The Other Infrastructure: Building Universities from a Student Welfare Lens

A university is judged by its ranking, star faculty, extracurriculars, and placements. In reality though, it is lived elsewhere - in the late 2 a.m. walks around campus, the movie nights crammed in a hostel room, in WhatsApp groups and Instagram threads where conversations can get polarized and sometimes cruel, and in the week before the exam when students stop coming to class. This second university, the one built by student behaviour, culture and welfare, has long been an administrative afterthought in Indian higher education. Increasingly though, it is becoming the critical piece that determines whether the first one succeeds at all.

After Expansion, the Harder Work

The shift towards student welfare is no longer a post-pandemic accommodation; it is now both a legal and regulatory obligation. India recorded nearly 13,900 student suicides in 2023 alone. In 2023, the Education Ministry also reported that 13,626 marginalized students had dropped out of educational institutions over five years. The question looming in front of higher education leaders is whether they understand student life and student welfare well enough to manage it.

Students in India’s high schools believe they are being trained to pass exams, not to live. A 2026 study by education consultancy Jetri found that 37% students feel that school prepares them to score well in exams, and 27% feel it prepares them for college. Fewer than one in five students (17%) say school prepares them socially and emotionally for life’s challenges, and barely one in ten (11%) feel prepared for a career. That leaves universities to do in four or five years what schools failed to do in twelve: turn out graduates who are ready for work and equipped for adult life.

Digital Natives are Still Developing Minds

Every year, our campuses welcome undergraduate students who are mostly between 17 and 19 years; developmental neuroscience will tell you that their brains are still a work in progress. The prefrontal cortex governs planning, impulse control and emotional regulation, and it keeps maturing into the mid-twenties. The reward system, by contrast, peaks in late adolescence and draws young people towards novelty and risk, especially when peers are watching. At this age, peer acceptance can feel like everything, and social exclusion registers with unusual intensity. Social media taps directly into this vulnerability: research shows that adolescents are more likely to “like” risky content simply because it appears popular. A first-year student may reason like an adult in a seminar. At midnight, behind the wheel of a friend’s brother’s car, the brain’s accelerator still outpaces its brakes.

The amygdala, which is the brain’s alarm system, is still strengthening the connection to the prefrontal cortex through the late teens and twenties. A poor grade, a breakup or  losing a friend group can feel more overwhelming and permanent than it is. Irregular hostel routines and exam-season all-nighters erode sleep, which weakens emotional control further. Studies also report that nearly half of all mental health conditions are likely to show up before the age of 18, and close to two-thirds before 25.

Universities enroll young people precisely within that window, and tend to treat them either as children to be policed, or as adults left to fend for themselves. For many Indian parents, a child leaving home for university is both a milestone and a worry. They naturally want to know how they are doing, down to the last semester’s grades. Students, as new adults shaping their independent lives, want some breathing room, and ideally would rather their parents not know about their backlogs. The student’s need for room to grow is as real as the parent’s need to know. That is not to say that the capacity for good judgment does not exist in a first-year student, but it may be fragile under stress, emotion and peer pressure.

Seen this way, the most useful way to build effective policies is through understanding student behaviour: what students do, why they do it, and how institutional design can make harm less likely.

From Compliance to Culture

India’s student mental health picture has moved from editorial concern to judicial supervision in under two years, following the Supreme Court guidelines in 2025. By May 2027, all educational institutions will have to be in full compliance with the DPDP Rules 2025, with the informed consent of 18+ years old data principals ruling what information gets shared with their parents. University administrators are expected to build policies and systems that work for all stakeholders, systems that respect student autonomy while keeping families informed when there is real risk. The expectation from courts, regulators and parents is now clear: institutions must identify distress early, respond with care, and document what they did.

Beyond the Checklist

Predictably, the new mandates risk becoming another checklist for universities to tick off – an on-campus counsellor, a published mental health policy, an annual psychological first aid webinar. But compliance is the floor. What our institutions need now is a culture that changes student outcomes, proactive instead of reactive. The attendance and assessment norms need not necessarily change, nor does your promotion policy or the disciplinary code. The work needs to go elsewhere, and will need everyone, from leadership to students, wardens, and faculty, to build the safety net of student welfare model. Three shifts matter most.

Data that measures early warning signs. Drops in attendance and grades will trigger a conversation in most places. Data that looks satisfactory is harder to detect. The student who scrapes past the minimum attendance threshold semester after semester – is that disengagement, an attendance strategy, or something deeper. Or the one who studies until 7 a.m. and attends class at 8:30 a.m., sleeping through the evening. That circadian rhythm serves her academic load, but not her social life on campus. Deciding which signals matter, and which can be captured in a system, is among the hardest design questions institutions face.

A trained and coordinated frontline. Counsellors on campuses are essential, but they will rarely be the first to see a student. Wardens, housekeeping or cafeteria staff, security personnel, programme coordinators and faculty do. They notice the student who has skipped meals three days running, or the one whose room has become unusually unkempt. Yet they are often the least trained and least supported in the welfare chain. Stretched across hectic duty shifts, maintenance complaints and understaffing, they have little bandwidth for emotional crises. When they burn out, the institution loses its earliest warning system. Adequate staffing and shared duty models are necessary so that welfare is not dependent on a small group of exhausted persons.

Trauma informed teaching. Faculty belong in this chain too. Over the past decade, colleagues have often told me how ill-equipped they feel to help students when a student comes to their office to talk about a parent’s divorce or childhood sexual abuse. A PhD training does not necessarily build emotional intelligence, and many faculty feel that such support lies outside their role. That may be fair, but classrooms have changed irreversibly since we millennials sat in them. Ready or not, emotional intelligence sits alongside subject expertise in every teacher’s toolkit.

While this may help students with personal issues, what about the challenges that come with the regular task of teaching the curriculum? Good pedagogy should allow for discomfort in the classroom, it pushes students to think critically, look at different perspectives, understand the world around them, and make informed choices on beliefs. Students carry real anxieties into the classrooms today, as they face an uncertain job market reshaped by economic strain and AI, and a world whose politics shape both their prospects and identities. Leading a classroom while holding space for their fears, dissent and emotions that discussions on economy, politics, or crimes will stir up is one of the delicate challenges that most faculty navigate every day.

For decades, Indian higher education has spent time and money perfecting the visible university: curricula, ranking, faculty profiles, and research output. That era is being displaced by a new priority – the behavioural, safety and welfare dimension that Courts have now made enforceable, and therefore visible and judged. It is time for institutions to work on scalable response systems, peer norms and institutional signals. Courts have made the second university visible. Institutions now have to build it on purpose.

I have spent nearly 12 years in Indian academia, as a faculty member in forensic psychology and in senior academic leadership. Views expressed here are personal.