“The Healthy Minds Study, a large survey of US college students’ mental health, shows some improvement between 2022 and 2025: the share reporting severe depression fell from 23 percent to 18 percent, anxiety from 37 percent to 32 percent, loneliness from 58 percent to 52 percent, and suicidal thoughts from 15 percent to 11 percent,” reports The Doomslayer.
UCLA Newsroom explains:
College students’ reports of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts have continued to move in a positive direction, the third year in a row of such improvements since 2022, researchers have found.
The 2024-2025 Healthy Minds Study , conducted annually by researchers from UCLA, the University of Michigan, Boston University in Massachusetts, and Wayne State University in Michigan, under the leadership of the Healthy Minds Network based at Michigan, received responses from more than 84,000 students from 135 colleges and universities…
Key findings for students demonstrating improvement over time include:
- Moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms dropped from 44% in 2022 to 37% in 2025, while reports of severe depression decreased from 23% to 18%.
- Moderate-to-severe anxiety symptoms fell from 37% in 2022 to 32% in 2025.
- Students who seriously considered suicide in the past year dropped from 15% in 2022 to 11% in 2025.
- Students reporting high levels of loneliness decreased from 58% in 2022 to 52% in 2025.
On the other hand, students don’t seem to be learning all that much. Students enter college unable to write competently. Many graduate still unable to write. High school grades have risen even as test scores have fallen and students’ knowledge has shrunk, especially in math. American IQs appear to be falling as the educational system fails to teach skills or stimulate minds.
College students are learning less and less. People’s vocabularies are shrinking at a time when more and more people have college degrees. As Zach Goldberg noted, people’s mastery of hard words has been falling for well over 20 years, and their mastery of easier words has been falling for 15 years. Meanwhile, a higher proportion of Americans have college degrees than in the past, and their average amount of education in years has grown. These trends are illustrated on his graph, “WordSum Scores Overtime.”
Going to college no longer expands people’s vocabularies the way it once did: Since 1970, there has been a steady decline in the correlation between years of education and people’s personal word stock.
Even back in 2011, when students learned more than they do today, nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates learned almost nothing in their first two years in college, according to a study by New York University’s Richard Arum and others. Thirty-six percent learned little even by graduation. Although federal higher-education spending had mushroomed in the preceding years, students “spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.” The National Assessment of Adult Literacy also showed that degree holders are learning less.
