In the college days of old, students were free to wander through the arts, debate the ideas of famous philosophers, write poetry, read history and tinker with new algebraic formulas.
Sure, white men made up the overwhelming majority of college campuses in the United States, and only a fraction of Americans even finished high school.
Still, in the early 1900s and before, college was a place to explore, not a machine designed to grind down the mental health of young adults with career‑defining exams and loans big enough to fill entire lecture halls.
That spirit of exploration has slowly been replaced by a system that treats students less like learners and more like long‑term financial investments. Students today should feel the same sense of discovery their great‑grandparents did, when the arts were celebrated rather than dismissed as “impractical” degrees. But they don’t. And while Timothée Chalamet joked that opera and ballet are being kept alive by a few thin hairs, he’s not entirely wrong. The U.S. has shifted from a culture that once encouraged new beginnings to one that funnels young people into an exhausting, uphill battle toward success.
This culture shift likely began in the 1970s, when college costs started climbing and the career‑driven mindset took over — because what’s the point of going into debt if you can’t spend the next 50 years paying it off.
College was once widely affordable, often tuition‑free or low‑cost at public institutions, supported by robust state funding through the 1960s. But as inflation rose and state investment stagnated in the 1970s, tuition began its steady climb. By the 1980s, the system had fully shifted toward student loans, and the idea of college as a place for intellectual exploration quietly gave way to a high‑stakes, high‑pressure pipeline to the workforce.
And now we’re living with the consequences. An entire generation of students drowning in stress, anxiety and burnout. Colleges all over the nation helped create an uprising of depression and anxiety for its younger generations and have been far too slow to even address it.
Yes, college should help the future careers of students, that is the whole point, but if we are going to move on from the freedom and whimsy of what college used to be, and making it extremely draining to afford, pass and get a career afterwards to pay off debts, at least make it the college’s top priority to help students with their mental health.
Half the time, 18 year olds are graduating high school and jumping into an entirely different academic scene, to receive the same care as a middle school camp counselor.
According to research summarized by EBSCO, more than 40% of college students report symptoms of depression, yet as many as three‑quarters never seek help.
About one in four students lives with a diagnosable mental illness, and some studies estimate that up to four out of five students seriously consider or attempt suicide during their college years. Suicide now ranks among the top five leading causes of death for college students. If college is no longer a place for students to really explore and enjoy, then something else has to be done to combat the depression and anxiety that comes after getting in.
If colleges continue prioritizing output over curiosity, they won’t just burn out another generation; they’ll slowly starve the very disciplines that once defined higher education. The arts, the humanities, the spaces where students learned to think, question and imagine, are already shrinking under the weight of “practicality.”
If students continue to be thrust into a system designed only for their work and the institution’s profit, the whimsical, world‑opening version of college that produced writers, thinkers, musicians, innovators, will fade into nostalgia. And with it, students risk trading their prime years for survival mode instead of a true learning environment.