Mental health in college has become one of the most pressing concerns in higher education, prompting difficult questions about why so many young adults struggle with loneliness, uncertainty, academic pressure, and the transition into adulthood. Yet understanding these experiences requires a longer view of human development, one that considers not only the pressures young people face today but also the challenges that have accompanied earlier generations as they tried to discover who they were and where they belonged.
In this episode of Passion Struck, I speak with Dr. Alexis Redding, a developmental psychologist and higher education researcher whose work offers an unusually revealing perspective on these questions. Her research took an unexpected turn in 2016, when she discovered a clue suggesting that a collection of college student interviews from the 1970s might still exist. The original research team had abandoned the study in 1979, leaving behind a trail of recordings, essays, research notes, and other documents that had effectively disappeared from view. Alexis spent a year reconstructing the archive, reopening a window into the lives of students navigating a period of profound personal change.
What makes this discovery so compelling is the recognition that followed. When contemporary students encountered the voices of their predecessors, they found familiar experiences of loneliness, identity formation, parental expectations, and anxiety about the future. Students who had lived decades apart recognized something of themselves in one another. The circumstances surrounding their lives had changed, but many of the emotional questions they faced remained remarkably consistent.
Our conversation explores what these connections can teach us about young adult mental health, why belonging has such a powerful influence on student well-being, and how cultural expectations around achievement and perfection can make it difficult to acknowledge struggle. We also examine the responsibility colleges, families, and communities share in helping young people develop the confidence to explore, make mistakes, and change direction as they build their lives.
What 1970s College Students Reveal About Young Adult Mental Health
The story behind Alexis’s research begins with an archive that almost disappeared. While investigating the work of William Perry, whose research helped establish the field of college student development, Alexis discovered evidence that interviews conducted with students in the 1970s might still be recoverable. The original study had documented students’ experiences across their college years, creating a record of how their thinking, identities, and expectations evolved over time. Finding the materials required patience and detective work, but reconstructing the archive allowed the research to continue across generations.
The historical comparison produced a result that challenged the assumption that today’s young people inhabit an entirely different emotional world from the one their parents and grandparents experienced. Students reviewing the earlier interviews recognized familiar concerns about independence, belonging, family expectations, and the uncertainty of choosing a future. The people in the recordings were living in a different social and technological environment, yet their questions about identity and adulthood remained recognizable.
Alexis also describes the significance of reconnecting with members of the original study, including people who graduated in 1975 and were able to listen to their own recordings again. Revisiting those earlier voices gave them an opportunity to reflect on their younger selves and reconsider how they had understood their lives at the time. Some recognized that hearing these experiences when they were younger might have influenced how they later parented, taught, or supported the next generation.
This research offers a valuable perspective on mental health in college because it places present-day difficulties within the broader story of human development. Contemporary conditions can intensify uncertainty and create new pressures, but the underlying experience of growing into adulthood has a longer history. Recognizing that continuity can help us replace generational blame with more thoughtful questions about what young people need, how they experience the world, and where meaningful support can begin.
Why Mental Health in College Requires a Broader Cultural Perspective
When conversations about youth mental health focus on a single cause, they can overlook the complicated interaction between individual development and the environments in which young people live. Social media, academic expectations, reduced opportunities for independent exploration, perfectionism, and wider cultural pressures all deserve consideration. Alexis’s argument is that the challenge becomes easier to understand when we recognize how these factors can interact with longstanding difficulties surrounding identity, independence, and uncertainty.
The distinction matters because the explanations we choose influence the solutions we pursue. If every struggle is interpreted as an individual problem, responsibility tends to fall on the student to become more resilient, perform better, or seek help when something goes wrong. Those responses can be valuable, but they remain incomplete when the surrounding environment contributes to the difficulty. A student who believes everyone else is succeeding effortlessly may find it hard to admit confusion, even when uncertainty is a normal part of learning and development.
In our conversation, I reflect on how similar patterns appear in organizational culture. Leaders often interpret performance problems as shortcomings within individuals, only to discover that expectations, incentives, and the broader working environment are contributing to the problem. Alexis sees a comparable dynamic in higher education. The way students are evaluated, the stories told about achievement, and the signals they receive from faculty and peers can shape whether they experience college as a place where they can grow or as a place where they must continually prove their worth.
This perspective also connects to the idea of systemic unmattering: the experience of being valued primarily for what we produce, how we perform, or how well we meet expectations. When achievement becomes the dominant measure of a person’s value, it becomes harder to acknowledge the ordinary uncertainty that accompanies growth. Supporting student mental health therefore involves more than providing services after a problem emerges. It also requires examining the cultures that shape students’ daily experiences and creating conditions in which asking for help, admitting difficulty, and learning through mistakes are treated as legitimate parts of development.
In this episode, you’ll learn
- How Dr. Alexis Redding recovered a forgotten archive of student interviews from the 1970s and what it revealed about the experiences shared across generations.
