What percent of students have anxiety?

89% of College Students Are Experiencing Stress or Anxiety as a Result of COVID-19, According to Nationwide Survey of Students

Washington, D.C . – New survey data from Active Minds, the nation’s leading nonprofit organization promoting mental health awareness and education for young adults, found that college and high school students’ mental health continues to be negatively affected by the pandemic, with one-in-four students reporting that their depression significantly increased.

“An uncertain fall semester has continued to impact students’ mental health across all demographics,” said Laura Horne, chief program officer of Active Minds. “Students are dealing with major uncertainty, grief, and disruptions to their routines and lifestyles and it is deeply affecting their mental health.”

While students are still struggling, there is also a lot of hope. They are relying on each other, as well as institutional resources, to help them get through this difficult time. Two-thirds of students reported an increase in supporting others with their mental health. Students are also proving to be resilient in the face of adversity. Seventy-eight percent of students feel optimistic or hopeful about their school-related goals and future job prospects.

“Students are struggling right now, yes. But what we are also seeing from students is a renewed sense of hope and optimism for themselves, for their peers, and for the future,” said Horne. “They are harnessing the power of peer networks and reaching out to lend support during this difficult time.”

Of the college students who responded to the Active Minds’ Student Mental Health Survey, 89% said that COVID-19 has caused them stress or anxiety, 78% felt loneliness or isolation, and almost half (48%) have experienced a setback in finances. High school students are not faring any better. Eighty percent of high school students surveyed have experienced stress or anxiety as a result of the pandemic and 76% have felt loneliness or isolation since March.

COVID-19 isn’t just affecting students’ mental health. Fifty-six percent of students responded that their daily level of physical activity has decreased or significantly decreased – a large shift away from this form of self-care.

“While traditional coping methods, such as physical activity, in-person therapy, or time with friends are perhaps more difficult for students, we saw that they found new ways to connect and get the help they need,” said Amy Gatto, senior campus program manager for Active Minds. “Social media and texting have a bad reputation, but when used well these types of virtual connection points between students are vital to supporting their overall mental health – especially during times of social distancing.”

Sixty-eight percent of students have benefitted from virtual interactions with friends via calls, texting, social media, or emails. Being at home has also helped students cope by spending time with their pets (54%) and receiving increased familial support (40%). Twenty-seven percent of students have also relied on virtual mental health support, such as virtual counseling, virtual support groups, and texting support to cope with the pandemic.

The results mentioned in this release are part of a larger project, which surveyed students from high school to graduate and professional degrees. Review the full report here .

About Active Minds: Active Minds is the nation’s leading nonprofit organization supporting mental health awareness and education for young adults. Active Minds has a presence on over 800 college, university, and high school campuses nationwide, and is powered by a robust Chapter Network, the nationally acclaimed Send Silence Packing® display, and inspiring Active Minds Speakers. The organization is dedicated to ending the silence and changing the conversation about mental health for everyone. To learn more, visit www.activeminds.org .

Contact: Amanda Horn, Active Minds
Phone: (202) 332-9595 x103
Email: amandahorn@activeminds.org

Active Minds is the nation’s premier nonprofit organization promoting mental health for young adults.

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47 Student Stress Statistics (High School/College)

45% of students in high school admit to being stressed almost every day in school. Find more student stress statistics below.

Steven Zauderer
January 11th, 2023

Surprising Student Stress Statistics

1. 45% of students in high school admit to being stressed almost every day in school.
2. 61% of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 feel stress over producing satisfactory grades.
3. 50% of middle school students reported feeling stressed over academics all the time, while 75% of high school students felt the same.
4. Around 500 Japanese students below the age of 20 kill themselves each year.
5. The U.S. ranks first as the country with the most stressed students.
6. College students feel stress as well, with 45% saying they felt that way at a higher-than-average rate.

What Percentage of Students Are Stressed?

1. 45% of students in high school admit to being stressed almost every day in school.

2. 61% of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 feel stress over producing satisfactory grades.

How Many Students Suffer From Academic Stress?

3. 50% of middle school students reported feeling stressed over academics all the time, while 75% of high school students felt the same.

What Percentage of Teenagers Are Stressed?

4. 40% of teenagers admit to feeling irritable or having feelings of anger, yet 36% of them felt anxiety or nervousness. Another 36% felt tiredness or fatigue during classes and 31% exhibited feelings of overall stress.

What Causes the Most Stress for Students?

Recent studies show that the COVID pandemic, bullying, and school shootings are significant factors leading to stress among high school and middle school students.

The time that a student spends in high school is representative of childhood into adulthood, where their carefree and worry-free life becomes laden with responsibilities and the address stresses that go along with them.

When depicted in the media, high school is often shown as mellow and carefree, though this is hardly the truth. Instead, it’s a time of great anxiety that some teenagers have trouble coping with.

