Are universities failing diverse first-year students?

As the gates of universities reopen and thousands of first-year students step onto campuses across the country, a familiar energy returns, one of possibility, anticipation, and transformation. For many, university marks the beginning of independence, self-discovery, and academic ambition. But beneath the smiles of orientation week and the curated moments on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok lies a deeper, often unspoken reality: the complex mental health challenges that accompany this transition.

For some students, this transition is not just a shift in location or academic expectations, it is a confrontation with long-standing emotional wounds. Especially for queer students, the journey to university has often been one of survival, not discovery. High school was not always a safe space; it was a terrain of bullying, emotional neglect, family rejection, forced conformity, and religious condemnation.

Many arrive on campus carrying trauma that has no name, no outlet, and no support system. Mental health, in these cases, is not a new concern. It is a continuation of a struggle that began long before the university gates opened.

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In many communities — particularly within African contexts — mental wellness is still framed as a Western concept. Now, as they enter university, these students arrive with wounds, with coping mechanisms, and with a burning need to be affirmed. But instead of healing, they often encounter institutions that treat mental health as an afterthought.

Services remain generic, failing to acknowledge how profoundly sexuality, gender identity, cultural alienation, and systemic exclusion shape the emotional wellbeing of queer and marginalised students. As first-years walk through the gates of institutions that promise transformation, one must ask: Are these institutions truly prepared and ready to support a student body that is more diverse, vocal, and unapologetically expressive than ever before? How can (first) year students thrive academically when their identities are under attack, when their mental health is compromised by systemic exclusion within the very institutions that are often portrayed as promised lands?

Who claims accountability for broken promises? What happens when the space that is supposed to offer freedom gets to mirror the very oppression students hoped to escape? Gender-diverse students often face ridicule, suspicion, or erasure in spaces where masculinity is policed, femininity is mocked, and nonconformity is seen as deviant or threatening.

These are not isolated incidents. If universities are serious about student wellbeing, they must be serious about dismantling the structural forces that undermine it. Cisnormativity, heteronormativity, racism, ableism, and classism must be confronted, through thetransformation of policies, spaces, language, and services.

Passive inclusion is not enough. Institutions must move beyond the binary and towards active transformation.

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