Pursuing higher education is inherently stressful. Students, usually fresh out of high school, are forced to reckon with immense academic pressure and financial strain while adjusting to unfamiliar social groups, environments, and norms. 

While university life has always presented challenges, the state of student mental health has never been as bleak as it is today. The prevalence of college student mental health issues increased by nearly 50% between 2013 and 2021.⁴ A large 2023 survey of North American college students found that over 80% are struggling emotionally in one way or another—with more than a quarter struggling significantly.² And it’s not just a North American problem. Globally, around 35% of full-time college students report symptoms of at least one mental health disorder.²⁴ It’s safe to say the issue has reached a point of global crisis. 

In the face of this pressing situation, students are not optimistic about the way their collective mental health is trending. The vast majority see burnout and severe mental illness increasing over the next few years.² That said, students are noticing positive changes in stigma, indicating that more and more students are beginning to feel comfortable seeking help.² Implementing targeted mental health initiatives is a great way to lean into this trend, ensuring services are available to meet the diverse needs of students as they step out of the shadows and reach out for support.

With more students facing mental health challenges and desperate for care, it is no surprise that this crisis has put a significant strain on existing college mental health services—many of which are ill-prepared to meet the growing demand. Often, the knee-jerk solution to this dilemma is to simply hire more counselors. However, traditional counseling models are not easily scalable to meet the growing demand, especially in the face of nationwide counselor shortages and university budget constraints. 

Even when schools can hire more counselors, increasing access to formal therapy does not effectively address the true complexity of student mental health. The emphasis on traditional counseling as the primary form of mental health support often excludes students who don’t feel their needs are severe enough to seek professional assistance.⁵ Traditional workshops and mental health programs attract willing students but fail to reach those hesitant due to stigma, personal beliefs, or preferences for self-care.

These complex challenges stress the importance of taking a multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach when tackling issues with mental health on college campuses. In the following sections, we’ll dive deeper into the key issues we touched on above, highlighting opportunities to break away from traditional mental health treatment models and leverage behavioral science to help get everyone on board.

Mental health practitioners in all sectors—not just on college campuses—are struggling to meet the growing demand for care.6 This means many prospective patients are being turned away or put on waitlists, and even those struggling with immediate concerns have to wait weeks to months for treatment. For students facing serious mental health challenges, access to timely care can mean the difference between staying in school or dropping out, with many sacrificing their academic goals for their mental well-being.2 On the other hand, students who push through without adequate support often find themselves struggling with worsening symptoms and unhealthy coping mechanisms that follow them well beyond their college years. Meanwhile, counseling centers and universities face growing liability risks as delays in care contribute to serious consequences like student suicides and other mental health-related harms.7 

With these risks in mind, it’s easy to see why stakeholders might prioritize hiring more counselors as a quick-fix solution over exploring alternative care approaches that may have greater rewards in the long run. In this case, the weight of a potential loss seems far greater than an equivalent gain. This bias, known as loss aversion, tends to encourage overcautious decision-making to reduce the perceived risk of potential setbacks. After all, it feels more secure to funnel resources into hiring additional counseling staff than to invest in cutting-edge programs that may not deliver immediate results. Unfortunately, playing it safe is no longer sustainable for most universities.

Here’s why:

Colleges Facing a Significant Counselor Shortages

In North America, particularly the United States, there is a significant shortage of mental health professionals.12 The current demand for support far outweighs available resources. As a result, practitioners are spread thin and struggling with burnout, which further impacts their ability to provide adequate care to a rising caseload.6 Many college practitioners have even left campus life behind to work in private practices—and too few are applying for open roles in university counseling centers. During the 2021–2022 academic year, three in four full-time staff members at Texas Southern University’s counseling center resigned.8 Similarly, nearly 40% of the University of North Texas’ counseling staff resigned in a single year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few universities are meeting the staff-to-student recommendations set by the International Accreditation of Counseling Services.