Students routinely suffer from academic pressure, along with social anxieties. They are keeping up with work, trying to find out what they want to do with their life, and learning about the processes that apply to different colleges is hard for many young people to navigate, even when there’s much help given to them.

Compounded on this can be bullying, violence that occurs at their school, and the unpredictability of the COVID pandemic.

What Country Has the Most Stressed Students?

The United States ranks first as the country with the most stressed students. Some of the reasons for this are obvious, though others are not so. Things unrelated to their education are often the reasons, such as crime and bullying.

Prevalence Of Student Stress By Country

High School Student Stress Statistics

5. 59% of teenagers have ambitions to go to a four-year college immediately after high school.

6. Applications for colleges saw a 4% raise from 2018. However, the college applicant rates that same year were 65.4%.

7. 66% of students admitted to worrying over whether they’ll be accepted into the colleges they choose to attend.

8. The stress rate of US teenagers is 5.8, significantly higher than the standard 4.8 of Americans as a whole.

High School Student Bullying Statistics

9. There were 15.7% of American high school students will become victims of cyberbullying from 2018 to 2019.

10. Female high school students are twice as likely to experience bullying than male students.

11. In the last year, 20% of female students admitted to being bullied online.

12. 60% of high school bullying is done over the internet through social media like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Text messages also play a big part in cyberbullying.

13. Nearly 160,000 teens have partaken in truancy due to bullying in some form.

14. 36.5% of middle and high schoolers have been victims of online cyberbullying.

15. Bullying impacts one out of every five American teenagers.

16. Out of 41 school shooting suspects, 46% of them were victims of bullying at school or online.

17. 15% of middle and high school students partake in cyberbullying.

18. 55% of public school students think bullies can impact how their peers view them. 72% of private school students felt the same way.

19. Some bullied students believe that it’ll happen again in the future, 41% to be exact.

20. When other people make efforts to stop the bullying, 57% of bullying altercations stop almost immediately.

College Student Stress Statistics

21. College students feel stress as well, with 45% saying they felt that way at a higher-than-average rate.

22. 20% of students admit to being stressed at least six times in the last 12 months.

23. 68% of students taking graduate courses in the US stay away from home. This can lead to higher stress levels than normal.

24. 40% of American students attending college feel that they get a proper amount of sleep for only two days out of a week.

25. 30% of students attending college view relationships as a huge factor in the amount of stress they receive.

26. About 50% of students in college have stress at the moment.

27. Finals can bring about stress, so much so that 31% claim that exams are their biggest stressor. Second to this is concern over getting a job, with 24% reporting. The third is the high workload, which is 23%.

28. 58% of students in college claim to be moderately, greatly, or highly worried about their mental health.

29. Nine of every 10 students in higher education showed feelings of tiredness and fatigue in the last week.

30. 48% of US college students looked for treatment for their mental health after showing symptoms of stress, depression, and anxiety. Stress was among 5.9 percent of the people that reported.

31. At some point, 75% of students have had severe anxiety, with 30% having extreme anxiety over the last 14 days.

32. 35% of students attending college list stress as the primary reason for poor school work.

33. 51% of students in university list academics as the primary cause of trauma, viewing it as difficult for them to cope with.

College Mental Health Support Statistics

34. 58% of university students admit to being moderately, greatly, or extremely worried over their mental well-being.

35. 46% of students feel anxious about going back to their campus during the late semester.

36. About 70% of college students believe their campus faculty are helpful during the COVID pandemic.

37. 78% of college students view their professors as very helpful people.

38. From the symptoms that were witnessed, 15% of college students believe they had COVID at some point.

39. About 1% of college students tested positive for COVID in 2020.

40. 60% of students think they’re more likely than others to contract COVID.

41. 64% of students are very apprehensive about their family getting the COVID virus.

42. 20.3% of college students have mental health services readily available to them.

43. There 61% of college students were given info from faculty members about ways to reduce stress. 54% of therapists think that anxiety, stress, and depression are the primary worries of their clients.

44. 41% of American college students stopped receiving mental healthcare at the end of the last semester. On average, it takes most students seven days to receive their beginning appointment with a counselor at their university.

School Shooting Stress Statistics

45. From 2013 to 2019, 549 incidents were reported involving shootings on school property. OF this, 63% of them happened on the properties of elementary, middle, and high school institutions.

46. Each year, there are 3 million students that witness gun violence.

47. Black high school students are twice as likely than white students to truant over concerns for their safety.

48. Over 46 weeks in the US, 45 school shootings occurred in 2019. This amounts to about one shooting every week that students are in school.

49. 57% of shootings happen immediately after a sports game. Basketball and football are the most common sports where shootings are likely to occur after a game is finished.

References

Steven Zauderer

CEO & Founder

CEO of CrossRiverTherapy — a national ABA therapy company based in the USA.

