I think a lot of this stems from the “cradle to college” notion where children are quite literally raised from birth to attend a top-25 school. That, coupled with helicopter parents who refuse to let their children experience failure before they jump the nest, is primarily to blame for this, IMO. Setting up impossible standards from birth only serves to make kids fall harder when they get their first C in college. If it sounds like I’m putting a lot of blame on parents…well, I am. I see this a lot in my WASP-y, upper middle class community- parents who simultaneously push their children towards Harvard and Yale starting in middle school while also blaming the teacher when their kid receives a poor grade or lashing out at the coach when their kid isn’t good enough for varsity. Kids should know that perfection is impossible, failure is healthy, and that it’s a-okay to be perfectly imperfect. Just my two cents.
I agree, that kids should know that it is ok to fail. However, it seems in Madison Holleran’s case, (the Penn student mentioned by the author of the article linked at the beginning of this thread) the pressure for perfection and success came from within. She was a two sport athlete in HS, so I think was naturally competitive. She was the one who wanted to go to Penn. And she had everything (looks, smarts, athleticism) and was doing well from all outward appearances. She just didn’t perceive it that way, and didn’t seem to believe her friends who confessed their own struggles in college. There was a family history of depression. The dad actually wanted to pull her out and not have her return there once he learned she was struggling, but she convinced her parents she’d be fine (but meanwhile had already put her plan in place). Here’s another article about her:
Of course people need to weigh the pros and cons of trying to get into these elite schools. If it compromises things that you don’t want to compromise and can’t live with that, then don’t pursue it. But in life people have to sacrifice for what they perceive to be the better choice. For me, attending the best medical school possible, becoming the best doctor I can be, and then helping make my mark in medicine for the betterment of society is more important than the best social life possible. Not everyone has to think the way I do and indeed many don’t. For many, the best social life and living in the moment for the “college experience” outweighs academics. My advice to this High Schooler was to realize that if he does want to attend these elite schools he will need to sacrifice and prioritize his time. Obviously being able to do everything is the best possible scenario but if thats not possible, you need to focus on the most important things ,namely academics, for entrance to the best of the best.
“There are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going”
And, on the hand,
“The journey is the reward”
I don’t know the causes of these suicides, or whether suicides are more prevalent now or more prevalent on college campuses or whatever. Thankfully, suicides are rare enough that each one is pretty much sui generis and I don’t know that we can conclude anything generally from them.
But I do know that if you are in a situation where you are working your tail off with no end in sight, you will get depressed. Kids today are so caught up in this game of striving all through highschool for the prize of the elite college admission, then they get to college and find that it isn’t over and they have to keep struggling for new prizes (coveted internships, job offers). Then by the time they graduate they are often so used to this – it’s the only way they know how to live – that they keep on doing it, for job promotions and other external rewards and eventually, I suppose, for their own kids’ similarly empty prizes.
Or, maybe the continual striving for new bragging rights and new shiny trophies isn’t enough. Maybe one day they wake up and say “wait a minute, what the hell am I doing this for? Who signed me up for this? I’m not actually enjoying my life, how did this happen?” That’s when they fall into depression, stop going to classes, never leave their dorm room, and eventually drop out of school.
I don’t know which depressed me more, @anon9362’s post clearly showing that she’s working herself to death not because she actually enjoys the process but because she feels like she has to do it or be a failure, or the follow-up posts giving her different advice but all geared towards that same empty prize of the “elite college” admission. The only way to win this game is not to play. Be like Triss in the movie Divergent and see past the panic-inducing simulations of birds attacking you or water drowning you, and say “this isn’t real.” You don’t have to play this game – it will not actually make you happier or a better person or anything at all worth having.
What gets me is that these are the kids (not just those posting in this thread, but those all over CC) who are already winners in life. They are smart enough, driven enough, talented enough to be successful in life. They don’t have to nearly kill themselves in order to be the best – they are not in danger of never having a job that will pay the bills.
