Stress levels: Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon?

College Search & Selection
1

These three schools I’ve heard bad things about stress levels, mental health, and work-life balance–but I’m sure that at any school you will be able to find extremely stressed out students. **Also to be clear–“stress” is expected, but a cutthroat environment, poor mental health services, and overall lack of a supportive culture shouldn’t be!

Can anyone compare/contrast them in those aspects, and also to schools of a similar caliber? Is ___ more “stressful” than ____? Are all of these schools “stressful”? Are all of these schools “stressful” but no more so than most schools?

2

Stress is a self induced issue, if you believe that a high stress environment is not good for you than you should look elsewhere. You would probably want to look at Brown over other ivies since they have a reputation for grade inflation which can relieve stress from poor grades for some people.

3

For Cornell, you’re probably referring to the myth that lots of people commit suicide by jumping into the gorges that surround campus. I visited campus this summer, and there are catch nets underneath the bridges. I think the Cornell suicide myth stems from the fact that it is located near some pretty gnarly gorges that a few people probably jumped into at one point or another. However, I’m pretty sure Cornell doesn’t have a crazy high suicide rate; people at other schools just go about it in less dramatic ways. It’s also important to remember that most schools now have mental health counseling centers if you are ever feeling a bit off.

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4

Columbia has the core and has a bit of a serious academic bent. I suspect most kids there work hard. On the bright side, if you need to cut loose for an evening, you’re in one of the best places in the world for mirthful galavanting. It’s freaking New York City; live a little.

Cornell apparently has been known to suffer some dreary winters. I know what cold and damp and blowing snow and freezing rain – combined with short days – can do, having grown up in northern Wisconsin and lived on campus in Madison (on an isthmus – windy) and in the Windy City itself. It can suck. On the bright side, think of all the cool outdoor winter activities in which you can take part. And nothing hits the spot like that first beer at a party after you’ve walked half a mile, across campus, through rough weather… or a mug of hot apple cider or cocoa if beer isn’t your thing.

CMU is not the prettiest campus in the world, and a lot of kids there are studying CS or Engineering – two areas that are hard everywhere. On the bright side, if you like sports, you’re in a pretty awesome town. A bit one-note in terms of the team colors, but they are fairly successful teams. And the hills and rivers are not awful in terms of scenery, imo. And the sandwiches come with fries on them. Awesome!

Yes these schools are known for hard work and stress. But they’re also known for awesome academics (across the board for Columbia and Cornell and at least in CS/Eng/Biz/Arts at CMU) and each offers ways to cut loose when the stress does mount.

5

Ignore the username…

I’m a current student at Columbia and the stress culture is absolutely exaggerated. I am less stressed here than I was throughout my entire high school career.

6

All of these schools have “stressful” environments. Columbia has wonderful academics. But the school lacks a strong sense of community and administrators and professors are not available for “hand-holding.” Cornell, unlike Columbia, is huge and you must be someone who can find your place there. Comments above about CMU seem right, but I’ve studied at both Columbia and Cornell, not CMU. There are so many great schools that foster collaborative, rather than cut-throat, student academic and social life, and also offer a greater sense of community than any of these schools. It sounds like you need to widen your search or revise your search criteria to find them.

7

Actually, I disagree with the premise of your statement:

I know somebody, whose job is considered by most people to be extremely stressful, who likes to say “it’s only stress if you aren’t having fun”

What people consider ‘fun’ (or stressful) is highly individual. @worriestoomuch point about understanding yourself and the environments in which you thrive is the key, and the rest of the quote give some hints as to where that fits for you:

“cut-throat environment” gets thrown around a lot, but is actually not a helpful phrase, and the tag rarely holds up. A lot of schools with that reputation are not seen that way by most of their students, b/c they thrive in the intensely demanding environment, where they have to push themselves to do their best- and they like that. As the Irish say, it’s a question of ‘horses for courses’: you have to run the horse on the right type of course for it.

“poor mental health services” is a judgement: what I think is a perfectly reasonable level of service for a university service may differ from what you think- and typically what will make the difference is whether they have what I want/need when I want/need it. So, define for you what “good” mental health services are, and then you can ask more specific questions (how long to get an appointment, for example, or what types of services are offered)

“supportive culture” is again a judgement that is very individual. Do you mean that teachers are open and welcoming when you come for academic help? do you mean that students are friendly and reach out to support classmates? do you mean that the administration has a lot of support structures that make it hard to fail? There are colleges that are closer to the High School Musical song & dance number “we’re all in this together”, but none of the three schools you list are like that. Some schools seem to appeal to more, hmmm, self-contained? students, others to more, hmmm, social? students.

