Many high school seniors across the country are in the midst of college applications, often a high-stakes and anxiety-ridden process.
But stress doesn’t necessarily go away once students are admitted.
Emotional stress, mental health and the cost of tuition are the top three reasons college students drop out, according to a 2023 Gallup poll of 14,032 students.
By most standards, there is a mental health crisis among college students. But the University of Michigan’s Healthy Minds survey, the nation’s largest student mental health study to date, recently found that college students report lower rates of depressive symptoms, anxiety and suicidal thoughts for the third year in a row.
Conducted in 2024 and 2025 and surveying more than 84,000 students at 135 American universities and colleges, the study reveals that symptoms of major depression among college students fell in the last two years to 18%, compared to 23% who said they had experienced severe depression in 2022. Students with suicidal thoughts fell from 15% in 2022 to 11% during 2024 and 2025.
I have worked in student affairs and university health for the past 25 years, leading substance abuse prevention and mental health promotion efforts, and overseeing a variety of clinical services. Despite these recent optimistic findings, I remain concerned about the prevalence and severity of student mental health concerns across the country.
taking a break
College students experience high levels of stress due to a confluence of factors, including academic pressures, financial concerns, and complex social dynamics. Understanding the root causes of student stress is an important precursor to schools finding effective ways to help students manage their anxiety and succeed in school.
But even when schools offer extensive mental health support programs, students occasionally need to take a break to focus on their health and well-being.
Over the past 10 years, I have reviewed and approved medical withdrawals for 133 students at Babson College. From fall 2015 to early spring 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic, an average of 12 students a year went on medical leave out of the nearly 4,000 enrolled at the school.
The average number of students taking medical leave then increased by about two people per year from fall 2020 to 2025. About 82% of these cases are related to mental health.
Approximately 70% of these students eventually return to campus and eventually graduate. In general, very few students who take a leave of absence end up returning.
However, there are some schools that implement proactive, non-disciplinary policies to support students taking a break and receiving more intensive treatments. These policies can provide clear treatment recommendations and instructions on the conditions students must meet in order to return to school, increasing the likelihood that students will enroll again.
Understanding well-being
Wellbeing is a word that is on the minds of many higher education leaders, but universities and colleges do not have a single definition of what well-being means, although it is often a term that schools use to refer to the mental health of students. Wellbeing generally involves recognizing and being comfortable with your feelings, and being prepared to manage stress.
Although there is progress toward integrating student mental health and well-being into the very fabric of an institution, many universities and colleges still rely on reaching students in more traditional ways, for example, through health fairs and information tables in the student center.
While these strategies certainly serve to help raise awareness of mental health resources, when used in isolation, they are unlikely to result in real behavioral change among students.
Students of color, especially Black and Latino students, are more likely than white students to temporarily withdraw from college.
One step institutions can take: hire more faculty, staff, and mental health counselors who are people of color and who can better connect with minority students through lived experiences.
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Wellbeing is critical to student success
In 2007, a Virginia Tech University undergraduate student shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before committing suicide.
Since then, schools have adopted early warning systems — often called care teams — to help identify students who are struggling, whether academically, socially or emotionally. The idea is that schools can step in and connect students with campus resources like academic advisors, student success coaches, accessibility services, financial aid and mental health support.
Ongoing training for faculty, staff, and students on how to activate these support systems and make referrals to a care team is critical to their success. The goal is to cast a wide net so that students don’t fall through the cracks and fall through the cracks when they aren’t mentally well, which is what happened with the Virginia Tech shooter.
Dozens of campuses, including New York University, Indiana State University, the University of North Dakota, Ohio State University and Harvard University, have also adopted mindfulness practices in recent years, offering breathing exercises and other forms of meditation to their students as free on-campus services.
Some campus police departments have also begun using therapy dogs to support student mental health and reinforce community engagement.
Other universities, such as Stevens Institute of Technology and Princeton University, stopped keeping labs and libraries open 24 hours a day to encourage students to take a break and rest, although admittedly most of the institutions that made these changes did so as a result of budget cuts and less as a preventative and proactive measure.
Position students for success
I have long maintained that well-being is essential to academic, personal and professional success.
In recent years, I have also encouraged schools to position well-being as the key driver of students’ academic, personal and professional success.
Research has linked students’ well-being to staying in school, and findings suggest that colleges can develop specific mental health programs to improve retention rates. In other words, focusing on the health and well-being of students can, in fact, lead to better outcomes – emotional, physical and academic.
*Ryan Travia is associate vice president for Student Success at Babson College.
This article was originally published on The Conversation
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