Exhaustion, burnout, anxiety, and depression are commonplace topics in most workplaces in the United States. Higher education is no exception. In the Healthy Minds study from the 2021–22 academic year, 44 percent of the student respondents reported symptoms of depression, 3 percent reported anxiety disorders, and 15 percent reported having seriously considered suicide in the past year—the highest recorded rates in the survey’s 15-year history (Hienze, 2023).
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
