Student Mental Health Argumentative Essay: Students on the Edge

Student mental health is one of the most assigned argumentative essay topics in American composition courses, and one of the most poorly written, because students describe the problem and forget to argue anything. The model below makes a claim about responsibility and defends it. Read it for the argument first, then for the notes at the end, which explain the moves and tell you how to replace its evidence with your own.

One rule before you start: the model names the surveys a careful writer would use, but it does not quote their numbers, because figures change every year and a model essay should not teach you to repeat a statistic you have not checked. When you write your own version, open the current reports and cite them.

The Essay: Depression and Hunger Among College Students

Walk through a counseling center waiting room at a large public university in October and you will see the crisis before anyone describes it to you. The students waiting are not there for a single bad week. Many have been on a list for a month. Some will be offered six sessions and a referral to an off-campus therapist whose first opening is in the spring. A few will leave without being seen and not come back. Down the hall, the campus food pantry is open two afternoons a week, and the line forms before the door opens. These two scenes are usually discussed separately, as a mental health problem and a poverty problem. They are the same problem, and it belongs to the college.

The national surveys that track student well-being have told a consistent story for a decade. The Healthy Minds Study, which samples students at hundreds of institutions each year, has documented a steady rise in the share of undergraduates screening positive for depression and anxiety, and a persistent minority who report serious thoughts of suicide. The American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment finds the same pattern and adds that students name stress, anxiety, and depression among the top factors harming their academic performance. The Hope Center’s basic needs surveys find that a substantial share of students at both two-year and four-year institutions report food insecurity, and that students who are food insecure are far more likely to report poor mental health than those who are not. Anyone writing on this topic should pull the current edition of each report and cite the exact figure, but the direction has not changed: more students are depressed, many are hungry, and the two populations overlap.

The common response to these findings treats them as a sum of private misfortunes. The student is anxious; the student should seek help. The student cannot afford groceries; the student should budget or work more hours. That framing is comfortable for institutions because it assigns the problem to the people least able to solve it. It is also wrong on the evidence. Depression among students tracks institutional conditions: the ratio of counselors to students, the cost of attendance relative to family income, the availability of emergency aid, the design of academic schedules that leave no room for a job and a meal. Hunger tracks tuition and housing costs that have risen faster than the aid meant to offset them. A student who is depressed because she skipped dinner three nights this week to pay rent is not suffering a personal failure of resilience. She is experiencing the predictable result of a price her college set.

The link runs in both directions, and that is why the two problems cannot be separated. Food insecurity worsens concentration, sleep, and mood, which are the early symptoms clinicians screen for when they assess depression. Depression in turn makes it harder to seek out the pantry, apply for benefits, or ask a professor for an extension. Students caught in that loop do not fail dramatically. They withdraw from one course, then another, and then stop enrolling. Research on attrition consistently finds mental health among the leading self-reported reasons students leave without a degree, and it finds that students with untreated depression leave at higher rates than their peers. A college that loses those students loses their tuition and, more to the point, loses the graduates it promised to produce.

The counterargument deserves a fair hearing. Counseling centers are expensive, licensed clinicians are scarce, and public universities in particular have faced flat or declining state appropriations for years. A dean who says the budget cannot absorb ten more therapists is not lying. But the cost comparison runs the other way once attrition is counted. Every student who leaves in the second year represents two or more years of lost tuition, and the recruitment cost of replacing that student is not small. Institutions that have invested in adequate counseling staffing and in basic needs programs, such as campus pantries connected to federal food assistance enrollment, emergency grants, and single-point-of-contact case managers, report improved persistence among the students who use them. The investment is not charity. It is retention spending that happens to be humane.

States have a role, and some have begun to play it. New Jersey, after surveys of its own college students showed stress and depression rising sharply through and after the pandemic, directed funding to campus mental health services and created statewide resources students could reach regardless of which institution they attended. Other states have required public colleges to report counselor ratios or to post crisis resources on student identification cards. These are modest measures. What they share is the recognition that student mental health is a condition of the system, which the state funds and regulates, rather than a private matter between a student and a counselor the student cannot get an appointment with.

The colleges that do not care are not, for the most part, run by people who do not care. They are run by people who have accepted a framing in which a hungry, depressed nineteen-year-old is a case to be referred rather than a signal that something in the institution’s design is broken. Changing that framing is the first task, and it costs nothing. The second task costs money: counselors in proportion to enrollment, a basic needs office with a budget, emergency aid that can be approved in a day, and schedules that assume students eat. A college that does those things is not being generous. It is doing the job it charged tuition to do, which is to keep the student in the room long enough to learn.

If you are the student in that waiting room, the argument above is not what you need tonight. Call or text 988. It is free and confidential, and it is staffed all night. Tell your counseling center you are in crisis and ask for a same-day appointment; most centers have them even when the regular list is long. Ask the dean of students’ office about emergency funds and the food pantry, and do not wait to feel bad enough to deserve them. The institution should be doing better by you. In the meantime, use everything it has.

How This Student Mental Health Argumentative Essay Is Built

The thesis arrives at the end of the first paragraph: the two scenes are one problem and it belongs to the college. Everything after that serves the claim. Notice the order: evidence that the problem exists, the wrong framing and why it is wrong, the mechanism that ties hunger to depression, the counterargument answered on its own terms, a policy example, and a close that returns to the opening image. That is the shape of a persuasive essay, and my guide to how to write a persuasive essay walks through each part in more detail.

Three choices are worth copying. First, the essay names its sources as kinds of evidence (an annual national survey, a basic needs study, attrition research) and tells the reader what each one shows, without inventing a number. In your own draft, replace each of those sentences with a cited figure from the current report. Second, the counterargument is stated at its strongest, with a sympathetic dean, before it is answered; a weak counterargument makes the writer look afraid. Third, the final paragraph changes audience, speaking directly to a student in crisis. That is a risk in an academic essay, and some instructors will ask you to cut it, but it is the kind of risk a confident writer takes.

The thesis itself follows the pattern in the guide to how to write a thesis statement: a claim someone could reasonably dispute, with the grounds for it signaled in the same sentence. If you want to see a model argumentative essay on a different subject built the same way, the business ethics essay uses the identical skeleton with annotations on each paragraph.

Using This Model for Your Own College Mental Health Essay

Study the structure, then close the page and open the surveys. Your essay should cite the current Healthy Minds, ACHA-NCHA, and Hope Center reports by year, and it should take a position you are prepared to defend when a reader pushes back. The model shows what finished work looks like. The work itself has to be yours.