First-year college students have record-high levels of stress, according to the CIRP Freshman Survey, an annual survey of students starting college at four-year institutions. Fewer students are reporting above-average emotional health and more students than ever (twice as many female students than male students) report feeling ‘increasingly overwhelmed’ before entering college. 

I’m sad to say that this study does not surprise me. The spring semester at my college (where many students are the first in their family to attend college and major primarily in business, accounting, criminal justice, and education) began last week. Students are usually not too happy to be back in an overheated classroom in January after a long break, but I felt I sensed something different in the atmosphere. There were some empty chairs—a few students had told me back in December that they would not be returning, for financial reasons. More than a few had also told me about parents losing jobs or parents long without jobs. Many of my students work (part-time, though some so much that it sounds like they are really working full-time); some lost their jobs last semester, or are in desperate need of a job to help pay for textbooks and tuition.

The CIRP Freshman Survey

The survey is part of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), and is administered nationally by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Some findings:

51.9 percent of students reported that their emotional health was in the ‘highest 10 percent’ or ‘above average.’ This is a a drop of 3.4 percentage points from 2009 and an even more significant decline from the 63.6 percent who, in 1985, ‘placed themselves in those categories when self-ratings of emotional health were first measured’—though it should be kept in mind that stigma about  mental illness has lessened in the past two decades, resulting in more students being able to acknowledge that they have psychological issues, such as depression.

In the survey, more female students report feeling often ‘overwhelmed by all I had to do’ as high school seniors. And indeed, female students were far less likely to report high levels of emotional health than male students (45.9 percent versus 59.1 percent), though it is also the case that female students are more likely to identify themselves as having mental health issues than male students are. Nonetheless, even though students’ ‘perceived emotional health took a downturn,’ more students than ever before (71.2 percent) rate their academic abilities as ‘above average’ or in the ‘highest 10 percent.’ 

Further, more students than ever before (75.8 percent) rated their drive to achieve in the same terms of ’above average’ or in the ‘highest 10 percent.’ A January 26th New York Time article on the study quotes Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at Southern Oregon University:

“Students know their generation is likely to be less successful than their parents’, so they feel more pressure to succeed than in the past……These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.” 

That is, students feel that they have to do more (get a graduate degree, for instance) in order to achieve as much as their parents. An undergraduate degree on its own is no longer seen as enough for a secure economic future.

Indeed, the ‘challenging economic landscape continues to influence students’ college experiences,’ a summary of the study states. The proportion of students using loans to help pay for college is 53.1 percent, as high as ever (I know few students at my college who do not take out some sort of loan at some point in college to cover costs). And 73.4 percent of students reported receiving grants and scholarships, more than at any point since 2001.  These sobering figures are not surprising in light of some of the study’s other findings, which note that unemployment is on the rise for students’ parents: The percentage of students who report that their fathers were unemployed  is 4.9 percent, an all-time high;  the percentage reporting unemployed mothers (8.6 percent) has also increased.

So What Are We to Make of These Findings?

As the January 26th New York Times article states, campus counselors are seeing the CIRP survey as the ‘latest evidence of what they see every day in their offices — students who are depressed, under stress and using psychiatric medication, prescribed even before they came to college.’ Other studies have shown that today’s college students of all ages suffer from higher rates of mental illness.

Time magazine speculates that ‘social media sites like Facebook and Twitter seem to have made these comparisons even more harmful by providing the perfect venue through which people can perpetually present a perfect version of themselves.’ Sites like Facebook and Twitter mean that students are ‘on’ all the time and, it’s suggested, therefore feel compelled to show that they ‘have it together’ 24/7. I am Facebook ‘friends’ and a Twitter ‘follower’ for many of my students, and while I think that Time has a point, my own students seem to use these social media sites more to de-stress and to get support, based on the ‘wall updates’ and comments I’ve seen. 

It’s other forces, including the economy, that seem to be weighing down on today’s students. I don’t want to speculate too much but wonder if another of the study’s findings offers a clue about the increase in first-year college students’ stress. The study found that ‘record high numbers of students believe the chief benefit of college is that it increases earning power.’ Students, it seems, are thinking that the main point of college is the ‘end product’ of getting a higher-paying job. College then becomes not a time to explore and learn on one’s own; instead, it’s all about doing whatever it takes to earn a higher paycheck. Students are increasingly feeling that everything they do from the first hour of Freshman Orientation will have some bearing on their future earning power.

Has college become too much of an end itself?  Perhaps the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—in which Yale Law School professor Amy Chua describes the ’extreme parenting’ she practiced to raise her daughters, Sophia and Lulu, to be academic stars, musical prodigies (all the way to Carnegie Hall) and more—is symptomatic of the experiences of American children prior to getting too college. Are parents today increasingly and even overly focused on getting their kids into college, and therefore insisting that their kids be, well, academic superstars, musical prodigies, ultra-able athletes, professional-level singers? For children raised with such an imperative to be so successful as defined by external measures (awards and test scores), does college seem like a letdown after years of performing and competing in high school, with parents (mothers especially?) simultaneously egging them on, and coddling them?  Are first-year students suffering from anxiety all over again as they realize that their hard-won achievements in high school count for nothing and that they have to start all over again now that they’re in college?

Has the push to get students into college become so intense that, by the time students get there, they end up depressed and deflated and needing to recover from all the stress of just getting into college?

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