The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be by Wendy Fischman & Howard Gardner

Author:Wendy Fischman & Howard Gardner [Fischman, Wendy & Gardner, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The same pattern holds true for most of the other major categories of academic rigor which students describe. For example, among students who talk about academic rigor, the second most frequent category is managing academic workload (21%)—both in terms of managing the work across an entire course load and just in an individual course. One student, aspiring to become an elementary school teacher, comments “I started having a little bit of anxiety from . . . the amount of workload that I had, and I felt like, everything was just, like, bundling up, so I would say that is the biggest issue.” A second student, majoring in natural science, says: “You know, sometimes school can be overwhelming. I feel like I am drowning. I don’t know if that is in the ‘anxiety department’ but it’s like, sometimes it becomes very stressful.”

Again, and notably, the school with the most students who comment on workload (33%) is one of the high-selectivity schools in our sample, whereas the school with the second most students who comment (32%) is one of the low-selectivity schools in our study. Moreover, of the two schools with students who comment the least about workload, one is a medium-selectivity school (4%), and the other is one of the low-selectivity schools in our sample (15%). Clearly, we can’t simply assume that the students with the most problems managing workload are the commuting students who often need to balance academic workload with off-campus responsibilities—such as taking care of families or juggling jobs while trying to find some free hours for study. Though these demands or constraints might be challenging for some students most of the time, or for many students some of the time, it is not necessarily what these students see or cite as the primary or most frequent cause of mental health issues.

In light of a third category of student comments about academic rigor, we are again motivated to check our assumptions. We refer here to compensating for, or overcoming, lack of preparation—not feeling ready for college-level work, or experiencing general difficulty with academics. A first-year student double majoring in biology and Spanish says: “I feel like a lot of people, when they come to [school], they don’t understand how demanding the academics are and get stressed out pretty easily.” Another student specifically describes readiness issues related to the transition to college: “Stress, because [first-year students who] are not fully transitioned, start stressing out . . . they start getting anxiety because, you know, they’re too scared to ask for help from anyone.”

Yet another surprise: One might predict that students who complain (or blame) lack of preparation for academic work may not have experienced high-quality secondary education—and that they are thus more likely to attend a college that is less selective. (Presumably it would be more difficult—though it’s clearly possible—to gain admission to a moderately selective or highly selective college without a good high school education.) But, in fact, we find a different pattern: the two schools with the

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