Anxiety over climate change affects college students

 

College undergraduates are anxious about climate change, with many feeling powerless and frustrated about Earth’s future, yet resources to help students cope are in short supply, according to new interdisciplinary University of Utah research. The sentiment isn’t limited to students studying the environment.

“They’re not alone,” said Jennifer Follstad Shah, associate professor in the university’s School of Environment, Society & Sustainability. “There’s a lot of students feeling that way, and likely a lot of adults feeling that way.” Her findings appear in the journal Sustainability.

The research led by Follstad Shah and other Utah faculty surveyed 547 University of Utah students about their emotional responses to climate change and the factors that influenced their feelings. More than half reported frequently feeling powerless or frustrated.

The team released a companion study last year based on the same survey data investigating ways students cope with climate anxiety. Led by Monika Lohani, associate professor of psychology, this study found that students found relief by spending time in nature, hanging out with friends and spending time with pets, engaging in self-care, changing their behavior to lessen their climate impact and learning more about climate change.

“The knowledge is empowering them to understand the intricacies. That makes them not feel hopeless,” said Lohani, a research associate with the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU). “All the progress in terms of technology that has come out to combat the carbon footprint actually made them feel more hopeful.”

Both studies argue that universities should expand support services to help students manage the emotional burdens associated with potentially destructive environmental change driven by reliance on fossil fuels.

Drivers of climate anxiety

Researchers surveyed students enrolled in three environmental studies courses and one communication course.

Students rated how often climate change made them feel certain emotions. In the study led by Follstad Shah, powerlessness and frustration were the most reported, with 54% of students reporting that they felt powerless frequently or a lot, and 55% said the same about frustration.

Just 4% of students said they felt hopeful “A lot,” though 40% reported at least some hope when other response categories were counted. Students who reported more general anxiety also tended to experience greater anxiety over climate. The researchers cautioned that the findings do not establish causal connections between climate change and anxiety.

“It may be that climate anxiety is a contributor to general anxiety, as well as the converse,” Follstad Shah said.

Students majoring in environmental studies reported higher climate anxiety than other students, even when they had similar levels of general anxiety. However, a student’s major was not a significant predictor once the researchers considered other factors, such as how often students encountered climate information, whether they considered climate change a personal issue and their political views.

Students who identified climate change as a top personal concern and who held more liberal political views tended to report greater levels of climate anxiety. Exposure to climate change information in class and online was also associated with anxiety, while information from friends, family and co-workers was not.

Lohani’s paper documented “adaptive” and “maladaptive” responses students have to the climate crisis. Some students said worry over climate made them shut down. One wrote, “Sometimes I just don’t feel like doing anything at all because it makes me so anxious.”

“People, often a majority, don’t know what to do with it,” Lohani said. “That is problematic for many reasons. Those who are overwhelmed, they might be catastrophizing or using avoidance or distraction, which ultimately is not good for their well-being, or efforts to address the climate change crisis. Those who are apathetic towards it, that is not bad for their well-being in the short run, but ultimately it is affecting them and their community.”

Supporting students burdened with climate anxiety

Follstad Shah and Lohani argued universities should expand mental health resources to address climate anxiety more directly.

Surveyed students told researchers that they want more opportunities to discuss climate change with peers and mentors. Follstad Shah and Lohani both highlighted the Good Grief Network, co-founded by LaUra Schmidt, a 2014 graduate of Utah’s Environmental Humanities program. This nonprofit harnesses peer support to help people and communities experiencing distress from social and ecological injustices.

The researchers encouraged students to get involved by asking faculty about climate research or internships. Students said they cope with anxiety by volunteering with advocacy groups. “Take part in environmentally friendly activities. Participate in community clean-up activities, volunteer for environmental issues, and join local projects,” said one student cited in Lohani’s paper.

Such experiences help students gain a sense of agency, according to the researchers. “Don’t be afraid to talk about it and let people know that you feel this way,” Follstad Shah said. “There’s power in those bonds.”

