Alexis Redding has a clear perspective on the well-publicized struggles of today’s college students: The crisis narrative is not helping to solve the problem. Talking about the “crisis,” she argues, sets us up to look for a quick fix. But the issues are systemic, and it is time to address what her research shows are the persistent challenges that students experience during a stressful time of life.  

Redding is the co-author of “The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood,” which documents the emotional ups and downs of the college years based on a trove of lost interviews she uncovered that feature college students from the 1970s. In the tapes, she heard echoes of the experiences with loneliness, stress, and emotional angst that students talk about in her classroom today. This work and her teaching led her to question the stories we tell about student wellbeing in college. 

This spring, Redding will release a new book “Mental Health in College: What the Research Tells Us About Supporting Students.” The developmental psychologist, author, and professor brings together experts in college mental health, including students, to offer a new path forward. Redding and her co-authors argue for a community approach to student wellbeing and offer a deeper examination of the causes — both universal and specific — that make the college years challenging for so many students. 

Here is an excerpt from our recent interview. 

LW: Who is the target audience for the book?

AR: The book is written for student affairs professionals and campus leaders — the people who are making decisions about supporting student mental health at an institutional level. But I think that everyone, including students, faculty, and parents, can benefit from reading it. Each chapter is layered with student stories that make the challenges they are experiencing both tangible and relatable. We hear, in their own words, about the experience of being in college. And, once we listen to what they are telling us, we are better equipped to create a support structure that genuinely helps them.

LW: There is an underlying theme in the book that challenges the reader to think about college student mental health differently. Can you explain that thinking?

AR: One of the core distinctions of this work is that it focuses on the wellbeing of all students —not only those in crisis.

Developmentally, the college years are inherently unsettling and disorienting. Students struggle for many reasons that go beyond clinical diagnoses. We need to decouple two intertwined realities: the typical developmental challenges that come with growing up and the clinical mental health concerns that require specialized care. Only then can we respond appropriately to each.

The crisis narrative, while well-intentioned, often fuels panic — for educators and for parents sending their children to college. Out of fear of under-reacting, we sometimes overreact, even when students describe expected challenges, like loneliness, anxiety, or uncertainty, as they navigate transition. By defining everything as crisis, we end up addressing only those who meet clinical thresholds and overlook the broader developmental picture.

When institutions lean too heavily into this framing, the default solution becomes: more counseling. Of course, clinical care is essential for students who need it. But not every student meets that benchmark or feels ready to seek therapy. Directing everyone to counseling by default overwhelms already strained systems and can even limit access for those in acute distress.

This book is meant to reframe that conversation — to move from crisis response to community care. Every student needs connection, purpose, and a sense of mattering. When we recognize that, we can begin to design campuses where all students can thrive.

LW: How does this perspective connect with what your research shows about the state of college mental health throughout the decades?  

AR: What we know is that college students have always struggled. My archival research goes back to the 1940s and shows that students are struggling in many of the same ways that our students are struggling today. That’s not to say that we don’t have unique struggles in 2025. We don’t want to ignore the role of social media and the impact of the pandemic on youth development and what it means to grow up in the 21st century. Yet, the developmental challenges — how hard it is to grow and change and ask the big questions about who we are and what we want out of our lives — that is remarkably similar across generations. So, the challenge is to differentiate between what students have always struggled with and what is new in today’s experience. 

My hope is that we can pivot to a conversation about what is typical about stress and anxiety and loneliness — things that we know have been persistent across generations — so that we can find a way to both build a campus community in which we can better support students and change the culture more broadly. That will help us reframe what it means to get support in college and make systemic change. And it will also help us more clearly identify what is new and what needs a more targeted solution. 

"By defining everything as crisis, we end up addressing only those who meet clinical thresholds and overlook the broader developmental picture."

LW: Where did the idea for the book come from?

AR: A couple of years ago, I was asked by our dean to create a professional development program on mental health in higher education as part of our Harvard Graduate School of Education professional development arm. Each year, we work with a cohort of practitioners that includes student affairs professionals, clinical mental health providers, members of the president's cabinet, and faculty members. We have an exceptional faculty of 16 leading voices in the field, including Tony Jack (Boston University), Jesse Beal (University of Michigan), Dustin Liu (New York University), Adam Pierson Milano (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill), and a team from the JED Foundation. 

The course looks at the entirety of the student journey, thinking about the different transition points that students experience, from admissions to career search. We work hard to break down the silos we all experience in higher education to think more meaningfully about how we can work together to support students. I love the experience of running this program and being able to build a robust community of practice. But it is a small group by design, so I started to think about how to get these really important ideas in front of a wider audience. That was the spark for this book. 

LW: The book is organized into three parts with seven chapters, each written by a different author. Can you tell us more about this format?