All three of the schools you list have a lot of highly focused, self-motivated students. It sounds as if you might be happier at an LAC where there is more emphasis on (for lack of a better word) pastoral care. The Colleges That Change Lives group comes to mind, but there are many others.

8

The post by @collegemom3717 is very eloquent and helpful. I only disagree with the point above that “cut-throat environment” is a “tag that doesn’t hold up.” I’ve taught at a variety of top universities and colleges, and there really are significant differences between them with respect to “collaborative” vs. “cut-throat” student culture. In some schools, students tear out pages of reserve materials to keep other students from accessing course material. By contrast, other schools have students who pool scarce financial resources to cover the astronomically-high costs of textbooks and then share them. “Fit” matters a lot (to student academic and social success), and campus cultures vary widely across US colleges. Finding where you “fit” will make all the difference between having an intellectually and socailly stimulating, versus, stressful, college experience.

9

I agree with the earlier comment that stress is self-induced. The issue with schools like this is that everyone who is admitted was in the top 5-10% of their classes and when they get to one of these schools someone has to be only average or below average for the first time in their lives. That can be hard for some to deal with. If you can deal with being “average” among an elite group, you should have no problem.

10

My son is at CMU. He thinks it is about the same, in terms of pressure, as his very competitive private HS was. He stated to me he may have an advantage over other students because he has “experienced failure” previously (that may be an exaggeration, but he has gotten B’s in part owing to serious health issues). Also he is taking an academic overload, which he also always did in HS, in order to pursue musical interests as well as a non-musical major.

For my son, the biggest challenge so far at CMU has been staying healthy – but then, he has a chronic health condition that “flared” once he was away from home. I will comment that the mediocre food service at CMU has not helped matters. They definitely have room for improvement in that area.

Many years ago, when I was at U of Mich., I noticed that the engineering majors felt under much more pressure then us liberal arts people. So I agree with other posters who note that the pressure may be major specific. Also it may depend on the type of person you are. I was never one to study much, even while pursuing my doctorate.

11

@psycholing off topic but my son’s friend is at CMU playing football and the biggest complaint has been food! Very few options and practice time seems to be around dinner and there aren’t many options! I was surprised to hear that.

12

@NJWrestlingmom Yes, chorus is also during the dinner block, so mine often can’t get meals, and he has a medical need to keep up his weight. This block dining system at CMU has to go…

OK – sorry for the tangent-- back to pressure…

I wanted to mention that of my friend’s children who have transferred out of school because of pressure, it has been places like Carleton (poor weather, high stress) that have come up over places like CMU or Columbia. This is not to malign Carleton – I know brilliant people who have attended with very successful outcomes. I just think at Columbia or CMU there is a lot more room to explore and outlets for social growth than at small, isolated LACs.

13

@ski_racer -

Why do you think they added the nets?

How is jumping into a gorge more “spectacular” than jumping off a tall building in New York City?

The suicide issue in colleges is real, but complex. Denial/cover-up only makes it worse and harder to understand.

Cornell had a suicide issue. Initially they denied it, using misguided statistics and the “spectacular” rational.

Then they owned up to it and started taking preventative measures (including the installation of nets).
Due to the nature of the problem, it takes a long time to figure out if a change has had a positive impact, but it appears that Cornell’s various initiatives are working.

I would rather see Cornell held up as an example of a school that appears to be having success curbing the problem rather than as a school that never had the problem. Maybe others would follow.

My kudos to Cornell for stepping up and trying to do something about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_gorge_suicides

14

The nets were installed to break the momentum of an anomolous “suicide cluster”. Which it did, thank goodness.

They clearly were having an issue then.

Such a cluster can develop when publicity about the events may inspire “fellow travelers”. to do likewise. Unfortunately many of these events are very public. Witnesses may see it happen, people see emergency units in the gorge, and it becomes front page headlines there. If someone hangs themselves in a dorm room (to be maudlin, sorry) a college can hush it up. That doesn’t work when somebody jumps in full view into a gorge that is public property.

As the linked article in #12 indicates, there were no incidents at all the four years that preceded it.

They weren’t having an issue those years, it would seem.

There were other events over the years too. Plenty of them. It was a known “thing”. They did put up barriers on a bridge when I was there, following one such incident (and its related lawsuit threat)… But the incidents were not in sufficient rates and numbers and concentration like that cluster was, as to cause them to do more. As that article indicates the long tem rate of such events there is not above average.

