Today’s college students are more anxious and depressed than ever. A study by the Healthy Minds Network revealed that 38 percent of students in 2023–24 reported symptoms of depression, including loss of enjoyment and persistent feelings of hopelessness. In response, universities have ramped up mental health messaging—through emails, workshops, and mindfulness events—urging students to prioritize self-care.
At Emory University, for example, the Spring 2025 Living Health Week encouraged students to “Choose Health” through events such as sound baths and barbecues. These offerings, though well-meaning, ignore the core problem: students are overwhelmed not by a lack of wellness resources but by the impossible demands of modern college life.
As the value of a degree declines, students chase résumé points to stay competitive. As Hannah Hutchins wrote in “STEM’s Hustle Culture Virus,” expectations now extend beyond academic excellence to include leadership roles, research, and even publications. Hustle culture has trickled down to undergraduates, who are trading sleep, health, and sanity for credentials. The line between dedication and self-destruction, she says, is rapidly vanishing.
As a current student, I can attest to this. To be competitive for jobs or graduate school, I’m expected to juggle internships, honors, extracurriculars, and maintain a stellar GPA. The result is burnout and, ironically, educational gaps. Stretching ourselves so thin means we leave college undereducated.
Liza Libes, writing for Minding the Campus, puts it bluntly: the obsession with résumé-padding is draining students of the time and energy they need for authentic learning. She describes how high schoolers are increasingly roped into elaborate, often ridiculous ventures—launching nonprofits, coding apps, building startups—not because they’re passionate, but because they’ve been told this is what it takes to get into college.
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These “passion projects,” she argues, are usually orchestrated by anxious parents or paid consultants and rarely reflect a student’s genuine interests. The result is a generation of kids performing adulthood before they’ve even figured out who they are. Instead of cultivating curiosity or developing a love of learning, they’re learning to stage-manage their lives for admissions officers.
That mindset doesn’t disappear after high school—it metastasizes. On campus, students continue pouring time into hollow displays of productivity while neglecting the very things education is supposed to foster: reading, thinking, and reflection. And for what? A shot at a better job? A résumé stacked high with credentials that quietly testify to burnout?
I see this on campus. Students invest hours in performative accomplishments while neglecting authentic intellectual growth. So when colleges tell us to “take a mental health day,” it rings hollow—because students have been conditioned to believe that missing out on anything risks falling behind in the relentless pursuit of credentials. Sure, students can take a “mental health day”—but it might cost them the edge they’ve been told they can’t afford to lose.
Frankly, colleges can’t continue to preach self-care while exacerbating the very workloads that drive students into burnout. Token gestures—such as free coffee, therapy dogs, and posters reminding students to breathe—only soothe the symptoms. They do nothing to address the root cause: a warped value system that prioritizes quantity over depth, performance over learning, and resume padding over intellectual growth. If universities are serious about improving student mental health, they should reconsider their investment in wellness events and instead reevaluate the structure of student success. That means reinforcing a different metric of accomplishment—one that values meaningful education over manufactured achievement.
It means creating a campus culture that encourages focus, reflection, and intellectual curiosity, not nonstop involvement or artificial “passion.” Only then will students be free to pursue learning without sacrificing their sanity.
Image by Mykyta Kravčenko on Unsplash