AR: The first part of the book looks at the scope of the problem from two very different perspectives: the student’s and the institution’s.

Section one starts with Rainsford Stauffer (author of “All the Gold Stars” and “An Ordinary Age”), who is joined by three student authors, to give us a student perspective on navigating colleges and universities today. They share stories of struggling with mental health challenges, navigating the typical stress and anxiety around the experience of being a student, and their range of experiences in finding the right support. 

Next, Dr. Laura Erikson Schroth, medical director of the JED Foundation, and Dr. Janis Whitlock, founder of Cornell’s Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery, bring us an institutional perspective of what is going on in our colleges and universities. Their clinical lens helps to underscore how we can meet the needs of students struggling with acute mental health crises, including suicidality and self-harm, as well as those navigating the more typical ups and downs of college. 

Together, these two chapters frame the book with student voices and national data on the two types of challenges students are experiencing — developmental vs. clinical — and help us to understand both the depth and breadth of the challenges. 

Part two focuses on how to build holistic supports for students who are more likely to struggle during the college experience: students who are under financial strain, community college students juggling school with other responsibilities, and military-affiliated students. The idea in part two is to deeply understand some of the challenges that those three groups of students are facing. This helps us to develop and design supports on campus that not only are targeted at helping those particular groups but benefit all students more broadly.

For example, the chapter on community college students, written by Amanda O. Latz of Ball State University, is focused specifically on what faculty members can do and how they can be part of this conversation about transforming our institutions. She shares actionable takeaways that are beneficial to faculty across institutional types. There are suggestions for using your syllabus to name and normalize struggles, encourage proactive help-seeking on campus, and to make sure we meet students where they are. She also asks important questions about how we can structure our classrooms and our assignments to recognize the realities of students’ experiences and to balance rigor with compassion.

LW: Part three focuses on transitions but not just the obvious ones. Can you tell us about that?

AR: We tend to put boundaries on the college experience. We talk as if the experience starts the day that students arrive and it ends the day they cross the stage. But that framing ignores the stresses they arrive with and the anxiety most people feel when thinking about what comes next. We're trying to broaden the narrative of the student journey and to recognize that those experiences that bookend college also inform what happens during the undergraduate years. 

To think about admissions stress, we have Angél Perez, the C.E.O. of the National Association of College Admission Counseling (Nacac), and his colleague Melissa Clinedinst, Nacac’s director of Research Initiatives and Partnerships. They conducted research on the stress students experience in the admissions process and advocate for a more humane and holistic approach that considers student wellbeing. They offer actionable insights into how we can rethink the messages students receive and how we can better scaffold this transition. 

To consider the transition from college to career, we have a chapter that focuses on the lessons of Stanford’s Life Design curriculum by Dustin Liu (N.Y.U. Stern School of Business) and Joseph Catrino (Dartmouth College). They help us see that we all have a responsibility to help students consider what comes next. Inside the classroom, we really need to be thinking about building the kinds of conversations, the kind of supports, the kinds of mentoring relationships that help prepare students for their careers. We are preparing our students for life, and it is important to lean into what it means for them to be prepared in that transition to the workforce and to be able to thrive there as well.

LW: In the community college section, I'm assuming there will be an examination of different student profiles, including students with marginalized identities or first-generation backgrounds.

AR: Absolutely. Considering student identities and experiences is central to every chapter of the book. We did not want to silo any individual identity in a stand-alone chapter. Instead, we wanted a nuanced look at the lived experiences of a range of students to be embedded in each. This approach recognizes the reality that students hold many different identities at once. Each author in the book has been tasked with thinking across the realities of who our students are to capture the nuances of their lived experiences. And they've done that in a powerful way. 

LW: I was pleased to see you had a section on financial stress. Why did you think that was important to include?

AR: I'm excited about this chapter as well because we don't talk enough about the impact on financial stress on student mental health and wellbeing. The authors, Bryan Ashton and Allyson Cornett, come to us from the Trellis Foundation in Texas. They really look at the complexity and nuance of what students are juggling while attending college, including student parents, by conducting large-scale research studies. Their chapter helps us to recognize the complexity of the student experience and to think meaningfully about designing a college community and robust support system that meets their needs. 

LW: Do you think faculty are opening up to the idea that they have a role here?

AR: Yes, I do. We each have a part to play in building the kind of campus where all students feel supported. This includes faculty, staff and administrators, campus leaders, and other students as well. I like to draw on the research of Laura Rendón and the Ecological Model of Validation about the power of each individual interaction that you have on a college campus. Faculty are key in creating the kind of community where students feel seen and heard. But these moments of validation can also come from staff in the library, the dining hall, and facilities and maintenance. We need to think of every single member of the institution as part of the solution of creating the kind of caring environment where all students feel seen, heard, and valued. 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.