Life is meaningless?

[Bullitt]

for people to believe life is 'a meaningless existential hell' is pretty extreme though. It comes across to me as suggesting there's no meaning in anything and that life is hell.

I think we should keep in mind that this seems a canned response, a survey answer choice. The students weren't saying that life is a meaningless existential hell, they were just >50% in agreement with the statement presented to them by the testers.