Students Stressed? You're Kidding!

Why should students get stressed? They're up in that elite ivory tower, removed from the troubles of the world! AP:

College kids are so frazzled they can't sleep or eat. Or study. Good grief, they're even anxious about spring break.

Most students in U.S. colleges are just plain stressed out, from everyday worries about grades and relationships to darker thoughts of suicide, according to a poll of undergraduates from coast to coast. The survey was conducted for The Associated Press and mtvU, a television network available at many colleges and universities.

Four in 10 students say they endure stress often. Nearly one if five say they feel it all or most of the time.
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Even so, the survey shows plenty of sources of stress, led by the seven in 10 students who attribute it to schoolwork and grades. Financial problems are close behind, while relationships and dating, family problems and extracurricular activities all are named by half as adding pressure.

College women have a more stressful existence than men, with 45 percent of females and 34 percent of males saying they face pressure often. The youngest students cite frequent stress most often. Whites report more stress than blacks and Hispanics.

From schoolwork to dating, women are likelier than men to say they experience pressure from virtually every potential source of distress in the survey. Six in 10 women and just four in 10 men say family issues cause problems, though the differences between the sexes in most areas are slimmer.

So let's see. Students are thrown into an unfamiliar setting, right out of a high school experience that leaves most hobbled and insecure, charged exorbitant amounts of money, and are then numerically evaluated by professors in freshman classes that are almost always large and overcrowded. Sure, there's more "freedom," but it's supermarket freedom: being forced to choose between monetized goods (technically "services") with very little information about them, and being resigned to be unable to create your own alternative. It's always a question of what is taught, but never how.

What's interesting is how often students blame themselves for this stress, or at the very most blame a course or professor. This is where the student left needs to inject itself in the conversation. Explain that education -- or better yet, learning -- should not be a stressful thing. The sheer combustibility of the student population around exam time should not be seen as the sum of our individual faults, but as yet another example of a faulty system. It's what the stressing pre-med student has in common with the computer science major, or the French major, or the sociology major. Such a fundamentally-shared oppression is exactly what campus ne'er-do-wells should be organizing around and against.

We should recast ourselves as grade abolitionists, as tuition abolitionists, and as partisans for participatory, democratically-run institutions of learning.