In response to these shortages, students are turning to other support avenues. College faculty are increasingly pulled into conversations about student mental health, with 46% of students noting that the help they received from an instructor had a positive impact on their mental well-being.2 However, faculty often feel ill-equipped to provide support, with many wondering whether it is appropriate to approach students about their mental health given their lack of training in this area.3 

Hiring Alone Won’t Fix the Mental Health Crisis

Even without a professional shortage, traditional one-on-one counseling models are expensive and not easily scalable. Given that students are naturally turning to alternative solutions in the face of growing wait times, the solution to an overburdened system of mental health services might not be increasing headcount—which, unfortunately, fails to get to the root of the problem.

The University of Virginia (UVA), for example, has nearly tripled its counseling staff to accommodate growing demand over the past decade, but faculty are doubtful that the university could ever hire its way out of the mental health crisis.3 Colleges like UVA are finding that demand for care continues to outpace capacity despite significant investments in counseling services and increased availability of one-on-one appointments for students. Even institutions with adequate resources struggle to keep up. Despite this discouraging outlook, many universities continue to prioritize traditional care models. We might be able to chalk this up to the status quo bias, which can encourage institutions to double down on familiar models of care, even in the face of evidence that suggests these models are no longer adequate for addressing current challenges.

It’s also worth noting that many universities have already invested heavily in traditional counseling infrastructure. With this money already spent and the need to justify past investments, the sunk cost fallacy can prevent decision-makers from making a move toward more scalable options. The good news? Many experts agree that not every student needs individual therapy, and colleges are starting to see the value in introducing diversified care models to ease pressure on formal care while providing effective solutions to students of varying levels of need.³

Adopting diversified mental health care means looking beyond a one-size-fits-all approach by matching students with targeted interventions rather than defaulting to counseling as the primary solution. This is an excellent opportunity to implement evidence-based stepped care.  

Stepped-care models have been increasingly adopted in primary care settings for managing mental health concerns like depression, with positive reception from clinicians.9 These models introduce a patient-centered approach to the delivery of mental health care, matching treatment intensity with the severity of a patient’s mental health issues. Rather than simply assigning every patient to one-on-one counseling, this approach ensures patients get the most appropriate care for their needs, whether it’s self-help, telemedicine, peer support, group sessions, or formal therapy. This frees up counselors to tackle the most severe mental health cases whilst offering less resource-intensive options for students who still need some support. Importantly, patients can “step up” or “step down” their care depending on their changing needs. This adds an element of self-determination to the care process, which could be instrumental in motivating patients to play an active role in their treatment and work toward their progress goals. 

The success of stepped care models can also be examined through the lens of a behavioral change framework called the COM-B model. The COM-B model proposes three key components that are essential for behavior change: capability (the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to perform the behavior), opportunity (the external factors that make the behavior possible), and motivation (the internal drivers that influence the behavior). From a capability standpoint, stepped care models involve low-barrier entry points like online screening tools or casual check-ins that help match students with care, encouraging engagement from students who might lack awareness of available resources or aren’t sure which type of care is best for them. At the same time, offering low-intensity programs like digital self-help tools and peer-led programs increases opportunities for students with varying levels of need. Finally, stepped care models support motivation by making help-seeking more approachable than diving right into formal counseling. This can encourage engagement from students who may think their problems aren’t “bad” enough to seek help or fear judgment for reaching out.

By embracing frameworks like the COM-B model, stepped care can be a win-win for campuses and students. For students, it provides quicker access to tailored support and cuts wait times for severe cases. For colleges, it offers a scalable and cost-effective solution without the unsustainable burden of hiring new counselors in the face of a growing therapist shortage. Framing stepped-care models as a scalable solution to the mental health crisis will likely play an important role in getting administrators to overlook common decision-making barriers, like the tendency to focus on defensive—rather than proactive—medicine.10 As colleges continue facing waves of budget cuts, highlighting the cost savings and efficiency of stepped care can help convince stakeholders to prioritize this new model over expensive one-on-one counseling.