The researchers note that these findings represent just a snapshot in time and a specific undergraduate experience at a major university in an arid Western state where climate impacts are very noticeable. About 66% of respondents were female, 69% were White and 63% leaned left politically. The authors recommend follow-up studies that include students across more academic majors, backgrounds and universities to better understand the drivers of climate anxiety and how to help students manage it.

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The more recent study appeared Aug. 5 in the journal Sustainability under the title “Climate Anxiety Among Undergraduates at an R1 University in the United States.” I

Faculty Productivity Among Affirmative Action Hires

 Affirmative action programs are often criticized because of concerns that they result in lower worker productivity and efficiency losses. This study evaluates the relative productivity of workers benefiting from an aggressive affirmative action policy in a setting where hiring constraints are mandated upon employers and are typically likely to bind. 

In India, colleges are required to reserve approximately 50 percent of faculty hires for individuals from disadvantaged caste and social class groups. The authors collect and analyze data from a nationally representative sample of 50 engineering and technology colleges in India, some of which randomly assign students to classrooms. 

The authors find that reservation category faculty have lower levels of education, lower professorial ranks and fewer years of experience in academia than general category faculty who are not hired through reservations. Yet, even with lower qualifications, they do not detect meaningful differences in instructional quality between reservation category faculty and general category faculty across a wide range of measures that include course grades, follow-on course grades, standardized test scores, dropout, attendance, graduate school plans, and graduation. 

In fact, at least for immediate effects on course grades, students taught by reservation category faculty perform slightly better than students taught by general category faculty. 

They also estimate “teacher-like-me” effects of reservation category faculty on the relative course performance and longer-term outcomes of reservation category students and cannot reject the hypothesis of null effects. 

Furthermore, even in the face of potential discrimination and resentment against faculty hiring quotas, general category students perform slightly better in classrooms taught by reservation category faculty than general category faculty. 

Finally, estimates of differences between reservation category and general category faculty in several measures of research productivity and administrative service are small in magnitude and not statistically different from zero. 

The findings have implications for the heated debates over affirmative action programs found in many countries around the world and in India which is now the largest country in the world.

Home Visits Can Re-Engage Chronically Absent Students

 Beginning in the summer of 2021, the state of Connecticut launched the Learner Engagement and Attendance Program (LEAP) where home visits by school personnel were conducted with students identified as chronically absent from Connecticut’s 15 most disadvantaged school districts. Home visits were designed to connect students and their families directly with teachers to foster strong connections. 

This study uses student-level data from 2021–22 through 2023-24 to estimate event studies of the effect of LEAP on student attendance, chronic absenteeism, disciplinary incidents, and student achievement. Utilizing models that address selection into treatment timing over student observable and unobservable attributes, the authors find that students who received the LEAP intervention experienced approximately a 4 to 5 percentage point increase in attendance rates, a 13 to 15 percentage point decline in chronic absenteeism, and a 3 to 5 percentage point decline in the number of disciplinary incidents. 

Notably, initial event studies indicated increasing treatment effects over time, but after correcting for selection on unobservables treatment effects appeared constant over time. 

These effects were broad based, with similar impacts by gender, race and ethnicity, and free or reduced-price lunch status. These attendance and discipline results provide suggest that the LEAP intervention increased student noncognitive skills.

Self-Censorship on College Campuses

 There has been widespread concern about self-censorship on university campuses, and especially that conservative voices are being stifled. Using survey data from a private elite college, this study shows that self-censorship is not simply about being conservative: it is students with the most moderate views who self-censor the most. This pattern is associated with confidence and salience — students who are more confident in their views or who see an issue as especially important tend to hold more extreme views and to self-censor less. 

At the same time, conservatives self-censor at higher rates than liberals, and the same individual is more likely to self-censor on the views where they are relatively more conservative than on those where they are relatively more liberal; conservatives are also far more likely than liberals to cite concerns about social exclusion as a reason for self-censoring, and report self-censoring less outside the university community. Groups perceived as marginalized self-censor less than majority groups, and especially so on issues salient to them (e.g., Black students on BLM).

