• Posted June 1, 2026

Perfectionism Among College Students Reaches Record High, Fueling Anxiety

College students are under more pressure than ever to be perfect, and such perfectionism is driving rising rates of mental disorders, a new evidence review says.

Students became increasingly perfectionistic between 1989 and 2024, researchers reported recently in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

This has been fueled in part by social and economic factors like rising income inequality and slowing economic growth, researchers said.

“Perfectionism is a public health risk – it’s associated with increased depression and anxiety,” said lead researcher Thomas Curran, an associate professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

“If we want to tackle the youth mental health crisis, we need to focus on these cultural and economic factors,” he said in a news release.

For the new study, researchers pooled data from 307 studies conducted over a 35-year period involving nearly 83,000 American, Canadian and British college students.

Not only is perfectionism increasing, according to the study, since the early 2000s, more burdensome behaviors that stem from perfectionism have become increasingly common.

“Perfectionistic concerns” – fear of failure, indecisiveness and fear of being judged by others – increased much faster than the motivation to set high standards and work hard to achieve them, researchers found.

They also discovered that higher rates of perfectionism overlapped with slowing economic conditions in a nation.

Likewise, rising economic inequality was linked to steeper increases in perfectionistic concerns.

“When there’s a lack of economic opportunity, young people seem to compensate with striving,” Curran said. “And when inequality grows, what you see is that fear and worry about making mistakes and other people’s opinions starts to become a more central feature of young people’s psychology.”

There also is a stable link between perfectionism and mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, the study found. The higher a person’s perfectionism, the more likely they are to have associated symptoms.

“These findings provide additional context for recent debates about youth mental health,” he concluded. “Phones and social media have received a lot of the blame, but the rise in perfectionism predates social media. This research study suggests something deeper is at work.”

More information

National Alliance on Mental Illness has more on the youth mental health crisis.

SOURCE: American Psychological Association, news release, May 28, 2026