…are considering suicide.
I never considered suicide in college (or at any time in my life). I may have missed the signs, but I am unaware of anyone I knew who did so. But that was four decades ago. I think it’s a sign that too many young people are going to college. And they’re paying too damn much for it.
This isn’t something new. We had several suicides in our dorms. This was in the early 70s in a single year. I stopped paying attention to it after I moved out after the frosh year.
Frankly, from the stories I hear about the insane tyranny in US colleges these days, I’m amazed it’s only one in five.
One of my former high school classmates killed himself during our college years (early ’80s). I hadn’t known him in either school, and only had a couple of mutual acquaintances — one of whom told me about the suicide.
That’s literally the only college suicide story I have. Maybe I would have heard about more if I’d lived on campus or made an effort to be part of “campus life.” I was too busy trying to pass my courses.
Furthermore, 20 percent of all students surveyed thought about suicide, 9 percent had attempted suicide, and nearly 20 percent injured themselves.
What is with these studies and always coming up with 20%? I’m skeptical.
Texas A&M has 68,000 students enrolled, which is close to the study number. 20% would be 13,600 students and then they claim 9%, which is 6,120 students attempted suicide. I’m not sure what to make up of the 20% injured themselves, because the sentence is so ambiguous that I can’t tell if it is 20% of the entire population or of the 9%. It seems odd that half as many people would have attempted suicide to those that were successful at harming themselves.
Let’s try 20% think, 9% of those consider, 20% of the 9 cause harm. That’s 245 students harming themselves in attempted suicides. Yet I can find only 1 story of a suicide in 2017 for Texas A&M and so far this year 2018 , only 10 students have died of any cause at Texas A&M.
According to a state of Texas survey, only 3.4% of Texans over age 18 contemplated suicide. If college is 5 times more stressful as just being alive, then I think the college system is doing it wrong. Heck, I told my children that college was their last chance to try things and fail at them with the parents willing to help bail you out. There shouldn’t be that much stress.
Leland, your parenting style seems to be in the minority these days.
There seem to be plenty of parents nowadays who demand nothing but valedictorian status from their child, even while being okay with “participation trophies” (how they can live in that sort of cognitive dissonance is beyond me).
There also seem to be plenty of parents who are so out-of-touch with their children and their childrens’ needs that the kids put that level of pressure and expectation on themselves absent any direction from their parents (again, how an otherwise “helicopter parent” can be completely oblivious to their child’s needs and their child’s perception of expectations is beyond me, but it seems to happen).
If and when I’m blessed with children, I can only hope that I don’t make the same mistakes of which I accuse others. I also hope that any parent who loses a child to suicide due to this sort of pressure doesn’t take that upon themselves any harder than they need to.
Thanks Johnny. The interesting thing to me is that my children academically performed better in college than in grade school. They’re only stress was dealing with roommates/suite mates, which I told them was part of the college experience that prepared them for the work environment and functioning in society. The good news, they only had to deal with those people for a semester or maybe a year. Outside college, they would have to deal with such people for years on end.
College is a high pressure cult-like environment that really does screw with your head. I’m not entirely being hyperbolic here.
These institutions hold the keys to any sort of future a young person could hope for (Justifiably or not. Unless you make it into a trade, your fate is something akin to slavery without their credential.) And boy do professors/deans/bursars know it!
In addition to their sparing and uncertain approval being one hurdle needed to get out and get a life, they also have the entire moral authority of our culture behind them. We all value education, right? Being an uneducated waste of society’s resources is the kiss of death, right? And what they demand from kids is impossible. “You’d better be the next Edison or Einstein. They’re the only people we need. Anything that has been done before is being done in China.”
And this is if you pick a reasonable STEM major that is ‘in demand’. You can get in line at a career fair that wraps around the block to talk to a few dozen companies about a few dozen positions, and get informed that you need to apply to their ATS as your resume is thrown in the trash.
I’d almost say that the modern college experience is an exercise in enduring a brainwashing session intended to break your spirit, foster, and prey on insecurity.
I’m not surprised that a lot of kids in that meat-grinder are suicidal.
Well, the places I went were unforgiving and somewhat high-pressure. When I see some of the people who go to the top top schools, who have to save the world before they’re washed up has-beens at 19, in between being the president of half a dozen clubs achieving records in every measure of human achievement, I may have gotten off easy.
I don’t know about random-major at random-u.