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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 April 2023
This article traces the rise of anxiety among American high school and college students since the late 1950s, with particular focus on the decades before 2000. Evidence for rates of change comes from anxiety tests administered during the period, as well as a variety of psychological studies. The article also takes up the issue of causation, highlighting the extension of counseling services and psychological vocabulary that affected evaluations of nervousness; the impact of negative developments like crime rates and growing family instability; and the results both of changes in educational patterns—such as more frequent examinations—and significant shifts in student goals and expectations. Finally, the article touches on efforts to mitigate anxiety, such as expanding student services, and also their limited impact.
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5 The timing and, to an extent, the nature of change emerge most clearly from data on a sequence of anxiety tests, administered recurrently from the late 1950s, and an extensive trove of contemporary studies on specific features of student anxiety, beginning with an examination of anxiety and expanding from that.
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12 Horwitz, Anxiety, chaps. 6 and 7.
13 Hoxby, Caroline, “The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 4 (Fall 2009), 95-115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Horwitz, Anxiety. See also Marc-Antonin Crocq, “A History of Anxiety from Hippocrates to DSM,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 17, no. 3 (Sept. 2015), 319-25; J. M. Murphy and A. H. Leighton, “Anxiety: Its Role in the History of Psychiatric Epidemiology,” Psychological Medicine 39, no. 7 (Oct. 2008), doi: 10.1017/S0033291708004625.
15 Brian Gill and Steven Schlossman, “Parents and the Politics of Homework: Some Historical Perspectives,” Teachers College Record 105, no. 5 (2003), 846-71.
16 Horwitz, Anxiety; G. D. Burrows and B. M. Davies, eds., Handbook of Studies on Anxiety (New York: Elsevier, 1980).
17 Karl Rickels, “Drug Use in Outpatient Treatment,” American Journal of Psychiatry 124, no. 8S (Feb. 1968), 26, https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.124.8S.20.
18 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: APA, 1980), 225.
19 Andrea Tone, Age of Anxiety: America's Turbulent Affair with Tranquillizers (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 217; David Hertzberg, Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
20 Google Ngrams, American English, 1900-2019, accessed Oct. 21, 2022.
21 American Psychiatric Association, DSM, 3rd ed.
22 Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (Washington, DC: Center for Educational Statistics 1993); Mack DeGuerin, “How the SAT Has Changed over the Past 90 Years and Where It Might Be Heading,” Insider, Aug. 9. 2019, https://www.insider.com/how-the-sat-has-changed-over-the-past-90-years-2019-8.
23 Davis K. Rothman, “A New Approach to Test Anxiety,” Journal of College Student Psychotherapy 18, no. 4 (Sept. 23, 2008), 45-54. For a literature review, see George J. Allen, “Effectiveness of Study Counseling and Desensitization in Alleviating Test Anxiety in College Students,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 77, no. 3 (June 1971), 282-89.
24 Robert W. Graff, G. D. MacLean, and Andrew Loving, “Group Reactive Inhibitions and Reciprocal Inhibitions Therapies with Anxious College Students,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 18, no. 5 (Sept. 1971), 431-36; Irwin G. Sarason, “Test Anxiety, General Anxiety, and Intellectual Performance,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 21, no. 6 (Dec. 1957), 485-90; Graham B. Blaine and Charles C. McArthur, eds., The Emotional Problems of the College Student, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century, 1971).
25 E. Sutton-Smith, B. G. Rosenberg, and Elmer F. Morgan Jr., “Historical Changes in the Freedom with Which Children Express Themselves on Personality Inventories,” Journal of Genetic Psychology: Research and Theory on Human Development 99, no. 2 (1961), 309-15; Seymour B. Sarason et al., “A Test Anxiety Scale for Children,” Child Development 29, no. 1 (March 1958), 105-13; Raymond B. Cattell, Handbook for the IPAT Anxiety Scale (Champaign, IL: Institute for Personality and Ability Testing, 1957).
26 Jean M. Twenge, “The Age of Anxiety? Birth Cohort Change in Anxiety and Neuroticism, 1952-1993,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 6 (2000), 1007-21.
27 Janet A. Taylor, “A Personality Scale of Manifest Anxiety,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 48, no. 2 (1953), 289; Richard Alpert and Ralph Norman Haber, “Anxiety in Academic Achievement Situations,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 61, no. 2 (1960), 207.
28 Twenge, “Age of Anxiety?”; Benjamin Ayres and Michelle Bristow, Anxiety in College Students (New York: Nova Science, 2009).
29 Blaine and McArthur, The Emotional Problems of the College Student.
30 Rust, “The Epidemiology of Mental Health in College”; Siegel, The Counseling of College Students; Clifford B. Reifler and Myron B. Liptzin, “Epidemiological Studies of College Mental Health,” Archives of General Psychiatry 20, no. 5 (May 1969), 528-40.
