There’s a growing national conversation about student mental health — and rightly so. Anxiety, depression, burnout and loneliness are rising among young people, especially college students. But if we’re serious about addressing this crisis, we need to talk about something that’s too often missing from the conversation: money.
College affordability isn’t a separate issue from mental health. In fact, it’s at the center of it.
I co-founded the Student Basic Needs Coalition after spending my own college years constantly stressed about how to pay rent, afford groceries and stay enrolled. I wasn’t an outlier. I was a mirror of thousands of students across the country trying to build a future while navigating housing insecurity, food insecurity and rising tuition.
For many students today, the source of their mental health struggles isn’t just academic pressure or social isolation. It’s the overwhelming financial burden of trying to get a degree while staying alive.
Financial stress is driving the mental health crisis
Courtesy of Paige Swanstein
Paige Swanstein — Co-founder, Student Basic Needs Coalition
We don’t need to speculate about this connection. The data is clear:
- Fifty-nine percent of college students say they have considered dropping out due to financial stress and nearly one in five actually have, according to a 2024 report from Ellucian.
- The Hope Center found that three in five college students struggle with at least one basic need like food, housing or transportation.
- Black and Indigenous, parenting and low-income students are hit hardest and they’re often expected to navigate benefit systems that weren’t built with them in mind.
Despite this, most colleges still treat mental health and affordability as separate lanes. You can get referred to counseling or handed a flyer for a meditation app, but too often there’s no support for what’s actually making students anxious — like unpaid balances, unrenewed SNAP benefits or choosing between buying groceries and paying tuition.
Poverty is isolating. Systems are exhausting.
We talk about a loneliness epidemic among young people, and it’s real. But for many students, loneliness doesn’t just come from screens or pandemic disruptions. It comes from economic exclusion.
If you can’t afford to eat out, join a club or take a weekend off work, you miss the social and emotional core of the college experience. You’re often invisible in campus conversations about well-being, because your stress is seen as the “typical college experience.”
And the systems that could help often create more harm. Students who qualify for food or housing assistance are often tripped up by unclear eligibility, confusing paperwork or administrative delays. The FAFSA overhaul this year is a case study in how poor implementation and underfunding turn what should be a support system into another source of trauma.
Mental health meets a policy backlash
Currently, students are being asked to meditate their way through a crisis, while Congress moves forward with proposals that will make their lives even harder. On July 4, Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashes Medicaid and forces states to take on more SNAP costs.
These policies are direct attacks on the supports students rely on to survive. This bill shifts food assistance costs onto states and create additional strain on already underfunded systems. While Pell Grant eligibility was not cut as originally proposed, the act’s process showed the continual uncertainty of support for college students. At a time when we should be investing in student well-being, this act did the opposite: it added pressure, uncertainty and instability.
Student Basic Needs Coalition
Left: A student is happy to receive food items from a food assistance table. Right: A student working a food assistance table outdoors holds a flyer with QR code for students to sign up for assistance.
What needs to change
Mental health initiatives that ignore college affordability will never be effective. If we want to support student well-being, we need real investments in the conditions that make learning possible. Rather than more cuts, we need to:
- Expand access to SNAP, Medicaid and other benefits for students.
- Fund basic needs centers and emergency aid programs on campus.
- Restore the value of the Pell Grant, which now covers only a quarter of college costs.
- Integrate food and housing support into mental health and advising systems.
These aren’t just “student issues.” They’re public health and workforce pipeline issues. We cannot expect students to persist, graduate and enter the workforce when they’re too hungry to focus or too stressed about rent to sleep.
Listen to what students are telling us
Across the country, I work with student leaders who are stepping up where institutions have failed — running peer navigator programs, helping their peers access benefits and organizing for policy change. Their message is consistent: stop offering empty resilience rhetoric and start giving us the tools to succeed.
Students don’t need to be told to take care of themselves. They need institutions and policymakers to care about them enough to fix what’s broken.
We can’t continue to respond to a structural crisis with individual coping strategies. We must address the economic roots of student distress or we will continue to see young people fall through the cracks of a system that claims to value their future.
***
Paige Swanstein is the co-founder and co-executive director of the Student Basic Needs Coalition, a national nonprofit working to end food and housing insecurity on college campuses.
