Mental Health Issues among College Students Essay Example

Your high school teachers are not lying when they claim that college is nothing like high school. Since the first day of school, I have been on a steep learning curve as a college student. I have learned that academics are the focus and not your well-being or social life. I worked my tail off on my academics for the first two months of school. I studied every day, making sure to finish all of my assignments, and I left myself very little time to socialize. Those two months were the worst of my life. I was completely miserable; I cried nearly every day about my grades and studies, and I despised everything going on. This completely surprised me because I was a straight-A student in high school who worked and had a social life. Of course, I had put pressure on myself throughout high school, but nothing in those four years prepared me for the level of academic burden that others, including myself, would place on college students. This brings attention to the mental health issue afflicting many college campuses, exacerbated by the pressures of being a high achiever. As college students continue to struggle in silence with their mental health, the national suicide rate of college students continues to rise to almost 11%, according to Governors State University in Chicago's Southland. The student support systems on campus can only help so much when, academically, the universities are not doing anything to prevent the continual deterioration of students' mental health. Limiting homework and creating an environment where mental health and knowledge take precedence over a letter grade are the best ways to address the university's rising mental health crisis.

The purpose of college is to continue your education in the desired field to make sure that you know everything that you could ask at a job one day. But unfortunately, it is no longer serving such purposes. The sheer amount of assignments dwindles the students' drive and passion for many of the subjects. The amount of homework and the strict syllabi many college courses have to make assignments a game of what is most important. The answer should be all of them, but when you have 5-8 assignments due simultaneously, you have to pick and choose your battles. Many professors do not accept late work, or if they do, the assignment will receive a significant percentage of the total grade. With this in mind, many students will divide their effort and execution of the assignments amongst the homework rather than doing their best work on each assignment. This leads students to hunt and peck for the information necessary to complete the assignment rather than actually learn the material and truly understand it. Since professors often use homework as an indicator for class understanding, this creates a skewed result giving the teacher inaccurate information. This creates an issue for professors and students as they are not truly learning the material, which is reflected in their exams. Though many argue that homework is a great way for students to self-evaluate where they are with the class content, the lack of motivation caused by the absurd amount of work makes this inaccurate and can be more detrimental than helpful to the students. The general stress surrounding homework can lead to low efficacy levels in students. According to the APA, self-efficacy "refers to an individual's belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments" (Bandura, 1977, 1986, 1997). This low self-efficacy has been noted as an indicator of anxiety and depression in students. The cutthroat environment fostered in many classes and campuses creates a disconnect from knowledge and invites the decline of students' mental health. 

The academic stress placed on homework is the completion of the homework and the grade received on it. When looking at many Syllabi for college classes, homework is 20% of your final grade. With this in mind, it is fairly important to maintain a high homework score as a buffer for exam and quiz scores. With exams and quizzes in mind, homework scores should reflect the students' status on the content, but that is not always the case as they have so much homework they cannot perfect it all. Then the exams and quizzes come along, and you do not know the material. It will significantly affect your grade as exams hold a much higher weight than homework. Students have become so much more "grade oriented than knowledge-oriented" (Hargis). Being focused on only the final grade often drives students to overlook their health and well-being. As a result, many high achieving students have undiagnosed mental health issues because they are too busy dealing with them because of school. Since "Grades are a poor product to get from such a large effort," Hargis believes that alternatives to grades could be integrated into the American school system. These alternatives would be based on peer reflection, revisions, and constructive criticism from your professor. The argument surrounding this form of education is that there is no method to standardize it and track progress throughout a semester. Though it would be difficult to track progress, this form of grading would advocate for the students to truly absorb the knowledge from their classes and foster a less mentally draining environment in the classroom. 

The intense grading scale and the immense amount of homework given to college students implement the ideology that the only way to be successful and, in turn, happy in life is to have the best grades and to get a college degree so you can get the best job and make the most money. As students continue to overwork themselves to achieve the best possible grades, they earn a false sense of accomplishment that when they graduate blinds them to struggles, they will be encountering while on the hunt for a job. A student's success should not be measured by their academic ability, but rather the work ethic and perseverance that they learned through the difficult classes and failure throughout their college careers. My father did not graduate from college, yet he was still able to apply the knowledge he obtained in undergrad to his current position as a chemical engineer sales associate for Liquid Process Equipment in Kaukauna, Wi. This Company works with distributors such as Frito lays, Bush's Baked Beans, and many other well-known companies. This is only one example of how you can be successful without a college degree. This can also be seen with those who go into trade industries that require less schooling and more skills-based learning. This solidifies the idea that success is driven by "a higher level of self-planning, self-monitoring" rather than academics (Ileri). 

As a new college student, I have had a steep learning curve since arriving at school. I was not prepared for the continued mental strain that would be put on me at all times. If not by the instructor or parents, then by myself. The academic stress of college is nothing like I thought it would be, and high school did very little to help me prepare for it. Since being on campus, I have talked to a mental health professional once, but it was made very clear that they would only provide support for six sessions even though it was recommended that they seek additional support from the community. The academic stress that I have endured this year has been like none other, and I could not cope with the transition, which resulted in me dropping my math course. Through all of this change, the mental health struggle of students has been seriously brought to my attention now that I am directly affected by it. To help alleviate the society of praising academic validation, universities should make reasonable workloads, new grading methods, and a focus on knowledge and well-being rather than cramming all of the knowledge into your brain for the exam and then losing it.