31 William Smith, Norris Hansell, and Joseph English, “Psychiatric Disorder in a College Population: Prevalence and Incidence,” Archives of General Psychiatry 9, no. 4 (Oct. 1963), 351-61. See also Graff, MacLean and Loving, “Group Reactive Inhibitions and Reciprocal Inhibitions”; Sarason, “Test Anxiety, General Anxiety, and Intellectual Performance”; Blaine and McArthur, The Emotional Problems of the College Student.
32 Reifler and Liptzin, “Epidemiological Studies”; Siegel, The Counseling of College Students; Dana L. Farnsworth, Mental Health in College and University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).
33 Smith, Hansell, and English, “Psychiatric Disorder in a College Population.”
34 S. B. Khan, “Dimensions of Manifest Anxiety and Their Relationship to College Achievement,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 25, no. 2 (Oct. 1970), 223-28; Siegel, The Counseling of College Students; Ayres and Bristow, Anxiety; Farnsworth, Mental Health in College and University; R. M. Suinn, “The STABS, a Measure of Test Anxiety for Behavior Therapy: Normative Data,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 7, no. 1 (Sept. 1969), 335-39; Blaine and McArthur, The Emotional Problem of the College Student.
35 Alexander W. Astin et al., The American Freshman: Thirty-Five Year Trends, 1966-2001 (University of California, Los Angeles: American Council on Education, 2002).
36 Amelia M. Arria et al., “Suicide Ideation among College Students: A Multivariate Analysis,” Archives of Suicide Research 13 (2009), 230-46; M. L. Rosenberg et al., “The Emergence of Youth Suicide: An Epidemiologic Analysis and Public Health Perspective,” Annual Review of Public Health 8 (1987), 417-40; Robert E. McKeown, Steven P. Cuffe, and Richard M. Schulz, “U.S. Suicide Rates by Age Group, 1970-2002,” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 10 (Oct. 2006), 1744-51.
37 Mary Ellen Flannery, “The Epidemic of Anxiety among Today's Students,” neaToday, March 28, 2018, https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/epidemic-anxiety-among-todays-students; Carlos Blanco et al., “Mental Health of College Students and Their Non-College Attending Peers: Results from the National Epidemiologic Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions,” Archives of General Psychiatry 65, no. 12 (2008), 1429-37; Twenge, “Age of Anxiety?”
38 Twenge, “Age of Anxiety?”; Derek Potter, David Jayne, and Sonya Britt, “Financial Anxiety among College Students: The Role of Generational Status,” Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning 31, no. 2 (2020), 284-95.
39 See Google Ngram Viewer for the longitudinal incidence of references to math anxiety and writing anxiety; Macarena Suárez-Pellicioni and María Isabel Núñez-Peña, “Math Anxiety: A Review of Its Cognitive Consequences, Psychophysiological Correlates, and Brain Bases,” Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience 16 (2016), 3-22. The first test for math anxiety was introduced in 1972: F. Richardson and R. M. Suinn, “The Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 19 (1972), 551-54.
40 James C. McCrosky, “Measures of Communication-Bound Anxiety,” Speech Monographs 37, no. 4 (1970), 269-77.
41 Marion Steininger, Richmond E. Johnson, and Donald K. Kirts, “Cheating on College Exams as a Function of Situationally Aroused Anxiety,” Journal of Educational Psychology 55, no. 6 (Dec. 1964), 320. Irwin G. Sarason, “Test Anxiety and the Intellectual Performance of College Students,” Journal of Educational Psychology 52, no. 4 (April 1961), 201-6.
42 Melissa L. Danielson et al., “Prevalence of Parent-Reported ADHD Diagnoses and Associated Treatment among U.S. Children and Adolescents,” Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology 42, no. 2 (March-April 2018), 199-212.
43 Cited in Robert F. Aubrey, “The Historical Development of Guidance and Counseling and Implications for the Future,” Personnel and Guidance Journal 55 No.6 (Feb. 1977), 290.
44 Norman C. Gysbers, Remembering the Past, Shaping the Future: A History of School Counseling (Alexandria VA: American School Counseling Association, 2010); Joshua Watson, “Managing College Stress: The Role of College Counselors,” Journal of College Counseling 15, no. 1 (April 2012), 3-4. For a more general cultural framework, see Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
45 Twenge, “Age of Anxiety?” 1007-10, 1018.
46 Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Perseus, 1999); Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (New York: Oxford, 1997).
47 Peter N. Stearns, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2006); Astin et al., The American Freshman.
48 Greg Diamond and Jerald Bachman, “High School Seniors and the Nuclear Threat, 1975-1984,” International Journal of Mental Health 15 (1986), 215.