So my advice to @anon9362 and everyone else who’s in her shoes, is to ask yourselves, “What brings me joy? What replenishes me? What do I get so caught up in that I forget to measure how well I’m doing and I just enjoy the moment?” Whatever that is, make it a priority. I don’t mean you have to quit doing homework and do nothing but go to yoga classes or whatever. But make time for it in your life, nurture it, don’t push it out of the way in order to do some stupid EC that you think will get you into Harvard. And if you can’t think of anything in your life that fits that description, then that is a real problem and you need to clear things off your schedule to make enough time and headspace to find out what it is.
I hope your daughter will get to visit Mount Holyoke while doing the northeast tour of colleges. It is a wonderful school with a world class faculty and student body. It features a very supportive environment as well as a gorgeous campus designed by the firm of Frederick Law Olmstead, who designed Central Park in NYC. While a native Hawaiian may not be enamored of this possibility, Mount Holyoke students may go skiing at nearby Mt. Tom
One of my friends has a daughter who graduated from Penn this year. After listening to her tales of her college life, including a harrowing experience while studying in France under the auspices of Penn, I am convinced she would have had a much better college experience at Mount Holyoke. For someone who is put off by the thought of graduating with a cast of thousands, a small, liberal arts school is the way to go.
Oh yes, I should mention that the Mount Holyoke Lunar Howling Society reportedly meets every full moon to bay in honor of wolves across the world. Founded in 1988 by two Mount Holyoke students, the organization’s main mission is to relieve stress, but it also connects members with howling societies around the world. Now that’s what I call stress relief! There are other Mount Holyoke traditions that are just as much fun.
As Blossom, Rhandco and others have said, the data do NOT support that suicide rates are rising among college-aged kids. The rates have been pretty consistent since the 1970s. Not sure there is any evidence to support the idea that under-counting is more rampant now than it was in the past.
There may also be more kids diagnosed with mental health issues in affluent families, who can afford to pay a typically out of network psychiatrist to diagnose and treat a kid. That doesn’t mean that poor kids don’t have the same (if not worse) issues, but are not identified.
There is enormous pressure on top students to achieve at high levels. Some of it is from parents, but much is self-imposed. I have friends who actively try to reduce the pressure on their kids (mostly daughters) with little success. But there is much more pressure, perhaps of a different sort, on kids living in poverty, or with no option for their future.
True depression is a biological illness. Unfortunately, there is no accurate way to predict which kids with depression will commit suicide - whether in college or out. It is such a tragedy and it is made even worse when parents are blamed for an action they often have little control over and could not see coming.
Scientists are working on identifying blood markers for depression. Hopefully there will be a breakthrough in the next few years.
This doesn’t really add much (to the higher level of discussion here on CC), but here’s a follow-up article, with comments from NYT readers:
It is noteworthy that the original article is currently the most read and most e-mailed article on the NYT website.
I remember an article in the Washington Post not too long ago about the number of millennials in counseling and “emerging adulthood.” I’ve linked it below for anyone who wants to skim through it, but it follows @momofthreeboys 's train of thought about “Peter Pan children.”
As a millennial, albeit a kid from a pretty laid-back family, I absolutely understand where this stress comes from, and it’s being pushed on the younger and younger. My friend attempted suicide in eighth grade due to school stress. And you can observe this phenomenon in your very home: College Confidential is the perfect petri dish of stress on stress. The Chance threads for Ivies are all variations on a theme: a laundry list of impressive-looking activities, exhaustive course schedules, near perfect scores, and tangible stress. People put their 3.8 GPAs under “Weaknesses,” curse their ethnicities, and overall fear being washed away in the torrent of similar applications.
But despite all of this, we’ll continue to observe without change. Hundreds of articles about suicide are published each year, yet the suicide rate remains steady. There doesn’t seem to be a good solution, considering the increasingly competitive nature of postsecondary education. It seems as much a societal as a parental problem to me.
@mom2and It is important to note the difference between depression and suicidal depression. Suicide is an escape, either to free yourself from pain you feel or to free those you love from the perceived burden you place on them. Plenty of depressed people are not suicidal.