Collaborative Stepped Care in Practice: Where it’s Working Well

Mental health treatment models based on stepped care have already been successfully implemented by a few notable universities. For example, the University of British Columbia (UBC) was one of the first institutions to introduce a stepped-care mental health strategy, as informed by campus-wide consultations conducted in 2015. In an investigative report into student mental health and well-being at UBC, consultants acknowledged that hiring more staff alone would not be an adequate solution to the university’s mental health crisis.11 Consequently, their proposal was not to do more of the same but to do things differently. UBC’s goal was to leverage a more comprehensive understanding of mental health to anticipate student demand for mental health resources with a proactive approach. Implementing a collaborative stepped care model was a key part of their solution. This involved providing students with multiple levels of care, from self-help resources to formal therapy, and allowing students to move between care levels depending on their individual needs.

UBC’s novel mental health strategy capitalizes on the collaborative power of faculty, wellness center employees, and student advisors, all of whom are encouraged to direct students toward wellness assessments, care planning, and resources. Having multiple points of entry into the care model is a great way to reduce decision barriers for students considering seeking help. Instead of placing the responsibility on students to decide whether their mental health concern is severe enough to warrant counseling, this streamlined approach connects students with support solutions almost automatically. This is an excellent example of the use of defaults, where accessing mental health support becomes the status quo rather than a decision students actively have to make. Even informal conversations with professors can serve as gentle entry points into the care model. Overall, removing psychological hurdles for students can encourage early intervention, preventing mental health issues from escalating and requiring more intensive counseling.

Equipping faculty to spot and support students in distress is a crucial element of UBC’s collaborative stepped-care model. Fortunately, many other schools have realized the value of leveraging faculty as a first line of defense, equipping university staff with tools to better support the mental health needs of students:

• The University of North Carolina provides early-intervention Mental Health First Aid training to 900 faculty and staff members.
• Penn State implemented a Red Folder campaign to help faculty recognize signs of distress and refer students toward the appropriate resources. Eating disorder referrals can even come from staff working in the school cafeteria.3
• Duke University launched the DukeReach reporting system, which allows anyone on campus to express concerns about a student.

While this collaborative approach can help reduce friction for students who could benefit from mental health care, it’s important that students still feel autonomous in their decisions—a critical component of self-determination theory. Students shouldn’t feel that their behavior is being monitored or that private discussions with professors can force them into formal interventions, as overstepping here can deter students from opening up to faculty. Striking the right balance means minimizing care barriers while empowering students to make their own decisions. This is where effective staff training is key, ensuring faculty know how to appropriately guide students toward resources without acting as gatekeepers or enforcers.

Ensuring students have access to mental health treatment is crucial, but lack of care is not necessarily the root of the problem. Instead of simply asking how we can address the growing demand for services, it’s also important to explore why students are struggling with their mental health now more than ever. While the problem is certainly multifaceted, many students attribute their mental health concerns to increased academic pressures, financial stress from rising living costs, and residual impacts of COVID-19—with a whopping 75% of students saying they’re feeling more burnout now than before the pandemic.2 

As a result, there’s a growing demand among students for the option to keep classes online to make it easier to juggle educational obligations alongside other responsibilities like work.2 However, while many students prefer hybrid or fully online classes, simply offering more virtual classes might not have the intended impact on students’ mental well-being. Why? Research suggests that those taking online classes are more likely to struggle emotionally.2 Virtual lectures can perpetuate feelings of isolation and disconnection from one’s peers. At the same time, remote learning requires significant self-discipline and time management, and many students taking these classes have not been given the opportunity to effectively develop these skills.

Whether learning is taking place in-person or online, understanding the magnitude of demands facing students—and why their go-to coping strategies aren’t cutting it—is critical for stakeholders who want to help learners manage stress so they can excel academically. Before exploring how students respond to stress, let’s look at one of the root causes: cognitive overload.

