How Universities Pretend and Fail to Care

You’ve heard it before: elite institutions are bad for their students’ mental health. In fact, you’ve probably heard it so many times that it has become normative; stress culture is the punchline of many jokes and the enemy of few initiatives. At the university I attend, the expectation is, no matter the circumstances, that the “grind” never stops. It’s not uncommon to get into a boasting match about how few hours you slept last night or how late you stayed up to get that midterm paper in for the surly English professor who grants extensions only in case of documented medical emergencies or family deaths. 

Elite universities have never done a good, or even decent, job of supporting the hordes of academically high-achieving (and consequentially high-strung) youth that pass through their gates. A 2018 report by the Ruderman Family Foundation ranking the mental health support systems of U.S. universities awarded no higher than a D grade to all eight Ivy League schools. It pointed to policies that prescribe a minimum length for leaves of absence despite the deeply personalized experience of mental and physical health recovery, as well as a ban in 4 out of 8 universities on-campus visitation as a student on leave. The report also lists some general statistics about the pre-pandemic university experience that are equally frightening: 40 percent of undergraduates had felt so depressed during the past year that they had difficulty functioning, and more than 10 percent of undergraduates had seriously considered suicide. In 2017, my school, Columbia University, lost seven students to suicide. 

Students are taught to prioritize academic work and class attendance over both their physical and mental health, but especially the latter. In a way, universities rely on stress culture to reify their increasingly narrow standards for admission. One common misconception in the sphere of academia is that the strength of a school or program directly correlates to how difficult it is to do well in them. In reality, a program’s success is directly linked to the success of its participants, an achievement that relies heavily on the maintenance of a work-life balance. 

But instead, schools use the reputation of their student body for clout, a reputation that is built on suffering and compromising mental health. Universities start doing their damage even before students step foot on campus-- or, for the past two years, into the Zoom waiting room. The pressure to succeed for upperclassmen in high school, especially those at elite (read: expensive and exclusive) boarding schools, is insane. Independent college counseling is a lucrative business, with experienced consultants charging thousands of dollars for personalized programs. From a young age, we teach children that attending a “good” school is the key to success and happiness and that academic performance is central to their worth. 

This isn’t a breaking story. But in a year that has seen immense pressure on faculty, staff, and administrators as well as students, we might have expected some compassion. From my experience, although some professors have been compassionate, overall the workload has been heavier and less lenient to "compensate" for online learning, which many see as less demanding. Although the physical aspect of getting up and going to class is negated in a virtual setting, the mental health implications of an online semester are manifold: a lack of community and interpersonal contact, reduced campus resources, and loneliness, to name a few. 

Universities have launched mental health initiatives en masse in the past few years, but these are only band-aid solutions. The March suicide of a first-year Yale student sparked outrage about inadequate mental health services, specifically, “long waits, short appointments and a lack of comprehensive care.” Even if there were enough counselors to go around-- the Ruderman report estimated one mental health clinician per 1,000-2,000 students for smaller schools-- the root causes of college students’ deteriorating health are often the practices of the colleges themselves. Slapping a mental health seminar over the issue of stress and hustle culture is like that one memefied Flex Tape commercial: easy and instantly gratifying, but questionable in its long-term efficacy. 

Columbia University’s Go Ask Alice! site, a health and wellness Q&A resource, perfectly demonstrated the performative quality of college health initiatives when it posted an advice column entitled “All night, done right: Getting the most out of an all-nighter” during our spring semester finals week. After a feeble attempt at expressing the “rarity” of the need to pull an all-nighter and the importance of getting enough sleep, “Alice” offered advice such as studying in a cool, well-lit room and cramming in the most important subjects before your body can’t physically stay awake. At no point did the article address the lack of deadline flexibility, heavy workload, or state of burnout that may have driven these students to stay up all night. 

Telling students that they should rest does not mean that they are able to. One barrier is the continued reification of stress culture; another is the required justification of absences, the need to “prove” that an excuse is worthy of missing class for. Students shouldn’t have to disclose or relive trauma to get accommodations when we trust our universities to make decisions for us every day, from what is available in the dining hall to eat to how our fall semester academic lives will be shaped. We, as students, put our lives in the gigantic, moneyed hands of our universities every day. It’s about time that they respect not only our academic achievements but also our quality of life. No matter how strong the pull of “academic excellence,” the number of hours you sleep per day should be more than the number you spend doing homework.