There are often signs before a suicide attempt. Generally a suicidal person will get their affairs in order, expressing their love for family and friends if not outright saying goodbye.
Unfortunately mental illness is a lot of guesswork and pattern analysis. We don’t understand our own mental faculties, so while we can recognize that both biological and environmental influences affect mental health, there is currently no possible way to understand the breadth of either. Everyone is unique, and so too are their minds, so diagnosing mental health is quite difficult; we group common symptoms together under a broad label like “anxiety” or “depression” despite the great variance between two cases of the same illness. Thus there is no “true depression”; “depression” is simply the label we’ve applied to symptoms that commonly coincide.
EDIT: Fixed spacing issues.
It seems that there has been quite an effort regarding suicide awareness and prevention. But how effective has any of it really been? This is an interesting report. http://www.sprc.org/sites/sprc.org/files/library/ChartingTheFuture_Fullbook.pdf
@CTTC That is very interesting. Thank you for the link! I can honestly say that suicide has been demystified so much even in my lifetime. Newspapers have shunted it to front page articles, and countless organizations exist to spread awareness. But despite all of this, suicide (and mental illness in general) is still stigmatized. A physical illness is thought of as something beyond your control, but a mental illness is thought of as a lack of restraint or self-control, something you should be able to do but don’t. Perhaps these are just my observations. What are yours?
I am relieved that depression and suicidal thoughts are beginning to be discussed openly on at least this campus and perhaps others. I have been advocating for such “coming out” since the Minna Sandmeier case at Stanford many years ago. (I have done directly so, with students, beginning with those who knew Minna.)
I think there are many, many things that comprise the category of “mental illness”…some of which can be managed or remedied with therapy alone and some that can be managed with drugs or drugs and therapy. Some mental illnesses don’t even manifest themselves until the early adult years (like bi-polar etc.) Some people with mental illnesses that can impact their lives can’t or won’t acknowledge they have a mental illness (OCD and eating disorders come to mind) and some families want desperately to believe that mental illness in a family member is a phase, or “an age” or will “pass” with a change of venue. You see this sometimes with families of bright kids with issues. “Readiness” for college is almost entirely discussed in terms of academic readiness but there are other factors that should be included when discussing whether one’s young adult is “ready for college.”
Not sure what data you are referring to, but one needs to be be careful about using the CDC data to infer what is happening within the sub population of kids who actually attend college - as opposed to the entire population of college-aged kids.
To provide context, here is some history:
College suicide has been a concern for a long time - the first analysis (that I know of) was performed after a cluster of college suicides in 1927.
The “college age” suicide rate increased by about 3x from 1950 to 1990.
http://www.nacacnet.org/research/KnowledgeCenter/Documents/Marketplace/jca222CollegeCanBeKilling.pdf
According to the CDC data, the aggregate suicide rate (for ages 10-24) appears to be dropping from 1994 until about 2008, then trending slightly upward.
BUT, if one drills down into the data, one sees that from 1994 to 2012 there was a rather disturbing 3x increase in the suicide rate of females by suffocation that has been masked by a reduction in suicide rate by gunshot.
Since suicide by gunshot is not common in the college going sub population (due to lack of access to firearms), it is entirely possible that the suicide rate among women actually attending college has increased measurably. The same phenomenon has also occurred with men, but it is less dramatic. (see the graphs in the following link). This could offer an explanation for what appears to be an inconsistency between what appears to be happening at colleges and the CDC data.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/841058
Here is some data on suicide in grades 9-12 (which is less common than at the college age) which shows that successful suicides are but the tip of the “mental health” ice burg:
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicide-datasheet-a.pdf
I think it is more productive to assume we have problem and try to better understand it than to assume we don’t have a problem based on a superficial analysis of the data.
Is there data which separates the suicides at the allegedly pressure cooker elite colleges vs. the directional state U’s or open enrollment colleges?
I’m pushing back on the idea that it’s Princeton’s fault when/if the suicide rate among 18-24 year olds increases. The statistics I’ve seen suggest that depression and other mental illnesses are equal opportunity diseases which afflict both the “elites” (for lack of a better world) and the plebes. The premise of this thread is that the insane competition to get into (and stay in) elite universities is causing a suicide crisis among our young people. And if that data exists- I’d love to see it.
