Image Credit: Keira Burton, Pexels
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a dorm room that has been empty for three weeks. The bed is still made the way it was left. The mini fridge hums with nothing in it. Somewhere between Center City and a campus an hour outside the city, on a SEPTA regional rail line or in the passenger seat of a parent’s car heading down Route 1 toward Chester County, a student is rehearsing who they are about to become again. Not the version who sat at their grandmother’s table on 60th Street, or translated a lease for a father still learning the rhythms of American paperwork. The other one. The one who fits.
That shift back into campus life gets treated, in most conversations about college mental health, as a footnote to a bigger and blander story about stress. But researchers who study Black students specifically describe something more particular: a compounding. Ebony McGee, who studies how racism affects Black students in STEM, has spent years hearing students describe feeling excluded and unseen on their campuses, a condition that itself drives up their stress load before a single midterm is assigned. Students of color often feel excluded and ignored, and those feelings contribute to their heightened stress.
Part of what makes the return so specific is the labor of switching back on. Researchers at the University of Michigan who study code-switching among Black professionals found the practice closely tied to vigilance, the constant bracing for discrimination, and to burnout, the depletion that comes from sustained emotional effort. The pattern shows up early on campus.
A Black senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison put it plainly to a reporter, saying, “you don’t stand a chance if you don’t speak their language.” A Brooklyn-based psychologist who works with students on this exhaustion has said the constant self-monitoring can become very traumatic for a person over time.
Research has shown that roughly 48% of Black college graduates feel the need to change how they talk around people of other races, a habit that gets sharper the first week back, when the muscle has gone soft from weeks of not needing it. The consultant Mary-Frances Winters has a name for the accumulated toll: Black fatigue, exhaustion that settles into the body and gets passed down.
For students on predominantly white campuses, that fatigue often collides with something else on return, a specific loneliness that researchers at EdTrust have documented among Black students who describe feeling like the “only one” in a classroom or a lab. It is part of why HBCUs pull so hard on Black students in this region, whether that means Lincoln University out past Oxford, the nation’s first degree-granting HBCU, or Cheyney a little further west.
Image Credit: Yan Krukau, Pexels
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A large study led by the Healthy Minds Network and the United Negro College Fund, surveying more than 2,500 students across sixteen HBCUs, found that 83% of HBCU students reported feeling part of their campus community, compared with 72% of Black students at predominantly white institutions, and that 45% reported flourishing mental health, against 38% of Black students at PWIs. The lead researcher on that study, Akilah Patterson, described what HBCUs are doing beyond the academics as “cultivating an environment of affirmation and belonging and support.” But belonging does not cancel out silence.
Money makes the return heavier still. That same HBCU study found financial stress sitting at the center of student worry, with over half of HBCU students naming it among their top three concerns, even on campuses where students report thriving in almost every other measure. And the guilt does not end at graduation. First-generation Black professionals often feel pressure to funnel their new earnings back toward parents and grandparents, even when doing so strains their own footing.
Underneath the money is a heavier question: what the degree is supposed to prove, and for whom. One first-generation student described his father, a preacher and former Division I athlete, telling him plainly, “Don’t be a statistic,” a phrase that turned a diploma into something closer to armor. Another student, writing for Active Minds, remembered her father’s response to a report card full of A’s not as a celebration but as an expectation restated: “You have to get A+, A+, A.”
Maame Efua Forson, a Harvard student writing about her own mental health crisis her first year, described trying to explain anxiety and possible ADHD to her Ghanaian father, a man with a psychology degree who nonetheless responded with disbelief. “What do you have to be anxious or depressed about?” he asked her. She traced the response back to something structural in her parents’ upbringing, writing that in Ghanaian culture, discussing mental health is locked behind stigma tied to the fear of bringing shame to the family name. Researchers studying Nigerian communities have found a related but distinct pattern, where mental illness is still widely understood through a spiritual or psychic frame, which routes people first toward religious or traditional leaders rather than clinicians.
In Southwest Philadelphia, the African Cultural Alliance of North America has spent more than two decades trying to meet families where that stigma actually lives, built originally by African musicians who noticed how many newly arrived immigrants around them felt lonely, confused, and intimidated and had nowhere culturally fluent to take that feeling.
For students carrying siblings alongside their own coursework, the exhaustion compounds again. Scholars who study parentification, the phenomenon of a child stepping into a caretaking role before they are developmentally ready for it, have documented how Black female college students in particular often manage school and part-time work while still providing financial, emotional, and mental support to their households from a distance.
The train still pulls back into the station in January and again in September. The dorm room fills up again, the fridge starts humming with something inside it, and the student who left for break starts quietly reassembling the version of themselves that campus expects. What research keeps confirming is that this reassembly counts as its own significant strain on Black students, one that deserves to be named with the same specificity as the pressures Philadelphia and diaspora families already understand instinctively, even when they do not yet have the words for it.
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Anand Subramanian is a freelance photographer and content writer based out of Tamil Nadu, India. Having a background in Engineering always made him curious about life on the other side of the spectrum. He leapt forward towards the Photography life and never looked back. Specializing in Documentary and Portrait photography gave him an up-close and personal view into the complexities of human beings and those experiences helped him branch out from visual to words. Today he is mentoring passionate photographers and writing about the different dimensions of the art world.