49 Diamond and Bachman, “High School Seniors,” 216. See also Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
50 Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Knopf, 1978).
51 Twenge, “Age of Anxiety?”; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). On tensions with modern happiness expectations, see Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York: Random House, 2003).
52 Twenge, “Age of Anxiety?”
53 Astin et al., The American Freshman. See also Gail Cornwall and Scott Coltrane, “How Americans Became Convinced Divorce Is Bad for Kids,” Slate, July 11, 2022, https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/divorce-bad-for-kids-history.html.
54 Astin et al., The American Freshman; Peter N. Stearns and Ruthann Clay, “American Guilt: A Challenge for Contemporary Emotions History,” Social and Education History 6, no. 3 (Oct. 2017), https://doi.org/10.17583/hse.2017.2927.
55 Jochen Hardt et al., “Anxiety and Depression as an Effect of Birth Order or Being an Only Child: Results of an Internet Survey in Poland and Germany,” Insights on the Depression and Anxiety, Sept. 14, 2017, https://doi: 10.29328/journal.hda.1001003; Stanley Schachter, “Birth Order, Eminence and Higher Education,” American Sociological Review 28, no. 5 (Oct. 1963), 757-68.
56 Terri LeMoyne and Tom Buchanan, “Does ‘Hovering’ Matter? Helicopter Parenting and Its Effect on Well-Being,” Sociological Spectrum 31, no. 4 (2011), 399-418; Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2003). Helicopter parenting intensified by the end of the twentieth century, but it is worth noting that it was first identified in 1969, just as student anxiety was intensifying. See Haim G. Ginott, Between Parent and Teenager (New York: MacMillan, 1969).
57 Snyder, 120 Years of American Education; Hoxby, “The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges.”
58 Sherman Dorn, “Origins of the ‘Dropout Problem,’” History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 3 (Autumn 1993), 353-73.
59 Astin et al., The American Freshman; Victor B. Saenz et al., First in My Family: A Profile of First-Generation College Students in Four-Year Institutions since 1971 (Los Angeles: University of California, Higher Education Research Institute, 2007).
60 Hoxby, “The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges.”
61 Hoxby may exaggerate this change, but her discussion of rising ambitions is relevant. “The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges.” See Astin et al., The American Freshman, 56-57, on distance from home.
62 Farnsworth, Mental Health in College and University. A similar trend of a greater focus on academic results, along with some increases in anxiety, was noted in British students in the 1960s. See Ferdynand Zweig, The Student in an Age of Anxiety: A Survey of Oxford and Manchester Students (New York: Free Press, 1963).
63 Hoxby, “The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges.”
64 Irwin G. Sarason, “Test Anxiety, General Anxiety, and Intellectual Performance.”
65 DeGuerin, “How the SAT Has Changed”; Michael C. Johanek, A Faithful Mirror: Reflections on the College Board and Education in America (New York: The College Board, 2001).
66 Alexis Brooke Redding, “Extreme Pressure: The Negative Consequences of Achievement Culture for Affluent Students during the Elite College Admissions Process,” Journal of College Admission 221 (2013), 32-37. On the sleep issue, see Derek Thompson, “Why American Teens Are So Sad,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/04/american-teens-sadness-depression-anxiety/629524/; Shari Melman, Steven G. Little, and K. Angeleque Akin-Little, “Adolescent Overscheduling: The Relationship between Levels of Participation in Scheduled Activities and Self-Reported Clinical Symptomology,” High School Journal 90, no. 3 (Feb.-March 2007), 18-30. On the distinctive American role for “extracurriculars,” see Robert J. Panos, Alexander W. Astin, and John A. Creager, “National Norms for Entering College Freshmen,” ACE Research Reports 2, no. 7 (Fall 1967).
67 Jane Hoggman, “Chronicling Email Pitches from Colleges to High School Sophomores,” Journal of College Admission 32 (Fall 2013), published as a letter to the editor; Edwin Fiske, “How College Admissions Came to Be Hawked in the Marketplace,” Chronicle of Higher Education 55, no. 5 (Sept. 2008), A112; James Cass and Max Birnbaum, Comparative Guide to American Colleges (New York: Harper and Row, 1965-71). For falling admission rates in select colleges, Jeffrey Selingo, Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), chap. 2.
68 On the “vanity” applications, Selingo, Who Gets In, chap. 2; see also Redding, “Extreme Pressure.”
69 Quotes are from Redding, “Extreme Pressure,” 34-35.
70 Selingo, Who Gets In and Why; Hoxby, “The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges.”
71 For the Crimson reference, see Farnsworth, Mental Health, 168.
72 Twenge, “Age of Anxiety?”; Douglas Treadway, “Reality Therapy as a Model for College Student Counseling” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1971).
