Does a culture that obsesses with achievement drive the UNC System to a “pursuit of prestige” at the cost of ignoring other goals? Wendy Murphy, chair of the UNC System Board of Governors, told the other board members last year that she worries this is happening.
“In higher education, an institution’s reputation is often based on how many talented students you keep out, not how many you prepare for success,” she said.
“... So, as I look at the mental health crisis facing our students, I wonder, what can we do to reform this culture of achievement at any cost?”
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When 12 students died by suicide in 24 months at NC State University in 2022 and 2023, at least three of whom were students in the College of Engineering, and three UNC-Chapel Hill students died by suicide in one month, some raised questions about whether the academic environment was too extreme.
“The (College of Engineering) curriculum is rigorous,” The Charlotte Observer's deputy opinion editor Paige Masten wrote in 2023. “It’s intense, like a pressure cooker — difficult and laborious in a way that sometimes makes it feel impossible to succeed, at least not without sacrificing something else.
“Research shows that students in ‘high-achieving’ environments are an at-risk group for anxiety and depression. (...) In fact, academic stress appears to be the single most dominant factor affecting student mental health. We don’t know what contributed to suicides this year at NC State, but competitive environments only increase the stress that students feel.”
Achievement pressure on students
While it’s been several years since a reported death by suicide at either university, Murphy’s comments in May and similar ones at a Board of Governor’s committee meeting this January reflect a persisting concern over how North Carolina’s most rigorous universities are nurturing students’ mental health in a time where “achievement culture” is seemingly prioritized above all else.
At North Carolina A&T University, a system school lauded as one of the best public historically black colleges and universities in the country, Assistant Professor of Counseling Tyreeka Williams told CPP the university and higher education in general have a highly competitive culture today. Students are expected to start setting themselves apart earlier and in more impressive ways than ever.
“Even a decade ago, even when I started my doctoral program, that culture really wasn’t emphasized,” she said.
“It was like, you can take your time and kind of ease into it a little bit and get your feet wet and figure out what works for you. But now it’s literally, if you’re going to be compared across other rigorous institutions, you need to set yourself up and set yourself apart.”
The UNC System’s Senior Vice President for Strategy and Policy Shun Robertson told Carolina Public Press in an email that the UNC System understands the pressure students and families feel to craft the perfect college application, and they see how that feeling continues to grow throughout their time in a university.
“Achievement culture is not about the pursuit of excellence,” she wrote. “With a negative achievement culture, having the top GPA is never enough. It still feels unacceptable.
“In this environment, where students are feeling the pressure to climb higher, we must consider what student well-being looks like for our state. If young people burn out in high school or don’t feel like there’s a chance of even getting into college, they may find college less appealing as a pathway.”
One way the UNC System is confronting this burden is through NC College Connect, a direct admissions program that matches high school seniors with participating schools, including 11 System schools and more than 20 independent colleges.
“Over 70,000 high school seniors received a letter last August stating they had already been admitted to several UNC System institutions,” Robertson wrote. “This early outreach shifts the culture around senior-year performance pressure and allows students to focus on making informed choices like completing the FAFSA and exploring majors.”
Cultural shifts and a new kind of pressure
But cultural shifts within universities are also putting a new kind of pressure on students. NC A&T used to be more “relational-based,” Williams said, in the sense that which professors you worked with and what classes you assisted with made a big difference in how much you achieved.
The focus has pivoted away from the relationships you form and to how much work you are able to produce, particularly because NC A&T finds itself at a critical point as it seeks to transition from an R2 to an R1 university, the highest classification a research institution can have. It narrowly missed out on the promotion last year but has set a new goal to reach R1 by 2028. But the culture shift is also true across much of higher ed, Williams said.
Whether that culture is toxic is a debate happening among faculty, she said. From her perspective as a counselor, she does expect to see higher rates of anxiety and burnout as an emphasis on the need to achieve more and more grows.
“If we don’t prioritize some level of self care and pace and find a healthy balance and a healthy pace, then it can become toxic,” she said.
“It’s great to achieve, but I don’t think these achievements should become our only identity. … That’s where you distinguish long-term sustainability versus short term ‘I achieved, achieved, and I’m so exhausted that I can’t do any more.’”
Murphy raised questions about how the UNC System communicates “purpose and worth” to its students beyond just praising them for their academic achievements in order to avoid falling into that very trap.
