College students have a lot on their mind: classes, social life, grades, and in recent years, mental health. We support college students with mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and others. That’s why we pay attention to anything related to college students and mental health.
And, like almost everyone else in the U.S., we spend some of our down-time scrolling through various social media and news feeds on our phones and laptops. This week, we noticed a major national publication with a large audience published an article with the following headline:
One of the Most Popular College Majors Has One of Highest Rates of Depression
That caught our attention. Upon further examination, we found another similar article, with a similar headline, from the same publication:
These Are the Most Depressed College Students by Major
These headlines qualify as click-bait, we know. We clicked, and what we found was interesting.
The article indicated that a new study showed depression among medical students increased over 35 percent in the past five years, followed by significant increases among students enrolled in the following fields of study: nursing, law, social sciences, business, natural science/mathematics, social work, and humanities.
One line literally jumped off the page at us:
“All majors saw upticks in depression rates from 4.6 to 35.3 percent from 2019 to 2024.”
That would be an increase approaching 700 percent, which we should know about. We hadn’t heard about increases that large among college students, so we decided to investigate.
Here’s what we found.
Feeling Depressed and Anxious, or Diagnosed with a Mental Health Disorder?
What we found wasn’t quite as dramatic as those headlines implied. But nevertheless, the information we reviewed is important for college students, parents with college age children with mental health issues, mental health treatment providers, and public policymakers.
We learned the information in those articles arrived on our screens thirdhand. First, the University of Michigan published a report called “The Healthy Minds Study.” Next, an education research group called Degreechoices accessed the Healthy Minds Network Data Visualization Tool and gathered data on mental health among college student between 2019 and 2024. Third, the national publication we mention above reported the top-line findings as detailed by the Degreechoices report.
When we reviewed the data from the Healthy Minds Study, we learned the figures in the articles with clickbait headlines are real – and they’re accurate – but they need context. Here’s the context: the figures they reported reflected the presence of depressive symptoms, but not the presence of or diagnosis of clinical depression.
That’s important information. Depressive symptoms can escalate to clinical depression relatively quickly. Understanding how many college students report no depressive symptoms or depressive symptoms that don’t reach a clinical threshold helps us develop a clear understanding of the big picture. However, what we wanted to learn – based on those headlines – was more specific: we wanted to know how the percentage of college students with major depressive disorder (MDD) and severe anxiety broke down by field of study/college major.
College Students and Mental Health: Major Depressive Disorder, 2019-2024
When we adjusted the data tool provided by the University of Michigan (UM) to report college students with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, the results aligned more closely with our expectations. We knew – or thought we knew – that a 35.3% rate of MDD among college students was too high.
When we checked the overall numbers for MDD among college students, the figure made more sense:
- MDD Among college students:
- 2019: 18%
- 2024: 19.21%
For context, there are currently around 18 million college students in the U.S., which means that in 2019, we can estimate that close to 3.3 million college students had MDD, and in 2024, close to 3.5 million college students had MDD.
We were still curious, though, about the breakdown by major/field of study. Here’s what we learned from the UM data tool:
2019-2024: Major Depressive Disorder, By Field of Study, By Percentage
- Humanities:
- 2019: 21.8 / 2024: 23.1
- Nursing
- 2019: 15 / 2024: 17
- Public Health
- 2019: 18.5 / 2024: 17.9
- Social Work:
- 2019: 16.2 / 2024: 20.1
- Social Sciences:
- 2019: 19.4 / 2024: 20.8
- Art:
- 2019: 26.3 / 2024: 26.4
- Medicine:
- 2019: 9.6 / 2024: 13.3
- Natural Science or Mathematics:
- 2019: 19 / 2024: 20
- Business:
- 2019: 13.8 / 2024: 15.5
- Engineering:
- 2019: 14.5 / 2024: 16.5
- Law:
- 2019: 14.3 / 2024: 16.5
That data shows us that over the past five years, the degrees/fields of study consistently associated with the highest rates of MDD were Art, Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Science/Math, with the largest five-year increases among students studying Medicine and Social Work.
College Students and Mental Health: Severe Anxiety, 2019-2024
Since depression and anxiety are the two most common mental health disorders in the U.S., we repeated the process we used to retrieve the data on depression to retrieve data on severe anxiety. Estimates from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) place lifetime prevalence rates of anxiety among adults between 30-35 percent, with estimated rates of severe anxiety between 20-25 percent.
Here’s what the UM data tool showed for the prevalence of severe anxiety among college students:
- 2019: 13.8%
- ~2.5 million
- 2024: 16%
- ~2.8 million
And here’s the breakdown by major/field of study:
2019-2024: Severe Anxiety, By Field of Study, By Percentage
- Humanities
- 2019: 17.1 / 2024: 18.3
- Nursing
- 2019: 15 / 2024: 16.1
- Public Health
- 2019: 14.9 / 2024: 15.3
- Social Work:
- 2019: 10.1 / 2024: 17.8
- Social Sciences:
- 2019: 14.9 / 2024: 17.3
- Art:
- 2019: 19.6 / 2024: 19.7
- Medicine:
- 2019: 9.9 / 2024: 12.4
- Natural Science or Mathematics:
- 2019: 13.8 / 2024: 16
- Business:
- 2019: 11.2 / 2024: 12.7
- Engineering:
- 2019: 8.7 / 2024: 11.8
- Law:
- 2019: 13.4 / 2024: 13.6
These figures show that over the past five years, the degrees/fields of study consistently associated with the highest rates of severe anxiety were Art, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Science/Math, with the largest five-year increases among students studying Social Work, Engineering, Social Sciences, Medicine, Mathematics.
College Major, College Students, and Mental Health: A Connection?
The data we report above is strictly correlative, which means the information describes relationships, but doesn’t determine causality. For instance, the information indicates students of the Arts show higher rates of depression and anxiety than students in other fields of study, but nothing in the information proves studying the Arts causes depression or anxiety: that would require a different kind of study altogether.
While the information is correlative, it’s also informative.
We learned that students of the Arts reported MDD and severe anxiety at higher rates than students in other disciplines, that students in Natural Sciences and Mathematics developed MDD and severe anxiety at consistently higher rates than we expected, and that the single highest increase in the data we examined was related to severe anxiety among students studying social work – an increase of close to 7 percent. That’s almost twice the size of the next largest increase, also among students studying social work: rates of depression increased by 4.9 percent.
While the articles we shared at the beginning of this piece focused on the increase in depressive thoughts among students studying business, which increased by 3.1 percent between 2019 and 2024, what caught our attention were the increases among students studying social work: what’s behind the differences?
That’s a question for future research, which we’ll report here when it appears. In the meantime, we’ll close with this reminder: verify the claims you see in media headlines, especially about mental health. To check facts, use these reliable sources:
- The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH)
- The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS)
- The Monitoring the Future Survey (MTF)
- The National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH)
- The Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
- The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
Each site contains a wealth of information that can help you separate fact from fiction, stay current on the latest news and developments, and learn almost everything you need to know about mental health and mental health treatment in the U.S.