Universities as Incubators of Mass Uprising

This study links high-frequency geocoded protest data during Bangladesh’s 2024 Monsoon Revolution, Facebook measures of protest activity and social connectivity, university enrollment and demographics to establish: (1) student-linked protests precede off-campus mobilization; (2) student concentration predicts both on- and off-campus protest, while non-student youth, educated adults, urbanization, and locations of “placebo” universities authorized but not yet operating do not; and (3) social connectivity to student protest locations predicts off-campus diffusion one week later. Universities appear to incubate mass uprising by making dissent visible, coordinated, and capable of spreading beyond campus. Such patterns are also evident in U.S. Vietnam War protests and in global data. That universities facilitate broader political mobilization can explain why governments often seek to restrict student activism.

Children learning to swim early become more academically successful and more sociable

 With family budgets stretched ever-tighter, swimming lessons can be one of the first expenses to be cut back – but with research showing swimming helps children not just physically but developmentally, researchers are calling for greater government support.

A major four-year study spanning nearly 7,000 survey respondents and 177 individually tested children suggests that children who learn to swim early don’t just become safer in the water and fitter, but they become more academically successful and more sociable than their peers.

This study has been unpacked, explored and expanded upon by researcher Robyn Jorgensen, Emeritus Professor at the University of Canberra, Australia, in her new book, Why Young Children Should Learn to Swim.

Testing an industry hunch

The project began with a conversation between researcher Professor Jorgensen and Laurie Lawrence, an Olympic swim coach inducted into both the Australian and US Swimming Halls of Fame. Lawrence felt that children who learned to swim early were generally more ‘school-ready’.

“There was no formal evidence to support this observation, but it was one that Laurie felt he and many others in the swim industry observed,” Jorgensen explains.

Jorgensen and colleagues decided to verify this ‘industry hunch’ through rigorous academic investigation using internationally recognised testing tools: the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales and Woodcock-Johnson III assessments, normed against national census data.

The results surprised even Jorgensen, who said: “My early observations of the young learners piqued my interest while retaining some sense of scepticism about what could be achieved. I am not from a swimming background, so had no vested interest in the ‘proving’ or otherwise of Laurie’s hunch. My only interest in swimming was as a grandparent and around water safety for my children and grandchildren, and as a recreational activity.”

On measures of literacy, numeracy and following instructions, the study found that young children before the age of 5 who participated in swimming, regardless of socio-economic background, could be 5-18 months ahead of milestones in literacy, numeracy, and being able to follow instruction – at a much better rate than general children population of the same age.

Jorgensen is keen to impress this does not mean young children who have been learning to swim are innately ‘smarter’, instead, she argues swimming lessons build transferable skills and dispositions. For example, a child counting kicks from one to ten with an instructor, for instance, absorbs number sequencing and one-to-one correspondence – skills with direct value in a classroom.

While many parents enrol children in swimming for safety reasons, Jorgensen’s detailed study suggests participants gain measurable advantages in cognitive development, language skills and emotional regulation.

“It is reasonable to claim that swimming prepares children for the schooling years, particularly the early years and the transition into schooling,” Jorgensen explains.

The price of entry

Yet access to this advantage is sharply unequal. Most swim schools operate as commercial businesses, and cost is consistently identified as the single biggest barrier to participation.

According to Jorgensen’s analysis, the biggest equity barrier is faced in the U.S. and China, where only very affluent families can afford regular swimming lessons.

After this, Singapore, Australia, Brazil and South Africa also face notable geographic and economic barriers to swimming.

One respondent from Zimbabwe summed up the difficulty, saying: “So swimming is still seen in Africa in general as elite. But basically, if you are a working-level person well below average, swimming lessons will not be a priority; what will be a priority is feeding your family.”

Geography also compounds the problem. In Australia, families on remote farming properties can face journeys of hundreds of kilometres to reach the nearest pool. This creates what the study calls ‘a double whammy’ – children from low-income and rural communities are simultaneously the least likely to access lessons and the most at risk of drowning.

