An Ethic of Care

What is the primary factor driving current students’ decisions about whether to stay in college or leave before earning a degree? The answer is not cost of attendance, though financial circumstances are a dominant cause. Instead, the leading consideration has to do with declines in personal well-being. Emotional stress and personal mental health are now the main reasons students are dropping out, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup State of Higher Education Study 2024, which presents an analysis of data gathered from more than fourteen thousand current and prospective college students, those who started but did not complete a degree, and adults who never enrolled in a postsecondary education program.

In 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, 36 percent of students cited emotional stress as jeopardizing their college completion. That percentage has since noticeably risen, with 54 percent of students now identifying emotional stress and 43 percent blaming mental health challenges as the reasons for stopping their studies. While students from all demographic backgrounds have been affected, these burgeoning psychological trends influencing college attendance include a disproportionately negative impact on women, 64 percent of whom said they considered not finishing due to emotional stress, compared with 37 percent of men. Women also reported contemplating leaving college for mental health reasons (52 percent) at a much higher rate than men (27 percent).

In addition, Hispanic (42 percent) and Black (40 percent) students were much more likely than their White peers (31 percent) to leave their programs. These statistics signal a critical need for colleges and universities to provide increased access to mental health services, enhance diversity among mental health care providers, identify and redress hidden biases in campus policies and practices contributing to current student mental health challenges, and redouble efforts to partner with K–12 schools in addressing student well-being. Emotional stress, as American Association of Colleges and Universities senior fellow Cia Verschelden has detailed in these pages, both contributes to and follows from a lack of a sense of belonging and depletes cognitive bandwidth among students, reducing their ability to thrive in the classroom and beyond. At a time when many programs, policies, and practices designed to bolster a sense of belonging have been eliminated due to partisan attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, campus leaders must devote renewed attention to well-being as an essential component of both academic and student affairs.

Moreover, attention to well-being must extend to faculty and staff. A 2022 Gallup Panel Workforce Study found that college and university employees have the second-highest rate of burnout of US workers across all industries, outpaced only by K–12 educators. Indeed, higher education faculty are experiencing similar rates of emotional and psychological stress as their students, according to a 2023 survey conducted by Sean McCandless, Bruce McDonald, and Sara Rinfret. More than 50 percent of the nine hundred faculty in the researchers’ study sample reported feeling worn-out or physically or emotionally exhausted every day because of chronic exposure to stress; overwork; emotional demands; unrealistic expectations; and under-resourced, unsupportive, or toxic environments. Another determinant was that they pushed themselves too hard without attention to their own well-being. For many, their psychological distress was enhanced by radically transformed working environments shaped by the proliferation of educational gag orders, politicians’ and governing boards’ unwarranted intrusion into tenure and promotion decisions, and legislative attempts to control the curriculum by proscribing the teaching of certain disciplines. Beyond the study’s findings, faculty across higher education have pointed to additional causes of mental distress, including the reduction of programs in the humanities and arts in favor of programs those controlling the funding have deemed to be more marketable pathways to immediate employability.

Campus leaders are also suffering from burnout, moral distress, and moral injury due to the politicization of higher education, the weaponization of donations, the erosion of institutional autonomy, and unconditional, nonnegotiable demands from a wide range of constituents, many of whom have conflicting ultimatums. Self-care among college and university presidents is not only a necessity for long-term well-being but also essential for effective leadership. The same ethic of care that leaders should apply to themselves must be infused throughout the institution by creating and sustaining a culture that embraces a shared responsibility for the individual and collective well-being of every member of the community. The articles in this issue of Liberal Education offer a road map for achieving this ideal and for fulfilling the compact we have made with our students, faculty, staff, and broader democratic society.

Illustration by Paul Spella