73 Astin et al., The American Freshman. Data in the fascinating compilation accrue from annual questionnaires administered to 350,000-400,000 first-year college students. See also E. L. Day et al., American Freshman: Twenty-Five Year Trends (Los Angeles: University of California, Higher Education Research Institute, 1992).
74 It is worth noting that references to the issue of pleasing one's parents, or potential parental disappointment at college failure, seem to increase during the same period—another possible change in college motivations and pressures that would surge further with the rise in more intensive parenting styles. Astin et al., The American Freshman.
75 Also significant: the percentage of students expecting to go on for at least a master's degree increased quite rapidly (by about 25 percent between the 1960s and 2000), creating another pressure on grades. Astin et al., The American Freshman.
76 Duffy, Parenting the New Teen in the Age of Anxiety, 79. Inflated ambitions for success in college were further fueled by parental optimism. See John Reynolds et al., “Have Adolescents Become Too Ambitious? High School Seniors’ Educational and Occupational Plans, 1976-2000,” Social Problems 53, no. 2 (Feb. 2006), 186-206; Stanley Coopersmith, The Antecedents of Self-Esteem (San Fransisco: W. H. Freeman, 1967).
77 Grade inflation is largely studied from the instructor side, and not always kindly. But the student side warrants attention as well, from the heightened expectations that are sometimes rather separate from actual effort, to the nervous overinvestment in grades in general, to the pressures that anxious students and their parents put on the graders. Over the decades, the dance between concerns about student anxiety and grade leniency has become steadily more acute. See Louis Goldman, “The Betrayal of the Gatekeepers: Grade Inflation,” Journal of General Education 37, no. 2 (1985), 97-121; Harvey C. Mansfield, “Grade Inflation: It's Time to Face the Facts,” Chronicle of Higher Education 47 (April 2001), B24; Wayne Lanning and Peggy Perkins, “Grade Inflation: A Consideration of Additional Causes,” Journal of Instructional Psychology 22, no. 1 (1995), 163.
78 Watson, “Managing College Stress”; Gallagher, National Survey of Counseling Center Directors 2006. The number of counselors feeling overwhelmed by the level of student demand doubled already from 1985 to 2002, by which point 83 percent of all centers reported a major increase in severe anxiety disorders in the previous five years.
79 Helicopter parenting has been studied from several angles, including the emergence of new fears about crime and kidnapping. But the role of the more general increase in childhood anxiety, from which future parents would emerge, deserves more attention—along with the more familiar role of the new parenting in producing less resilient children. Children's competence was being diminished—even the decline of chores was mentioned as a factor—in ways that promoted anxiety in school and college alike when it was combined with high expectations. See Stearns, Anxious Parents; Lenore Skenazy, Free Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Let Grow (Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 2021).
80 Tara Thiagarajan and Jennifer Newson, eds., Mental State of the World 2021 (Chandigarh, India: Sapiens Labs, 2021); Laura Weiler, “Are Students in the US More Likely to Suffer from an Anxiety Disorder?” Chasing the Storm, Dec. 7, 2021. Differences among English-speaking countries include distinctions in educational structure, including the absence of American limits on the college applications frenzy, as contrasted with, for example, British regulations of the applications process: Sally Weale, “Levels of Distress and Illness among UK Students ‘Alarmingly High,’” The Guardian, March 4, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/05/levels-of-distress-and-illness-among-students-in-uk-alarmingly-high.
81 In the short period spanning the last five years of the twentieth century (interestingly, before the surge of social media), demand for counseling services rose 50 percent in many universities, prompting a tendency to focus on this span alone. The temptation to single out recent developments intensified as rates continued to soar. Martha Anne Kitzrow, “Mental Health Needs of Today's College Students,” National Association of Personnel Administrators (NASPA) Journal 41, no. 1 (Fall 2003), 165-79. See also Thompson, “Why American Teens Are So Sad.”
82 This trend can be seen in the published content the Chronicle of Higher Education, which had initially featured scattered articles on specific anxieties such as public speaking, and turned to the broader trends only around 2007; and by and large the same trend unfolded in the publications of the National Association of Personnel Administrators. See Julia Schmalz, “Facing Anxiety: Students Share How They Cope and How Campuses Can Help,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 11., 2017; Kitzrow, “Mental Health Needs of Today's College Students,” https://www.chronicle.com/article/facing-anxiety/.
83 These programs have been hugely popular: an early “Paws for People” initiative at Tufts University drew literally ten times as many students as anticipated. Jill Castellano, “Pet Therapy is a Nearly Cost-free Anxiety Reducer on College Campuses,” Forbes, July 6, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jillcastellano/2015/07/06/pet-therapy-is-a-nearly-cost-free-anxiety-reducer-on-college-campuses/?sh=48f407ac7c59.