What percent of students have anxiety?

There are few words more familiar in academia than the word test. From early childhood until perhaps our advanced years, we engage with tests in countless ways—formally and informally, with anticipation and nerves. In this section we take a look at tests and exams more closely and try to demystify them.

Tests or “examinations” are assessments designed to gauge your knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviors, and aptitudes. Below is a short list of some of the many tests you have likely taken:

Just imagine how many tests have you taken in your lifetime:

• In total, you may have taken an average of 113 standardized tests between pre-K and twelfth grade, according to the Council of the Great City Schools, which studied students in large urban districts.
• In the 2014–15 school year, 401 unique tests were administered across subjects in the 66 large urban school systems that the council studied.

You may feel as though you’ve already taken enough tests for a lifetime! But, for better or for worse, testing seems to be a fact of life, and it’s certainly a recurring feature of the college experience. So you’ll be in the best position for success if you can learn to take tests in stride and develop good test-taking skills.

As you’ll discover, a big part of doing well on tests is knowing what to expect and gearing up psychologically—that is, learning how to deal with test anxiety.

What Is Test Anxiety?

My fears are like thundering elephants. Then when I get them out and really look at them, I see that they are actually mice with megaphones.

—Bruce Rahtje, author and Biblical scholar

For many test takers, preparing for a test and taking a test can easily cause worry and anxiety. In fact, most students report that they are more stressed by tests and schoolwork than by anything else in their lives, according to the American Test Anxiety Association. [1]

• Roughly 16–20 percent of students have high test anxiety.
• Another 18 percent have moderately high test anxiety.
• Test anxiety is the most common academic impairment in grade school, high school, and college.

Test anxiety is “the set of phenomenological, physiological, and behavioral responses that accompany concern about possible negative consequences or failure on an exam or similar evaluative situation.” (Zeidner, 1998) Put another way, test anxiety is a combination of over-arousal, tension, worry, dread, fear of failure, and “catastrophizing” before or during test situations.

Below are some effects of moderate anxiety: [2]

Below are some effects of extreme test anxiety: [3]

• Overanxious disorder
• Social phobia

Poor test performance is also a significant outcome of test anxiety. Test-anxious students tend to have lower study skills and lower test-taking skills, but research also suggests that high levels of emotional distress correlate with reduced academic performance overall. Highly test-anxious students score about 12 percentile points below their low-anxiety peers. Students with test anxiety also have higher overall dropout rates. And test anxiety can negatively affect a student’s social, emotional, and behavioral development, as well feelings about themselves and school.

Why does test anxiety occur? Inferior performance arises not because of intellectual problems or poor academic preparation. It occurs because testing situations create a sense of threat for those who experience test anxiety. The sense of threat then disrupts the learner’s attention and memory.

Other factors can influence test anxiety, too. Students with disabilities and students in gifted education classes tend to experience high rates of test anxiety.

If you experience test anxiety, have hope! Experiencing test anxiety doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you or that you aren’t capable of performing well in college. In fact, some stress—a manageable amount of stress—can actually be motivating. The trick is to keep stress and anxiety at a level where it can help you do your best rather than get in your way.

Strategies for Preventing and Controlling Test Anxiety

The following video, from the University of British Columbia, provides strategies for coping with any stress and anxiety you may have about an upcoming test or exam. It also provides strategies, such as the following, for acing an exam:

1. Ask about the exam (materials covered, format, points, level of detail, etc.)
2. Take inventory of your notes
3. Set a study schedule
4. Keep your diet consistent
5. Don’t stop exercising
6. Get regular sleep
7. Make a five-day study plan for each exam

Health and wellness cannot be overstated as factors in test anxiety. Studying and preparing for exams can be easier when you take care of your mental and physical health. The following are a few tips for better health, better focus, and better grades:

1. Try a mini-meditation to reduce stress and improve focus. Breathe in deeply, count to five, and exhale slowly. Watch your lower abdomen expand and deflate. Repeat five times. Learn more about how to proactively manage stress.
2. Know when to stop. Although some students may stay up until 4 a.m. studying, it’s not a healthy habit. Your mind is more efficient when you get enough quality sleep, so make sure to schedule enough time for rest.
3. Don’t try to be perfect. You’ll alleviate a lot of anxiety by learning that just “doing your best” is something to be proud of—it doesn’t have to be perfect.
4. Reach out for help. If you feel you need assistance with your mental or physical health, talk to a counselor or visit a doctor.

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Did you have an idea for improving this content? We’d love your input.

1. «Text Anxiety.» American Test Anxieties Association. Web. 25 Apr. 2016. ↵
2. «Test Anxiety.» Test Anxiety. Web. 25 Apr. 2016. ↵
3. «Test Anxiety.» Test Anxiety. Web. 25 Apr. 2016. ↵