A study released by UCLA takes a look at the correlation between the continued decline of incoming freshmen emotional health and college expectations.

Based on a survey of incoming college freshman, trends indicated emotional health of incoming freshman continues to decline:

The American Freshman: National Norms Fall Cooperative Institutional Research

Emotional Health Concerns Connect with College Expectations

Previous CIRP research (Pryor et al., 2010) and some media (Douce & Keeling, 2014; Grasgreen, 2013) have highlighted students’ declining emotional health over time and its connection with student success. It is important to examine how this affects students’ experiences and expectations for college. Students are asked to rate their emotional health in relation to other people their age, in addition to the frequency with which they feel depressed.

In 2014, students’ self-rated emotional health dropped to 50.7%, its lowest level ever and 2.3 percentage points lower than the entering cohort of 2013. Additionally, the proportion of students who “frequently” felt depressed rose to 9.5%, 3.4 percentage points higher than in 2009 when feeling “frequently” depressed reached its lowest point. Self-rated emotional health and feeling depressed are very highly correlated, and the remainder of this section focuses on the latter.

Over time, institutions have been addressing the needs of students with various disabilities. Figure 8 demonstrates that students with different types of disabilities report feeling depressed more frequently. Of those students who indicated being on the autism spectrum or having Asperger’s syndrome, 22.4% reported being “frequently” depressed compared to 9.3% of those who did not report the disorder. Over 17% of students who reported having a chronic illness (17.5%), as well as those who indicated having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD, 17.2%), were “frequently” depressed, in contrast to those who reported not having these conditions (9.2% and 9%, respectively).