About 20 percent of college students have weighed suicide, according to a study by researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Using data from the American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment, which surveys 67,000 undergraduate students from across the nation, the researchers also found that 1 in 4 students suffered from a mental health disorder in the prior year.
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Cindy Liu, the lead author of the paper, said in an interview with the Boston Globe that “pressure to achieve” is one of the reasons for this trend. Liu applauds the destigmatization of mental health issues and the rise in mental health awareness on college campuses. But she fails to acknowledge one major factor.
Students are forced into the “college track” because of the aforementioned pressure to achieve — pressure from their parents, teachers, counselors, and other mentors. Yet if there is one statistic that proves that college isn’t right for everyone, it’s that only 54.8 percent of students actually graduate. The rest drop out.
Young people are told that college is the only path to career success and are diverted from other avenues like apprenticeships, internships, and trade schools, which can sometimes be just as lucrative — and also less expensive. The study blames several types of traumatic or difficult events for this increase in stress, one of which is finances. The average student loan debt for the Class of 2017 was $39,400.
To make matters worse, many students are largely unprepared to face the stresses of college.
In an interview with the Boston Globe, professor Sarah Lipson of Boston University said she believes students today are less resilient. Millennials have long been called the “snowflake generation,” but this trend has continued through Generation Z. Lipson argues that the parents of today’s college students protected their children from adversity and failure, rendering them weak in the face of problems and disappointments. She challenges college campuses to help build resilience in their student body — a call that tends to fall on deaf ears. Many campuses have shut down some speech as a way to protect their students from ideas they find “offensive” rather than building a more confident student body through the open exchange of ideas.
Mental health issues are a serious and life-threatening epidemic for college students, but unless we dive deeper into the underlying causes, they will only become more prevalent.
Brendan Pringle (@BrendanPringle) is a freelance journalist in California. He is a National Journalism Center graduate and formerly served as a development officer for Young America’s Foundation at the Reagan Ranch.
