Excerpted from “The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be” by Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2022.
Along with our research team, we spent five years visiting ten disparate campuses, carrying out over two thousand intensive, semi-structured interviews. On each campus we interviewed approximately fifty incoming students and fifty graduating students, and smaller numbers of faculty, senior administrators, trustees, young alums, parents, and job recruiters. … Across all participants, nearly half (44%) rank mental health as the most important problem on campus — one of the few agreements among all participants. Put another way, each constituency group in our study — first-year students, graduating students, faculty, administrators, parents, trustees, young alums — ranks mental health as the biggest problem on the college campus. This alignment — among students at different stages, faculty and administrators who are on campus, as well as trustees, young alums, and parents who are off campus — is notable; indeed, it does not obtain with respect to any of the more than three dozen other questions in our interview protocol.
Academic Rigor: The Most Commonly Cited Cause
Across all students in our study, the most common explanation (52% of all student-reported causes) about why mental health is the most important problem on campus is academic rigor — the “pressure” of academics. Indeed, we also find that students describe this pressure as what “keeps them up at night.” But what exactly is the pressure? Is it about learning difficult content? Or preparing for exams or writing papers? Or building a favorable transcript to get a job or get into graduate school? Or (reminiscent of response options on school admissions exams) “all of the above”?
Perhaps not surprisingly at this moment in history, when students discuss academic pressure as a cause of mental health, the most frequent explanation focuses on achieving external measures of success-securing a high grade-point average, or “doing well” on an assignment or an exam (51%). For example, a first-year student majoring in communications explains: “I know a lot of kids who … get super stressed out over grades and they get really anxious about it … like intense people make like, ‘You have to have a good GPA, you have to have As and stuff.’ And so, like people get really stressed out over that.” A graduating student in the midst of applying to graduate programs describes needing to perform: “I think, you just want to have a good grade in the class because it’s one step forward to your degree, right? It’s one step forward to being [on] the honor roll … Am I gonna graduate? Am I gonna graduate with honors? And like, you know, like, will I get into a good graduate school?”
Interestingly and importantly, these concerns with the external markers of success are the most common descriptors for academic rigor at every campus – from most to least selective. For example, of the three schools with the most students who comment on external measures of success, two schools are high-selectivity campuses in our sample (67% and 60%), and the other school is one of the low-selectivity campuses in our sample (63%). On the other hand, of the three schools with the fewest students who comment about external measures of success, two schools are medium-selectivity campuses (45% and 40%) and the other school is one of the high-selectivity campuses in our sample (45%). In other words, student stress with respect to academic rigor pervades every campus, regardless of its selectivity. Therefore, we can’t – and shouldn’t –presume that students at the most selective institutions feel more pressure than do students at other schools – nor that the faculty at these selective institutions apply more pressure than faculty at other schools. Students at all schools report stress with respect to “doing well.”
