/infrastructure.
Study Results
Pending
Populations: University students