Cognitive Overload is a Common Barrier to Student Well-Being

Many of the feelings of overwhelm facing college students can be attributed to cognitive overload. Cognitive load theory posits that our brains have a limited capacity to hold information in our working memory, meaning we can only process a small amount of information at a time. When students attempt to juggle too much at once—such as lectures, assignments, part-time jobs, and social commitments—their mental systems become overloaded, impairing their ability to learn and often leading to burnout. Today’s digital environment likely worsens the issue, as students have access to virtually unlimited information and tools that make multitasking too tempting to avoid, especially in online learning environments. The resulting feelings of overwhelm can reduce academic engagement, cause significant psychological distress, and even negatively affect academic performance.14

Attempting to reduce cognitive overload for students is one way colleges might tackle this problem, but this isn’t always possible—many academic and life pressures are unavoidable, and stressors will continue long after students graduate. Learning how to handle stress and prevent burnout is a valuable life skill. This brings us to the second part of the problem: students don’t always approach stress with healthy coping strategies, and their default responses often reinforce ineffective behaviors.

Maladaptive Coping Mechanisms Do More Harm Than Good

Burnout is not just a result of academic and life pressures that won’t stop piling up; it’s also associated with inadequate coping mechanisms.14 Research suggests that stressed college students often resort to maladaptive strategies, such as venting, self-blame, or behavioral disengagement (withdrawing or giving up on efforts to deal with the stressor completely).15 Although academic stress is common among students, only a few have healthy and effective coping mechanisms to deal with it.16 Why might this be? For one thing, maladaptive strategies like behavioral disengagement provide immediate relief from stress, making these coping behaviors incredibly self-rewarding. Procrastinating an assignment or skipping class reduces anxiety, which reinforces this avoidance behavior. Over time, this can create a cycle where avoidance becomes the default response to academic stress. 

Another issue is that poor coping mechanisms are often modeled by peers. For example, when other students cope with negative self-talk instead of directly addressing their problems, these mechanisms become normalized. Consider how students often brag about how little sleep they get, how many all-nighters they’ve pulled, or how rarely they have time to eat. Many students see overwork and lack of self-care as a sign of strength, but normalizing “stress culture” in this way perpetuates unhealthy coping styles—like turning to drugs and alcohol. This begs the question: how can school administrators reduce pressure experienced by students while ensuring they develop good coping mechanisms to deal with inevitable stressors?

On the surface, there are many steps that administrators can take to lighten the load on students, such as cutting out unnecessary academic assignments or increasing access to financial aid so students don’t have to spend so much of their time at work. However, simply reducing the burden on students is not enough. Preparing students to deal with stress is equally, if not more, important.16 After all, these stressors don’t go away after graduation. Long days spent studying for exams will turn into long days at the office, and the financial stress of keeping up with tuition will shift to the challenge of managing rent and loan repayments. Without building effective coping strategies, students can find themselves just as overwhelmed after graduation as they were in school.

So, where do we start? Some experts suggest that students can benefit from opportunities to increase their resilience, with a focus on building skills that will help them better tackle the overwhelming demands of college life and beyond.3 Research shows a significant correlation between students’ academic pressure and psychological resilience—in other words, students with lower levels of psychological resilience experience higher levels of learning burnout.13 Helping students build resilience proactively is crucial for tackling stress before it snowballs into severe mental health concerns like anxiety and depression.

Self-Guided Solutions for Building Student Resilience

Resilience training programs teach people to build skills that help them cope with stress, adapt to life’s challenges, and handle problems with a positive mindset and a willingness to grow. The Florida State University Student Resilience Project is an excellent example of this in practice on campus. This online toolkit is designed to guide students toward healthy stress management practices by providing a range of skills-building activities and exercises to help students hone their resilience, such as interactive videos, positive student stories, and podcasts by campus experts. 

