Academic Stress and Psychological Wellbeing of Higher Education Students in the NEP 2020 Era: A Critical Review

Abstract

Higher education has always demanded long hours, delayed gratification, and a tolerance for uncertainty, but the last few years have made the psychological cost of that demand impossible to ignore. Meta-analytic work now puts anxiety among graduate as well as postgraduate students at roughly a third worldwide, and depression estimates cover an even wider range, with doctoral students consistently reporting more distress than their undergraduate peers (Chi et al., 2023; Evans et al., 2018). In India, this picture has collided with a major policy shift: the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which promised multidisciplinary, flexible, and “holistic” higher education, explicitly naming mental health as a curricular and institutional priority for the first time in the country’s education-policy history. This review brings these two conversations together. It examines what is currently known about academic stress and psychological wellbeing among higher education students, both globally and within India, and asks how far NEP 2020’s stated commitments to student wellbeing have translated into structures that actually reach higher education learners. Drawing on peer-reviewed studies, policy documents, and recent Indian survey data, the review argues that while NEP 2020 provides an unusually explicit policy opening for mental health integration, its language is concentrated on school and undergraduate stages, leaving the specific stressors of research-based graduate education – supervision dynamics, funding precarity, publication pressure, and career uncertainty – largely unaddressed. The review closes with recommendations for institutions and policymakers seeking to close this gap.