Clearly they needed to stop the cluster, and anything they can do to further reduce these incidents to even further below the national average is laudable. The difficulty for the community there is that the gorges, and the views from them, are a highlight of being there ( witness the t-shirt slogan “Ithaca is Gorges”); a material quality of life enhancement to those who are not inclined to jump into them.
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-times-article-sheds-light-on-suicide-clusters-at-americas-top-colleges-2015-7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

15

re: the OP, my guess is the stress levels and work balance is similarly bad in the sciences and engineering at all three schools, similarly unbalanced in other areas at Cornell* and Columbia, but maybe a little easier in those “other” areas at CMU.
*Although I have to say I have never personally encountered a stressed Hotelie. Outside of an exam week.

Based on my college search with D1, the situation seems to me to be pretty much the same at most other comparably- reputed institutions with comparably capable students.

For one recent direct comparable, D2 took humanities classes at Cornell and Columbia and said that the level and expectations were the same.

16

I don’t, and the research on stress doesn’t either. Some people are more prone to stress than others, yes, and some people may do things that make their lives more instead of less stressful. But there are definitely external factors that contribute to a stressful environment, and some universities manage this in their student body better than others.

And the stress isn’t always due to the shock of being below-average for the first time, although that does contribute. I worked in student services at one of these universities and it was more like the competitive nature of the student body encouraged this kind of behavior and thinking no matter where in the pack you resided.

A lot of times students will say that their environment is not “cut-throat” because it’s sometimes difficult to tell what is a cut-throat/competitive/toxic environment when you’re in it, especially for college. If you’re a college student who has never been anywhere else, what comparison do you even have? I wouldn’t go by the tags that students use to describe their university but rather the features of the experience they’ve talked about. I’ve talked to tons of Columbia students about their mental health; while most of them loved Columbia and wouldn’t want to leave, most also acknowledged that it is a very stressful place with quite competitive students. (And there’s lots of research on why someone might say they like something when they really don’t.)

Also, “poor mental health services” actually does have an objective definition. I mean, yes, there’s a certain level over which perception is subjective, but you could say that about anything (a “tall” building, “good” professors, “top” school). That doesn’t mean that we can’t objectively compare or comment on mental health services at different universities or that some universities don’t have categorically bad services. If there aren’t enough counselors per student; if the wait time for an appointment is several weeks or months; if the students generally don’t feel helped by the counselors; if the clinic doesn’t stage proactive programs or encourage student engagement and instead wait for the students to come to them; if the professors don’t feel comfortable referring students to the clinic; if mental health isn’t appropriately woven into several aspects of student life at the university? These are all hallmarks of a “not good” mental health services program at a university, and they’re issues that will affect EVERY student at a university, even if they think they will never use the services (and even if they are right).

17

I can speak anecdotally about Cornell. My son is a stem major in his second year. Stress for him is manageable and usually peaks during finals. I noticed both times he came home (winter and summer breaks) he had bad acne from stress which cleared up after a week at home. Other than that his life there is fine. He’s got a good group of friends, a handle on his schedule (he’s a varsity athlete) and learned he can tolerate the long dreary winter (we’re from SoCal). It helps that he’s part of a faith based community as well.

At the end of last school year I read an article about an engineering student who went missing around 2am during finals. Last seen in engineering building taking a break from studying. Sadly, he was found dead a few days later in one of the gorges (the update said cause of death was not determined and I never followed up with it). This year one of my son’s acquaintances already withdrew from Cornell due to stress.

You never know what each student is going through and how they perceive their circumstances. I know my son has a lot of faith, grit and persistence and that’s helped him get through stressful times. I think he’s honed the skill of compartmentalizing tough times in a way that helps him work through it and come out the other side stronger.

18

@CALSmom makes the core point: on person’s overwhelming ‘stress’ is another person’s tough but manageable is another person’s satisfying challenge.

In the end, paying attention to what works for you- rather than reflexively going for the shiniest name, is your best bet.

19

I’m a current CMU student. The amount of stress I’m under is unbearable. I’ve developed severe depression since coming to the university. I don’t feel like I’m getting anything valuable out of my experience relative to the amount of stress I’m under.

20

@ellie1965 - Your health and sense of well-being are more important than anything else, and you deserve all the help and support that the CMU mental health services and outside therapists or psychiatrists can provide. Make an appointment with health series immediately. You are not alone. With appropriate medical and therapeutic support you can learn how to manage your stress and make college a more fulfilling experience.