- Why mental health in college is influenced by developmental challenges, cultural expectations, and the environments in which students live and learn.
- How a sense of belonging can support student well-being, help-seeking, academic persistence, and the confidence to navigate unfamiliar situations.
- Why effortless perfection can make students reluctant to acknowledge uncertainty, and how honest stories about failure can create opportunities for connection.
- How colleges, families, and educators can build cultures of care that recognize students as people rather than reducing their value to achievement or performance.
- Why exploration, course correction, and career reinvention are essential parts of growing into adulthood.
How Belonging Helps College Students Navigate Uncertainty
Belonging is one of the clearest themes to emerge from Alexis’s research. She explains that students who experience a stronger sense of belonging tend to fare better academically, are more likely to seek help when they need it, and are more likely to remain in college and graduate. These outcomes reveal why belonging deserves attention as a central part of student well-being rather than as a pleasant addition to the college experience.
The importance of belonging becomes especially apparent during transitions. Students entering college are often navigating unfamiliar expectations, new relationships, greater independence, and questions about whether they have chosen the right path. At precisely the moment when they need opportunities to establish connections, they may feel least certain about where they fit. Small interactions can therefore carry considerable meaning, particularly during the first days of a new environment, when students are beginning to form impressions of the people and institutions around them.
Alexis shares an example from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where a dean welcomed incoming online students by telling them, “You belong here. You were chosen.” The message was direct, but its significance extended beyond the words themselves. It communicated that the students had been selected intentionally and were legitimate members of the community they were entering. Alexis also recounts a moment when she recognized a student whose application she had read. The student became emotional when she realized that someone remembered her, offering a vivid illustration of how being noticed can make a person feel that their presence matters.
These moments reveal that belonging is built through both institutional practices and everyday human interactions. A university can speak about community in its mission statement, but students experience that commitment through the people who remember their names, listen carefully to their concerns, and demonstrate that they are valued beyond their performance. When students feel supported in this way, they have a stronger foundation from which to take intellectual risks, ask questions, recover from setbacks, and develop a more confident relationship with uncertainty.
The Hidden Pressure of Perfectionism and the Stories We Tell About Success
Young people often encounter carefully edited accounts of success long before they enter college. They see the achievements, decisions, and milestones that make other people’s lives appear coherent, while the uncertainty and setbacks that preceded those outcomes remain largely invisible. In an environment shaped by academic competition and expectations of effortless success, students can begin to interpret their own struggles as evidence that they are falling behind.
Alexis discusses the pressure associated with effortless perfection, a culture in which people feel compelled to appear accomplished and in control without revealing the effort or difficulty behind their achievements. The problem is that this expectation can isolate students precisely when they need connection. If everyone appears confident, each person may assume that their own doubts are unusual, creating a cycle in which uncertainty remains hidden and opportunities for support become harder to find.
One way to interrupt this pattern is to tell more honest stories about the process of growing and changing. Adults often share the polished version of their careers, emphasizing the decisions that worked and the accomplishments that followed. Young people can benefit just as much from hearing about rejection, indecision, disappointing results, and the moments when someone had to reconsider a plan. These experiences help reveal how often meaningful progress emerges through adjustment rather than through a perfectly executed path.
The stories we choose to share can therefore influence how young people interpret their own experiences. When parents, educators, and leaders speak openly about uncertainty and explain how they recovered from setbacks, they offer a more realistic account of what development looks like. They also communicate that a difficult period does not have to become a permanent judgment about a person’s abilities or future. Struggle becomes easier to discuss when people can recognize it as part of a shared human experience rather than a private failure they must conceal.
The Research Behind Mental Health in College: A More Human Approach to Student Well-being
When Alexis began working with the research and ideas that informed Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students, one of the most important questions was how to understand student well-being beyond the individual experiences that are easiest to see. A student may appear disengaged, overwhelmed, or reluctant to ask for help, and it can be tempting to treat that behavior as a problem contained within the student. Yet the surrounding environment may be influencing whether that person feels comfortable enough to speak openly, seek support, or believe that they belong.
That question connects the book to the archival research Alexis describes in our conversation. Looking across generations allows researchers to recognize the enduring challenges of becoming an adult, while examining campus culture helps explain how institutions can either support students through those challenges or make them more difficult to navigate. The book brings research on college student mental health into a broader discussion of the experiences and systems that shape student life, including academic pressures, financial stress, and the different circumstances students bring to higher education.
What makes this perspective valuable is its emphasis on shared responsibility. Student mental health is affected by individual needs, but it is also shaped by relationships, expectations, and institutional practices. Creating a more supportive college experience therefore requires attention to the entire environment in which students learn and develop. The goal is to build communities where students can seek help, form meaningful connections, and learn from difficult experiences while retaining the agency to make their own decisions.