“Are we making it clear that a person is valued, not just because of their admission to a university, or the number of AP courses they took, but because of their character and resilience in the face of challenges?” she said. “That is some of the best teaching we can do.”
The System’s messaging on that has expanded over time, Robertson said, and leaders are working to broaden the narrative.
“We’re more explicitly stating our role in driving the state’s economic growth and there’s a clearer focus on our public mission and role in strengthening pipelines in high workforce need areas across North Carolina like teaching, nursing, and engineering,” she wrote.
“And to meet the state’s workforce needs, and for employers to value a UNC System degree, we must have a strong stance on academic rigor. At the same time, we recognize that academic rigor and student well-being are deeply interconnected. The UNC System continues to prioritize student mental health as a critical driver of student success, while remaining attentive to broader conversations about student well-being.”
Achievement culture and mental health
Data and national trends show many students experience mental health challenges before reaching college with about 20% of 12-17 year olds having a mental health condition, so efforts to support mental health must start early, Robertson said.
To aid in that, the UNC System is investing in Mental Health First Aid and Question, Persuade, Refer suicide prevention for campus communities and current and future educators, including teaching and principal fellows. More than 80% of the System institutions are also certified JED campuses, a suicide prevention initiative designed for universities and high schools, and the System aims to expand its participation in the future, Robertson said.
Assistant Professor of Counseling at NC A&T Maylee Vazquez doesn’t think achievement culture is inherently toxic if students are approaching the quest for achievement and success in a healthy way. But she has had experiences with students at NC A&T and other North Carolina universities who have trouble accepting a “no” — from a job rejection to a professor declining to accept late work — because of the pressure they put on themselves.
“They were so used to getting a yes and so used to achieving, that when they were met with the ‘no’ at a college level, it was difficult for them to handle,” she said.
“... They were feeling that anxiety of not being able to achieve and not (being) able to face that first-time real-life reality of someone else not seeing you as the best that you are. … That’s the unhealthy part. … That’s the portion of us not having that discussion with students and saying, ‘You know, it’s OK to not always be the best.’”
Grading, engagement and motivation
Ethan Hutt, an associate professor in the School of Education at UNC-Chapel Hill, studies how grading interacts with student engagement and motivation.
In systems like K-12 and higher ed, students have limited ways to demonstrate their success to audiences — universities, professors, employers — so a natural emphasis on grades and transcripts occurs. This incentivizes things like grade inflation, the trend of assigning higher grades for the same or decreased quality of work over time, Hutt said.
North Carolina adopted a 10-point grading scale for high schoolers in 2016. As a result, a 2023 study found more lenient grading led to an average increase in GPA by 0.27 points while exam scores stayed the same. It also led to a measurable decline in student attendance.
“Students, basically, systematically adjusted their effort in school based on how hard it was to get an A or a B,” Hutt said.
“My view, and this is also just from teaching undergrads for a long time, is that they’re very savvy. This is not a critique of them, it’s how we've set up the system of rewarding them for doing well by getting good grades. And so it’s not surprising that after 13 years of school where they’re high achieving or successful, their frame is, ‘I need to get good grades, and this is a pathway to continuing on in my professional career,’ and they bring that into college.”
While it might seem like giving the vast majority of students A’s would remove the pressure in competitive environments, Harvard University’s study on their own grade inflation problem found that it simply elevated students’ stress when they received anything less than.
“‘Well, if everyone’s getting an A, then it’s not a big deal;’ well, no, that means, anytime you don’t get an A, or whatever the threshold is, it becomes a real catastrophe, because it’s really noticeable,” Hutt said.
Supporting student mental health alongside academic achievement is a shared responsibility between the System and individual institutions.
The System level is focused on setting strategic direction, leveraging data and convening expertise and scaling evidence-based practices such as the Mental Health First Aid, QPR and JED Campus initiatives, Robertson said. Campuses are responsible for the implementation and designing and delivering programs and interventions.
“In my time on this board, we’ve had healthy debates about the purposes of education, about the role of the liberal arts in an increasingly technical world, and about admissions standards,” Murphy said in May.
“I think we all agree, however, that education is important precisely because it is the means to a greater goal or purpose rather than an end in and of itself. We should not be in the business of promoting academic perfection as the only path to self-worth.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.