The Mecca of the academic world is suddenly under a bright and harsh spotlight; the one that none of the press reps at the sprawling campuses are quite used to handling. Last month, the death of 23-year-old Princeton University junior, Lauren Blackburn steered the conversation back to mental health and the Ivy League universities. Blackburn, found dead in Lake Carnegie, a week after he mysteriously went missing, reportedly suffered from bipolar disorder. However, that doesn't nearly cover up for the fact that this has not been the only or rare one-off student death on the Princeton campus. Blackburn’s is the sixth death of an undergraduate student at the school since 2021. All the previous five deaths were ruled as suicides, as per the independent daily student newspaper of the university. As per a few reports, Blackburn is the third Princeton undergraduate student to die in two years, and eighth since 2021.
Ivy League, heavy workload, high expectations
Random studies on how corporate boardrooms are filled with non-Ivy league students make it to headlines every once in a while. However, how these campuses handle mental health crises has been far more concerning. The incredibly high rejection rates and impossibly low selection rates come with their own battles. The combination of high pressure, high expectations, on impressionable minds starting out into the adult world is a near fatal combination for mental health. Jack Anderson, a Harvard-graduate admissions counsellor, who runs an Ivy League vlog channel, talks about the other side of being in the Ivy League. “Whilst it's great to attend Ivy Leagues, one of the unspoken realities is that they can ruin your mental health and self-confidence if you aren't careful,” he posts before sharing on the strategies that students can use to improve their mental health while attending their dream college. One of the reasons they say this happens is ‘because students go from being big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond’. Something they are not prepared for. Plus, the changed environment, distance from family, friends and relationships.
Resources have not nearly been a problem for the eight universities namely Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia. The big endowments, apart from donations from legacy admissions, continue. The eight traditional Ivy Leagues collectively received $6.4 billion in federal funding in 2024. Yet, former students and experts opine that mental health resources are lacking. Last year, at Dartmouth University, two students were found dead and their bodies recovered from Connecticut River. One of those deaths was speculated to be caused due to a hazing incident after the victim was last seen at a Saturday night gathering on a dock. The mental health crisis has been a recurrent and intermittent problem at the universities. Back in 2017, by February, a shockingly large number of five student suicides were reported at the prestigious Columbia University, since the session began in September of the previous year.
Higher education and mental health crisis
Inarguably, mental health crisis is a pan-campus problem in higher education; however, Ivy Leagues specifically garner more scrutiny and are expected to take the lead on solutions too as in other arenas. In 2023, with the end of its spring semester in May, North Carolina State University concluded a beyond tragic school year — with 14 student deaths. Seven students died by suicide, two fatally overdosed, four of them died due to natural causes and one in a road accident, as per the details furnished by Mick Kulikowski, NC State’s director of strategic communications and media relations. At the time, almost all of the mental health experts called the loss of young lives as tragic and staggeringly large to depict national trends and adopt urgent, desperate measures for students’ mental health.
A 2018-report conducted by Ruderman Family Foundation, scrutinized the policies surrounding leaves of absence across the Ivy Leagues. The report particularly highlighted how universities sometimes force students with mental illnesses to take leaves of absence. Notably, Penn scored the highest in the mental health report, with an abysmal grade of D+.
In 2022, Harvard was sued over negligence in providing mental health support to a student who died by suicide. In 2021, a Department of Justice Investigation claimed that Rhode Island's Brown University discriminated against students who availed a leave of absence for mental health.
Whatever is being done is too little to tackle something too much. All enrolled students at Brown University are eligible for 12 free counselling sessions per year. Most of the others adhere to short-term models of care. These models are not of much assistance to students with longstanding trauma who exhaust campus therapy visits and are then left to their own devices. Student forums, social media platforms and mental health experts all point towards and agree on a couple of things — that Ivies must do better for the students’ mental health as what they are doing isn’t clearly enough.
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