For readers who want to understand the research behind these questions, Mental Health in College offers a deeper exploration of how higher education can respond to student needs. It complements the central message of Alexis’s interview: supporting young adults begins with understanding their experiences, listening to what they tell us, and creating environments where they can grow as people as well as students.
Growing Into Adulthood Through Exploration, Failure, and Reinvention
College often carries an expectation that students should use their years of study to identify a future profession, develop a stable identity, and prepare to enter adult life with a clear sense of direction. For some people, that process unfolds relatively smoothly. For others, the years after graduation bring new questions about work, relationships, responsibilities, and the kind of life they want to build. Alexis’s research encourages a more flexible understanding of adulthood, one that makes room for exploration and acknowledges that development continues long after a degree has been earned.
The ability to change direction is an important part of that process. A student may choose a field because it satisfies family expectations, offers financial security, or seems to provide a clear route forward, only to discover through experience that their interests and priorities are different. Learning to recognize that mismatch and respond thoughtfully requires a degree of agency: the ability to reflect on one’s circumstances, consider alternatives, and make decisions about what comes next. These skills develop through practice, especially when people have opportunities to explore possibilities without treating every change of course as a failure.
The archival research offers a useful reminder that the uncertainty experienced by young adults today is connected to questions earlier generations also faced. Members of the class of 1975 went on to make significant changes in their professional lives, illustrating that graduation rarely settles every question about identity or purpose. Their experiences complicate the idea that a successful life follows one predetermined route and suggest that the capacity to adapt can matter as much as the ability to make an initial choice.
For parents, educators, and institutions, this perspective creates a different responsibility. Supporting young adults means helping them develop judgment, resilience, and the confidence to reconsider their plans when new information or experience calls for it. It also means allowing them to encounter challenges while remaining connected to people who can offer perspective and support. When young people understand that adulthood includes periods of uncertainty and reinvention, they can approach the future with greater flexibility and a more realistic sense of what growth asks of them.
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About Today’s Guest, Alexis Redding
Dr. Alexis Redding is a developmental psychologist and higher education researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where her work focuses on college student development, mental health, identity, and the transition to adulthood. She co-leads the Transition to Adulthood Lab and directs professional development work focused on mental health in higher education. Her research examines how young people navigate the formative years of college and how institutions can create environments that support their well-being and development.
A distinctive part of Alexis’s work involves recovering and studying archival interviews with college students from the 1970s, allowing researchers to compare the experiences of earlier generations with those of young people today. Her findings highlight the persistence of uncertainty, loneliness, identity development, and the need for belonging across generations. She is the author of The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood and editor of Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students, works that examine how young people grow, change, and find their way through the transition into adult life.
What Do 1970s College Students Reveal About MENTAL HEALTH Today?
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FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
What is mental health in college?
Mental health in college refers to students’ psychological and emotional well-being as they navigate academic demands, relationships, identity development, independence, and the transition into adulthood. It is influenced by individual circumstances as well as the social and institutional environments in which students live and learn.
Why is belonging important for college student mental health?
Belonging helps students feel accepted and connected to their community. Research discussed by Dr. Alexis Redding links a sense of belonging with positive outcomes such as academic performance, help-seeking, persistence, and graduation. Feeling recognized and supported can also make it easier for students to ask questions, take risks, and recover from setbacks.
What did Alexis Redding discover in the 1970s student interviews?
Alexis Redding helped recover an archive of college student interviews and related documents that had been abandoned in 1979. The recordings revealed that students from earlier generations described experiences familiar to young adults today, including loneliness, uncertainty, identity questions, family expectations, and concerns about the future.
What is effortless perfection among college students?
Effortless perfection describes pressure to appear successful and capable without showing the struggle behind that success. This expectation can make students reluctant to admit uncertainty or ask for help, especially when they believe their peers are managing college more easily than they are.
How can colleges better support student mental health?
Colleges can support student mental health by combining appropriate services with a broader culture of care. This includes helping students establish connections, making help-seeking feel acceptable, recognizing individual students, and creating environments where uncertainty and mistakes can be part of learning rather than sources of shame.
Why is the transition to adulthood so challenging?
The transition to adulthood often involves changes in identity, relationships, education, work, and responsibility at the same time. Young adults may be expected to make consequential decisions while they are still learning about their interests, values, and abilities. Supportive relationships and opportunities to explore can help them navigate that uncertainty.
What does Mental Health in College explore?
Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students examines research on college student mental health and the role that higher education institutions can play in supporting student well-being. It addresses the varied pressures students encounter and encourages approaches that build supportive, caring, and inclusive campus communities.
Why are career changes and reinvention important in adulthood?
Career changes can reflect the way people’s interests, priorities, and circumstances evolve over time. Learning to reconsider a plan, respond to new experiences, and pursue a different direction helps people navigate uncertainty throughout adulthood. As Alexis’s research illustrates, graduation is one milestone in development rather than the final answer to who a person will become.