While the course is not required, it is strongly recommended to all students. The university leverages completion bias to encourage participation by leaving an open to-do list item on the student’s MyFSU dashboard that can only be checked once they get started on the program. Since we are naturally motivated to complete tasks we started, leaving the to-do visually unchecked is intended to trigger a sense of discomfort that drives action from students. Another way schools might be able to encourage participation in these types of programs is by making participation the “default,” requiring students to opt out rather than opt in. This approach is incredibly successful at increasing organ donation rates, as people are more likely to stick to a pre-selected option than actively choose another alternative. 

Enhancing Self-Efficacy Among Online Learners

Similar interventions could be used to help students transition to online or hybrid learning. The University of Edinburgh, for example, developed an interactive learning intervention based on the evidence-based self-regulated learning framework.17 This framework encourages learners to actively plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning so they can better manage their own learning process. From a behavioral standpoint, this framework allows for greater self-efficacy, which refers to the level of confidence one has in their abilities and their sense of control over their circumstances—which has been shown to improve performance across various domains. Students participating in the University of Edinburgh’s program reported learning practical tips for managing their time, useful information to help with note-taking, and how to set learning goals. As expected, many felt more confident about starting hybrid learning after the intervention.

One encouraging trend in mental health is the decline in stigma—negative attitudes and stereotypes that people may have about mental illness or those with mental health conditions. Despite reductions in campus mental health stigma, it’s still a significant help-seeking barrier that makes students hesitant to reach out due to the fear of being labeled or treated differently by their peers.18 These fears have a real and unfortunate basis in reality: past research indicates that people with mental health conditions are more likely to be stigmatized than people with learning or physical disabilities—groups that already face extremely high levels of stigma.18 Sadly, many students internalize these attitudes and start to feel the same way about themselves.19 Across the board, self-stigma is associated with reduced hope, low self-esteem, feelings of shame, and poorer recovery from mental illness.

Self-Stigma Contributes to Disparities in Help-Seeking

Personal attitudes around mental health support pose an even greater help-seeking barrier for students from certain cultural backgrounds. Students of color tend to be less likely to seek help for mental health concerns, and stigma likely plays a large role in this issue. Asian students, for example, exhibit higher levels of personal stigma than other groups, and this is significantly associated with lower rates of help-seeking.5 Similarly, a study on university students in Iraq found that the majority held negative attitudes toward people with mental health disorders, leading many to conceal their own conditions.20 These cultural barriers highlight the importance of addressing stigma to normalize help-seeking among students from diverse backgrounds.

Addressing Inaccurate Beliefs About Mental Health

Misconceptions about mental health are often at the core of stigma. For example, many people believe that mental illness is a sign of personal weakness, that those with mental health conditions are dangerous, or that seeking therapy is shameful. It doesn’t help that the media often portrays people with mental illness as unpredictable or violent. To adequately address mental health stigma, it’s important to first understand the cognitive biases behind these associations and inaccurate beliefs:

• The representativeness heuristic explains how we often generalize media portrayals of the mentally ill to everyone with mental health conditions. For example, we might assume that people with bipolar disorder are unpredictable because the disorder is often depicted this way in film.
• The availability heuristic makes us more likely to remember vivid but rare examples of aggression exhibited by people with mental illness, causing us to overestimate how common this is and reinforcing our inaccurate beliefs. 
• The fundamental attribution error describes how we tend to attribute behavior to internal flaws rather than external circumstances. For example, we might assume a student who misses class due to depression is just being lazy rather than considering that lack of available support is affecting their mental health.

Whether due to media, cultural norms, systemic distrust of healthcare systems, or past experiences of discrimination, individual and social attitudes around mental health appear to be a serious help-seeking barrier. Traditional attempts to reduce stigma by changing the language or labels used to describe mental health conditions have not been successful, as relabeling mental conditions alone does little to challenge misconceptions.25 Fortunately, many universities are already working to reduce stigma via broader shifts like awareness, education, and normalization campaigns, and these initiatives have largely been effective in changing student attitudes.21 We’ll explore these initiatives in the following section and offer a few opportunities to leverage behavioral science to normalize mental health discussions.

