Ivy League suicides, Princeton's 8th student death in 4 years expose crisis at elite schools

This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

The recent death of a Princeton University undergraduate student, just weeks away from completing his junior year, has prompted renewed conversation about how Ivy League schools handle mental health crises on campus.

Lauren Blackburn, 23, was an English major and creative writing minor from Indiana. He was missing for several days before authorities found him deceased in a lake. Officials have not released his cause of death or said if there was any foul play involved.

Blackburn was the third Princeton undergraduate student to die in two years and the eighth since 2021. Six of those deaths were determined to be suicides, as The Princetonian first reported.

Princeton Professor Yiyun Li, who directs the university's creative writing program, lost both of her sons to suicide, one of whom, James Li, was a Princeton student when he died in 2024.

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"What can parents do but give their children the space to be, and allow them to do what they need so that they can become more fully themselves?" Yiyun Li wrote in a New Yorker essay titled "The Deaths — And Lives — of Two Sons" published on March 23.

"And yet, despite the parents’ efforts, and despite all the beings and doings that occur as the children grow, some among them die before their time. Children die, and they are not happy. And their parents can never know whether those children died because they were not happy, or whether they were not happy because they sensed, too early, that they must face their own deaths."

While mental health crises and suicides are not unique to Princeton, or Ivy League schools generally, experts say Ivy League students face distinct challenges and pressures while attending the country’s most prestigious schools. Experts also say Ivy League institutions should be dedicating more funds to mental health resources than they do currently.

"I think it comes down to the demands, and I would say almost 100% of the time, the Ivy League schools have really high rigorous demands," Ivy Ellis, certified mental health therapist and Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) who regularly works with college students, told Fox News Digital. "Whereas at other universities, the demands can be lower in terms of just how much schoolwork is asked, like how many classes they have to take, how much homework they have, how many tests they have."

Ellis added her belief that while Ivy League schools do "care" about their students, "There's limited funding and limited resources that go towards mental health."

"So almost all the universities and Ivy League schools have counseling centers in place, and I know they're excellent, excellent counselors," she said. "They work really hard. There's just such a high number of students that need that support, and the number of counselors just doesn't really meet that level of support."

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Dr. Victoria Grinman, a psychotherapist and owner of a private practice called Growing Kind Minds who also works with college students, told Fox News Digital that "colleges across the board are seeing mental health crises, unfortunate things happening and people struggling."

"So I don't think that it's necessarily just about Ivy League institutions. But we also have to be aware that when … a teen is entering into an Ivy League institution, there are some expectations and standards that differ. And with those standards comes a lot of self-expectations," she said.

None of the eight traditional Ivy League schools — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — responded to Fox News Digital's request for student death data between 2020 and the present, or what resources they offer students experiencing mental health crises.

At Dartmouth University, two students were found dead in the Connecticut River last year; one of those student’s deaths has been attributed to a hazing incident. The university also saw four student deaths in 2021. 

Following the two 2024 deaths of students, both of whom were Asian, now-graduates Daniel Lin and Deborah Jang penned an op-ed for The Dartmouth criticizing the school’s response to the two tragedies as racist.

"A symptom of this invisible racism is that we ourselves become invisible — to others and to ourselves," they wrote. "...There was no lasting public discussion on the racialization of the two deaths. It’s not lost on us that two Asian students died in three months. The College could have named this; they could have made an effort to reach out to the Asian community. This reality leaves me feeling like these conversations can only happen behind closed doors, mostly among Asian students."

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The authors added that "Dartmouth does not have even the bare minimum support for Asian students."

Last year, two Cornell University students were found on the same day in the Fall Creek Gorge, one of whom died while the other was hospitalized. The university saw a string of suicides around 2010, and one victim’s father sued Cornell for negligence by not implementing appropriate suicide prevention measures related to the numerous bridges in the Ithaca, New York, area. He accepted a $100,000 settlement from the city in 2014, according to The Ithaca Journal.

"These bridges and adjacent cliffs have developed an iconic status for suicide due to multiple jumping suicides among enrolled Cornell students and other individuals," a summary of a 2024 case study reads. "Cornell University and the City of Ithaca have a unique challenge where multiple bridges and gorges collectively had become a ‘hotspot’ for suicide."

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Yale recently faced a lawsuit following the 2021 suicide of first-year student Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum accusing the university of discriminating against students with disabilities because it required students on mental health leaves to withdraw from Yale and reapply, according to The New York Times. Yale has since changed its policies.

Back in 2017, Columbia University saw a string of seven suicides between September and January of that year, as The New York Post reported at the time.

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Grinman noted that the college experience has changed drastically in recent years, "especially with social media and just what it's become."

"It's a place where people are actually launching into the next phase of development," Grinman said. "Everybody, even if they don't know what they want to do in college, they want to go to college because they want to have the college experience. It's where kids are starting their lives, right? They're learning how to live on their own, how to be in social groups, how to do things on their own. So it's a very, very sensitive time," she said.

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Students who may have been "big fish in a small pond" in high school may find that’s not the case at a prestigious institution, "and there is some angst around comparison," she explained.

Ellis suggested more colleges and universities should offer "early intervention" resources, targeting mental health concerns before they develop into self-harm or suicidal ideation.

"If the universities could help facilitate these dialogues and make it less of a taboo to have mental health struggles, and then even maybe some systems in place for screening so that they're able to help these students earlier on so it doesn't get so intense that the students are just failing out of school or even engaging in really harmful behaviors," she said.

The eight Ivy League schools received a total of $6.4 billion in federal funding in 2024. Financial statements from Columbia University show that it received $1.3 billion in federal funding; the University of Pennsylvania received $1.8 billion and Yale University received $898.7 million during 2024. 

Not far behind were Cornell University, receiving $825.5 million in fiscal year 2024, and Harvard University, which received $686.5 million. Princeton University took in $455 million, Brown University reported "more than $254 million" and, according to USA Spending, Dartmouth received $141.9 million in 2024.

The funds that universities receive from the federal government are often in the form of grants and used for research and development, facility and administrative costs and student aid. The Trump administration has frozen billions in federal funding to colleges and universities that do not comply with the president's executive orders to protect Jewish students from hate and dismantle DEI policies.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Each of the eight total Ivy League schools have mental health resources ranging from counseling hotlines and centers to student-run support groups.

Suicide continues to be a leading cause of death within the United States, with 49,000 people dying by suicide in 2023, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Suicide rates increased 37% between 2000-2018 and decreased 5% between 2018-2020 before returning to their peak in 2022, according to the agency.

"I think one of the most important things is thinking about going back to the basics of, hey, if you know that Billy down the hall lives alone in an individual room and you haven't seen him in a day or two, he hasn't attended Psych 101 with you … knock on his door, ask, how are you? Can I get you something? Just going back to the basics of loving your neighbor," Grinman said.

Fox News Digital's Rachel del Guidice and Jacqliene Mangini contributed to this report.