to explore and change the way higher education is run and financed.
This is where the student left needs to inject itself in the conversation. Explain that education -- or better yet, learning -- should not be an inherently stressful thing. The sheer combustibility of the student population around exam time should not be seen as the sum of our individual faults, but as yet another example of a faulty system. It's what the stressing pre-med student has in common with the computer science major, or the French major, or the sociology major. Such a fundamentally-shared oppression is exactly what campus ne'er-do-wells should be organizing around and against.
We should recast ourselves as grade abolitionists, as tuition abolitionists, and as partisans for participatory, democratically-run institutions of learning.
College students are stressed. Really, they are. They can't eat, they can't sleep, they have trouble concentrating and are sometimes irritable. An Associated Press and mtvU survey found that four in 10 students say they often feel stressd. Almost one in five said they feel stressed all the time. One in five has been too stressed to complete schoolwork or be with friends. Twenty percent also contemplated dropping out of school.
The study also goes into percentage of students with a mental health disorder (13 percent) and whether they stick to their treatment plan (about two-thirds).
On the upside, six in 10 reported that they are usually hopeful and are enjoying life.
One of the students quoted summed it up best:
"Everything is being piled on at once," said Chris Curran, a junior at the Albany College of Pharmacy in Albany, N.Y. He said he has learned to cope better since starting school. "You just get really agitated and anxious. Then you start procrastinating, and it all piles up."
Most of my stress came down to poor time management, too.
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This is where the student left needs to inject itself in the conversation. Explain that education -- or better yet, learning -- should not be an inherently stressful thing. The sheer combustibility of the student population around exam time should not be seen as the sum of our individual faults, but as yet another example of a faulty system. It's what the stressing pre-med student has in common with the computer science major, or the French major, or the sociology major. Such a fundamentally-shared oppression is exactly what campus ne'er-do-wells should be organizing around and against.
We should recast ourselves as grade abolitionists, as tuition abolitionists, and as partisans for participatory, democratically-run institutions of learning.