Mental health education offers a direct opportunity to combat misconceptions students might have about mental health issues. When students learn about the prevalence, causes, symptoms, and treatments associated with various mental conditions, they’re less likely to feel aversion toward it—a common response to things we don’t understand. 

One study found that after taking an Abnormal Psychology course, students believed mental health was more easily cured and less embarrassing than before.21 In the course, students learned about the history of mental illness, studied various disorders, and explored numerous models for understanding mental illness. Asian and Hispanic students, in particular, showed significant differences in their beliefs toward mental illness before and after the study, suggesting that education could be a great way to reduce racial disparities in help-seeking due to cultural stigma. Perhaps universities could integrate this mental health education into curriculum requirements, making introductory psychology courses mandatory so that all students gain a general understanding of mental health.

While awareness and education are great for tackling stigma over time, attitude shifts won’t happen overnight—and many students dealing with personal stigma need help now. In the meantime, accommodating students’ existing attitudes around mental health treatment can ensure students access the help they need, especially those who prefer to deal with mental health problems on their own. Consider how some students even turn to social media and online articles to get mental health advice discreetly. While these platforms can be great for spreading awareness, they can also spread misinformation and ineffective coping strategies. Introducing evidence-based self-guided tools could be a great way to redirect these preferences for self-help. This begs the question: how can universities and mental health service designers work together to encourage students to make use of digital mental health services?

Nudging Toward Self-Guided Resources

Nudging is a behavioral science concept that involves gently guiding people toward a certain decision without restricting their freedom of choice. From a behavioral standpoint, sending out text or email reminders, posting about available resources on social media, or displaying links to online services in student portals could all be great ways to encourage the use of self-guided programs by students who prefer to keep their concerns to themselves. 

Making digital resources just a single click away reduces the effort involved in accessing such tools. This is a form of choice architecture that involves presenting options in a way that makes the desired behavior easier. The simple presence of a call-to-action prompt, especially when paired with social proof (e.g., “80% of students use this service”), can encourage and normalize help-seeking behavior. At the same time, regular emails would help frame mental health check-ins as routine. Thanks to the mere exposure effect, simply seeing mental health resources and discussions can make students more comfortable with the idea of engaging with them. This may serve as a valuable stepping stone for students who are hesitant to seek help in person or engage with support services, encouraging students to step out of their comfort zone at their own pace while still benefiting from the privacy of more discrete digital resources.

Emerging research in this area continues to explore how these techniques can be effectively applied to digital mental health tools. In one study, researchers implemented nudges and behavioral prompts—including to-do checklists and actionable tips based on behavioral science—to drive engagement in an online treatment for depression and anxiety.22 They found that users who were exposed to nudges and prompts were more likely to complete course components, suggesting that these strategies could be great for encouraging engagement in self-guided programs. This approach could work equally well for ensuring students actually use and benefit from campus mental health apps and other self-guided tools.  

Dispelling Stigma with Peer-led Initiatives

While several students prefer dealing with their mental health alone, as many as 83% also turn to friends and family for help.2 Building off these existing preferences for peer support, directing students toward peer-led mental health initiatives could be a great way to break down barriers associated with stigma. These programs involve students who are trained to support their peers by being available for casual counseling sessions, directing students toward available resources, and providing mentorship to help students through challenging situations. Many educational institutions already offer peer-led support, including Le Moyne College in upstate New York, where students can serve as mental health ambassadors after completing a course on habit change, cognitive reframing, and growth mindset.23 Similarly, the University of Miami offers students the opportunity to support their peers while receiving training and mentoring from school counseling staff. 