With cost-of-living crises around the world, Jorgensen’s call-to-action is for greater systemic support to allow equitable access.

A call for subsidy

Jorgensen argues governments have both a moral and financial incentive to intervene.

The study suggests that where governments worldwide already spend billions trying to close attainment gaps in schools.

“What this study has shown is that even when socio-economic backgrounds are accounted for, children who participate in quality lessons achieve better than the general population. It would make sense for the government to consider investing in providing or subsidising early years swimming for families who would otherwise be excluded from participation in early years swimming lessons,” Jorgensen explains.

“Investing in quality swimming lessons would make a politically wise move. The cost of lessons can be quite high, but if policies were created to offer subsidies for parents or to create swim programs for disadvantaged families, there is considerable potential for adding capital to these cohorts of learners,” she explains.

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DOI

10.4324/9781003774747 

The Sunshine Protection Act puts K–12 children at greater risk for fatal car crashes

In July 2026, the US House passed legislation to make daylight saving time (DST) permanent. But a new analysis of the consequences of the “Sunshine Protection Act,” reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 29, finds that this legislation would come with serious safety consequences for millions of schoolchildren across the US who would have to leave for school before sunrise, when fatal crashes with pedestrians are more likely, for much of the school year. Permanent DST would lead to more than 2 billion pre-sunrise commutes for children, and students who walk or take the bus to school would face an increased risk of early morning crashes. 

“Permanent DST would move the school day earlier relative to the sun without changing a single bell schedule, putting millions of children on streets and at bus stops in the dark for weeks or months every year,” says Horacio de la Iglesia of the University of Washington, Seattle. 

Much of the public debate around permanent DST has focused on the light available during the evening. But the researchers say that mornings are a critical time for schoolchildren, who would generally return home during light hours under any clock policy. The de la Iglesia lab has long studied the way school start times affect adolescent sleep, including the move in Seattle and many other school districts to later secondary school start times. When the US House passed the Sunshine Protection Act in July 2026, the team realized that no one had investigated how many children would be sent to school in the dark under the new policy.  

“The US has tried this before,” says Guadalupe Rodríguez Ferrante, also at the University of Washington, Seattle. Year-round DST took effect in January 1974 and was abandoned that October, in part because of public concern over dark winter mornings and children traveling to school. “All of today’s students, and most of today’s parents, have never lived through a winter on DST, so experience with the current seasonal system does not tell us what permanent DST would be like.” 

The researchers gathered school start times in 14 states with permanent DST along with local sunrise times. They counted the number of pre-sunrise commutes in each location and found that there would be about 356 million more pre-sunrise school commutes with the move to permanent DST. When they broadened their approach beyond these states to the entire US, they found that the Sunshine Protection Act would lead to more than 2 billion dark morning commutes for children. They also found that students in both northern and southern states would be impacted, and Georgia had the highest number of pre-sunrise school commutes of all states analyzed.   

The team then analyzed fatal-crash records in the US over a decade and found greater odds of crashes involving pedestrians on dark mornings. Among fatal morning crashes, those involving pedestrians aged 5 to 18 were more likely when it was dark. The data suggest that permanent DST would lead to more children at an increased risk of early morning crashes, say the researchers. 

“The burden of permanent DST is likely greatest for children who walk, wait for buses, or arrive early for school breakfast programs, which disproportionately serve lower-income families,” says Ferrante. 

The US’s current system of shifting the clocks forward and back also doubles the number of dark school mornings compared with permanent standard time (ST). Permanent ST is not only safer for children going to school, the researchers say, it also keeps students’ solar, biological, and social clocks best aligned, according to the team’s past research. 

“The name ‘Sunshine Protection Act’ is misleading,” says de la Iglesia. “No clock policy adds a single minute of daylight. It only changes when that daylight is available, and permanent DST moves an hour of light out of the morning, when children travel to school, and into the evening.” 

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Current Biology, Rodríguez Ferrante et al., “Over a billion more dark-morning school commutes for K–12 children under the Sunshine Protection Act” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)01348-5