Pick up a newspaper in any small town in the US and read the very sad story of the kid commuting to community college in Kentucky who committed suicide. An unfathomable tragedy. But the notion that the pressure to get into U Penn is somehow causal… well like I said, let’s see the data.
So is Penn the new Cornell?
The prevalence of mental illnesses may not have changed much. But early detection is often a way to prevent problems from aggravating.
On the one hand, there are just not enough CS grads from elite schools to go around. These will fan out across the spectrum of IT employers.
On the other hand, outsourcing is only expected to continue. What jobs will remain after outsourcing has taken its toll will go to elite school graduates first, should MOOC-based certificates be rejected by employers. Outsourcing will only compound the problem.
@blossom- This is a complex issue, I posted some school level data recently on another thread, I would be curious what people’s thoughts are…
In the past, schools either have not been keeping track of the data or have not been comfortable making it public.
There was a study done on the Big Ten plus U Chicago over the course of the 80’s that showed a wide range of suicide rates (about 5x) between the highest and lowest schools, but did not name the individual schools.
The school that has provided the most data has been MIT which has been tracking the issue since the 60’s. During the 80’s MIT had a higher rate than any of the schools tracked in the “Big Ten +” study.
From other data sources, it appears that UMich and UIUC were toward the bottom of the range of the “Big Ten+” schools. I have seen mention of Northwestern’s rate being high, but have seen no actual data.
MIT also quoted a study from 1936-1961 that determined that MIT, Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley had similar suicide rates.
In a Boston Globe study of 12 colleges over the course of the 90’s of the five names made public MIT was at the top at 4 times the rate of UMichigan. Harvard and Johns Hopkins were noted as being above the majority of schools followed by Cornell.
This year, the Boston Globe initiated another study, but so far only four schools have responded with data. Others (including Cornell) have said they are working on it. In this study both MIT and Harvard separated the data for undergrads and grads and Harvard’s current undergrad rate is pretty close to MIT’s. WPI and BC have also supplied data and they are about a factor of 10 lower than MIT and Harvard. Let’s hope that more schools actually follow through and provide data.
There is some data available on William & Mary. but it is expressed in absolute numbers rather than a rate. If you compare it to BC (which is about the same size) there is a very big difference in the absolute numbers.
Over the past 40 years, MIT has implemented a number of programs to attempt to reduce the rate (including making freshman year grading pass/fail) but it is hard to tell if the programs are working because of the relatively small number of events and the tendency of the events to cluster. The rate has been coming down, but that may be due (at least in part) to the fact that MIT is now enrolling more women, who have a lower suicide rate than men.
I have long ago accepted that I will always be a failure as I am not mentally or physically capable of reaching the levels of perfection required by society (and I graduated from an elite school). I stopped caring, and when people try to get me to do things or ask why I haven’t done/ achieved this or that, I just tell them I am a failure. Then of course they say no, if you just do this you won’t be! But that’s not true, there will always be another hurdle to jump. It’s a race I cannot win. In work I just do enough to pay the bills. Outside of work I just do what makes me happy. Otherwise I will end up having a heart attack or in a secure hospital.
I do think this issue with college students may be linked to costs. If students are taking out large loans they are under a LOT of pressure to do very well academically because they need a high paying job to pay the loans back and/or to prevent the loans becoming a burden to their family. Also, if students have financial aid, this may well be linked to maintaining a very high GPA, which adds to the stress. Remember that the students and parents on CC are not a representative sample. They are MUCH wealthier than average. I have no safety net. If I lose my job, I will lose my home and end up on the streets. Many others feel this pressure (it’s not new).
The idea of doing any EC which they have a “passion” for is completely alien to 99.9% of US high school students! They don’t even know what that means. They do whatever will meet their passion for admittance into college. It’s never about enjoyment. It’s always about being the best, winning awards and putting in an excessive number of hours, in order to impress admissions.