Sitting across from my friend, an alumnus of the university where I’m finishing the last year of my degree, I realized the sad state of affairs that we had brought into view with our conversation. You see, this was the moment of silence after we both declared that we would not encourage our children to go to university. But this wasn’t a couple of misfits with a mismatch between their talents and their programs, or Einstein’s fish attempting to climb a tree. We both loved our programs and we loved learning what we did, and on top of that we’d both had a positive experience in university and been good students according to our records. So why did we not want to encourage our children to go to university? Because it’s a mess. Both of us being fairly self-aware individuals, we had come to realize that we’d had the fortune of being born with abilities, beyond our control, that simply favoured us in the high stress environment of the university. Not only that, we’d happened to make the right choices and realized our talents and passions early enough that we ended up in the place where we wanted to be. Many of our peers? Not so much.

University is facing an identity crisis. On the one hand, it’s a job factory, pumping out society-appropriate employees with a stamp on their back claiming they are capable of doing the thing they have done non-stop for the last 4 years. On the other hand, it’s a place of learning and discovery, questioning every aspect of reality and humanity, and maintaining an unprecedented lead in research and academia, even with the rise of private research institutes, hospitals, and corporations. The problem arises out of the by-product of this crisis: a mental health epidemic. University has become the breeding ground of stress-related mental illness. In an effort to make their ‘society-approved’ stamps more and more legitimate, the job factory identity of universities makes it harder and harder for students to succeed, moving the bar higher so that only the best of the best can make it through its programs. But not only is the lone guaranteed product of this process the people who can adapt well to stress, it undermines the majority of future society-dwellers, who will go on to run the very world that they’re constantly being told they’re incapable of running. There are two big problems with this process and way of thinking. Firstly, the universities are losing future investment because the people not adapting well to copious amounts of stress make up the majority of the student population (more on this below) and therefore will associate negative emotions and memories with university. Secondly, considering that very few of the jobs that the job-factory model is preparing us for are actually high-stress jobs, the one ability that university’s ‘best of the best’ decidedly have more of than their peers will be completely useless in the workplace. So in the end, as a business, which is what the job-factory university considers itself, it fails the exact goals it sets out to accomplish as it loses both future investment and present quality of product.

While this may seem like an entitled rant from a millennial snowflake, I implore you to stick around for the horrifying statistics that are to follow. Here is a screenshot from the American College Health Association’s executive summary report for the fall semester of 2016:

These numbers should scare you. These are the members of the next generation, and they feel broken. Over 50% of the student population felt things were hopeless, were overwhelmed by their work, felt very lonely, mentally exhausted, and felt overwhelming anxiety. These numbers don’t mean much until you compare them to the national (US) average for mental illnesses. According to the above report, 39.1% of students ‘felt so depressed that it was difficult to function’ in the last 12 months, while the 12-month prevalence for a major depressive episode in the general population, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), is 6.7%. That’s almost a 6-fold increase if all of those students got diagnosed. If half of them got diagnosed, we’re still talking about more than double the national average. And if that’s arbitrary, let’s talk about hard-er facts. 2.1% of the student population attempted suicide in the last 12 months. According to the NIMH, the prevalence of attempted suicide among the general population was 0.6% in 2015. That’s a 3.5-fold increase. Other reports are even more alarming. The table below by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, cited by the American Psychology Association, claims that 7.9% made a suicide attempt. Compared to the national average, that’s a 13-fold increase.

What’s most alarming about this situation is not even the numbers, but rather how easily the conversation shifts to the ‘snowflake millennial’ red herring, which is still slightly better than said millennials simply accepting it as a fact of life and not voicing their concerns. This is not a fact of life. Life is what the general public stats show, and though that needs a lot of work as well, this is far worse than ‘life’. The damage has been done and continues to be done on millions of young minds across North America, and much of the rest of the developed world.

I don’t claim to have the answers. But there is a conversation that needs to be had, and it isn’t happening right now. The job factory mentality is self-defeating, and will inevitably fail itself, but the damage being caused by it is going to endure. This is not at all a hyperbolizing of generational trauma being felt by my peers in the West. I write this fully realizing that other people of the same generation around the world are going without food, proper education, proper healthcare, and other necessities of life, and that these events are causing lasting damage to their psyches that is likely measurably worse than what university is causing us. But the difference is that the university is supposed to be a place of learning and enrichment of the mind. And the irony of such a place destroying the mind is less a point of absurdist humour, and more a testament to the frail state of a society that doesn’t have the sense to protect the minds of tomorrow from the ideologies of yesterday. During times when the role of the university is constantly put under the spotlight with respect to topics such as free speech, safe spaces, and critical thinking, perhaps it’s time we questioned the role that the university plays in manufacturing a mental health epidemic.