Written by: Khanak Soni, Garima Rajan
University students today seem more connected, more competitive, and more accomplished than ever before. You open LinkedIn for like five minutes, and it almost becomes impossible to avoid posts announcing internships, research publications, some kind of leadership roles, exchange programs, and academic awards. Achievement has become something people want to show off rather than just experience, especially in modern academic culture, and success is no longer experienced privately. It is curated, displayed and constantly compared.
But beneath this ambitious culture, there is an odd contradiction: many high-achieving students secretly feel like they do not deserve their success.
A student gets a really excellent grade but immediately starts telling themselves the paper was just easy like anyone could do it. Another is praised by a professor but they assume that the compliment was exaggerated, and maybe they actually didn’t actually mean what it sounded like.
Someone else lands a prestigious internship and spends weeks feeling as if the company recruited the wrong person, or that they don’t deserve to be there. Even with all the visible wins and accomplishments, many students quietly have this fear that eventually everyone around them will realise that they are not as intelligent or capable as they appear.
Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first identified this pattern in 1978, calling it the “Imposter Phenomenon,” a psychological experience where people struggle to internalise their achievements and persistently fear being exposed as “frauds” or a deceitful person.
Even though imposter syndrome is often described as an issue of low confidence, its increasing prevalence among students implies that the problem may extend beyond the individual. The academic environment itself may be reinforcing these feelings. (Clance & Imes, 1978)
The Rise of Imposter Syndrome
Universities now run on constant evaluation. Students aren’t only assessed by grades , but also through placements, internships, networking opportunities, leadership positions, extracurricular activities, and even social visibility. There is always another benchmark waiting to be accomplished.
As a result, achievement starts to lose its emotional meaning. Success no longer feels rewarding, it feels relieving, because achievements are quickly replaced by newer expectations. Hence, students begin chasing productivity not for satisfaction, but to avoid falling behind.
Social media intensifies this pressure further. On platforms such as LinkedIn, achievement has transformed into public performance, where carefully curated “success stories” dominate students’ screens everyday. While these posts seem motivational, there’s still this quieter downside, which creates endless opportunities for comparison. Students begin to feel as if everyone around them is accomplishing more, progressing faster, and handling the university life with greater confidence.
This “culture of comparison” creates a space where students rarely feel secure in their own abilities. Self-worth becomes linked to visible productivity, while the rest begins to feel like its undeserved. Consequently, many students experience the constant feeling that they’re never doing enough, regardless of how much they’ve already accomplished.
The Psychological Impact
One of the most damaging aspects of imposter syndrome is what psychologists call “achievement discounting”. Students experiencing imposter feelings often reject evidence of their own success. Good grades turn into pure luck. Compliments turn into pity. Opportunities become accidents rather than reflections of real competence.
Ironically, the students who seem the most successful externally are often the ones struggling the most internally. The highest-achieving students tend to put an enormous amount of pressure on themselves, because they fear that failure will expose them as incapable. Instead of feeling relieved after succeeding, they become anxious about maintaining the image of competence they believe others expect from them .
This creates an exhausting cycle. Students overwork themselves to prove they’re worthy and deserving constantly, but when success finally arrives, they refuse to accept that they earned it. Hence, achievement stops feeling rewarding and instead turns into a temporary relief from feelings of inadequacy.
Burnout, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion have consequently become normalised within academic spaces. Pulling all-nighters, functioning under extreme stress, and basically sacrificing their mental well-being are treated as symbols of ambition rather than warning signs. Universities reward performance, but rarely create environments where the students feel emotionally secure enough to acknowledge their accomplishments. (Mullangi & Jagsi, 2019)
Academic Culture and Identity
Imposter syndrome is frequently framed as a personal psychological issue, but this perspective ignores the role of academic institutions’ play in reinforcing these emotions. Universities encourage competition from the moment students enter the campus. The ranking systems, selective opportunities, and constant comparison reinforces the idea that self worth must be continuously earned. (Sonnak & Towell, 2001)
For first generation students, minority students, and students from highly competitive family environments, these pressures can get even more intense. A lot of people experience what is called a “stereotype threat”, where a mistake or failure feels larger than the individual self. A mistake does not feel personal; it feels like you are confirming stereotypes about ones’ background, intelligence, or capability. (Peteet et al., 2015)
Educational institutions usually celebrate excellence without teaching students how to emotionally process their success. Students learn how to achieve, but not necessarily how to feel deserving of achievement. Correspondingly, many students graduate with very impressive resumes, while continuing to carry feelings of intellectual fraudulence into their professional lives.
At the same time , universities continue offering generic talks about “stress management” without addressing the systems contributing to the environmental and institutional factors and emotional struggles. Productivity workshops and wellness seminars might help a little bit, but they can’t fully fix a problem rooted in cultures of perfectionism and relentless achievement. (Feenstra et al., 2020)
Conclusion
The solution isn’t to eliminate ambition or competition entirely. Accomplishment and challenge remain important aspects of education. However, there needs to be greater awareness about the emotional consequences of academic culture.
Students today are constantly encouraged to become more productive, employable, and accomplished, but little attention is given to emotional security, belonging, or self-worth independent of achievement. In environments where students mostly feel valued primarily for what they produce, feelings of inadequacy become almost unavoidable.
Maybe the real issue is not that students are incapable, unintelligent or fraudulent. Maybe the issue is that they are trying to survive systems that continuously condition them to believe they are never enough, no matter how much they try.
References
Caselman, T. D., Self, P. A., & Self, A. L. (2006). Adolescent attributes contributing to the imposter phenomenon. Journal of Adolescence, 29(3), 395–405. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2005.07.003
Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psycnet.apa.org. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1979-26502-001
Cokley, K., Smith, L., & Bernard, D. (2017). APA PsycNet. Psycnet.apa.org. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-09930-002
Feenstra, S., Begeny, C. T., Ryan, M. K., Rink, F. A., Stoker, J. I., & Jordan, J. (2020). Contextualizing the impostor “syndrome.” Frontiers in Psychology, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.575024
Mullangi, S., & Jagsi, R. (2019). Imposter Syndrome: Treat the Cause, Not the Symptom. JAMA, 322(5), 403. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2019.9788
Peteet, B. J., Montgomery, L., & Weekes, J. C. (2015). Predictors of Imposter Phenomenon among Talented Ethnic Minority Undergraduate Students. The Journal of Negro Education, 84(2), 175. https://doi.org/10.7709/jnegroeducation.84.2.0175
Sonnak, C., & Towell, T. (2001). The impostor phenomenon in British university students: Relationships between self-esteem, mental health, parental rearing style and socioeconomic status. Personality and Individual Differences, 31(6), 863–874. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0191-8869(00)00184-7
Khanak Soni is an undergraduate psychology student at FLAME University, Pune, and Garima Rajan is an assistant professor of psychology at the same university.