These peer-led programs tend to work well for students who need mental health help but are hesitant to reach out to professionals. People often feel more comfortable with peer-to-peer communication, which is why many turn to online communities for support and advice. The difference is that structured peer-led initiatives—with college-provided training and oversight—don’t turn into unproductive echo chambers like many online peer-to-peer communities. The peers involved in these programs receive ongoing support from college counseling centers to ensure they provide appropriate guidance, giving students a safe and reliable alternative to unmoderated online spaces. By making peer-led support a key aspect of campus mental health care, universities can foster a culture where meaningful mental health discussions become the norm rather than the exception.

While all these novel interventions address many of the roadblocks standing between college students and adequate mental health treatment, delivering effective mental health services is no straightforward task. For example, resource limitations can get in the way of even the most well-thought-out programs. Whether stepped care strategies, peer-led support programs, or student resilience training, implementing these initiatives requires staff training, administrative overhead, and the introduction of new technology like self-guided apps and student mental health portals. Without adequate funding and oversight, these programs might lead to care gaps, staff burnout, and reduced trust in campus mental health services.

Additionally, campuses have to strike a balance between empowering students to make use of these programs and acknowledging the broader factors contributing to the student mental health crisis. Inadvertently framing these initiatives as solely the student’s responsibility can suggest that mental health issues are personal shortcomings rather than challenges rooted in systemic issues like social stigma, normalized but unhealthy coping strategies, and inadequate access to care. Involving students in the decision-making process is a great way to ensure programs feel reflective of their experiences.

Finally, when it comes to targeting mental health stigma on campus, one-size-fits-all mental health programs might not be targeted enough to deal with personal stigma, especially when attitudes are rooted in cultural norms.Students from diverse backgrounds might face unique social or psychological barriers to help-seeking, so initiatives to normalize mental health discussions need to be inclusive and culturally sensitive. Recognizing these challenges is crucial for implementing mental health solutions that are effective and sustainable.

By prioritizing mental health on campus, we can equip students with the tools they need to excel personally, academically, and professionally. Introducing initiatives to better treat complex mental health challenges, build student resilience, and combat stigma with behavioral science can help students feel supported and empowered to seek help when needed. Increasing both access to care and help-seeking behavior is essential for combating the mounting mental health crisis and fostering a healthier, more resilient student population.

Supporting the mental health of students isn’t just a campus issue. Today’s college students are the decision-makers of the future. Unfortunately, many of these future leaders, innovators, and changemakers are struggling academically—or even dropping out of school entirely—due to mental health concerns. The mental health crisis is significantly disrupting university retention rates; the percentage of students who say they might consider dropping out over emotional stress more than doubled from 2020 to 2021 and continues to remain high today.1 Students are also considering taking gap years or postponing their graduation rates due to mental health challenges, delaying their entry into the workforce and potentially impacting their long-term career trajectory. 

Left untreated, mental health challenges can disrupt entire career paths and ultimately rob society of the valuable insights and contributions of students who didn’t get the help they needed when they needed it. The good news is that colleges and universities have recently stepped up their investments in mental health programs. Thankfully, some governments are making it easier by prioritizing student mental health by increasing campus budgets to ensure services can meet the needs of all students. In 2024, the Canadian federal government announced the Youth Mental Health Fund to help hire new counselors, improve wait times for care, and increase access to services among postsecondary students. This is a trend we hope to see continue, especially if we can get more schools leveraging behavioral science principles to implement more targeted care approaches, reduce stigma, and drive student engagement in mental health services. 

Even more promising are the global initiatives popping up to support student mental health on a broader scale. Georgetown University, for example, has assembled a coalition of faculty and students to focus on research and advocacy to improve mental health outcomes worldwide. As universities get a handle on internal campus-wide challenges, they’ll be better prepared to join these global initiatives to promote global well-being.

Are you looking for innovative ways to improve the mental health of college students? At The Decision Lab, we have robust experience applying evidence-based behavioral science insights to drive positive change in the education industry through strategic planning, service development, and policy design. Reach out today so we can work together to get ahead of the mental health crisis and unlock the true potential of tomorrow’s decision-makers.

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