by Maggie Groetsch
On November 20, Rachel Stigall sat in front of her open binder working on her latest math packet at her college’s nearby cafe named The Library. “Of course I’m working on math when I have an American Government quiz in 2 hours,” she confessed to me. Stigall was contemplating whether she was going to go take her quiz or begin her Thanksgiving break early and take a zero for the quiz, she said, before grabbing her wallet out of her backpack. Dressed in a black puffer vest paired with a sweater and jeans, Stigall stood tall and confident as she tucked her shoulder-length blond hair behind her ear and ordered her afternoon coffee. The barista, dressed in yoga pants with her hair in a dark low bun, was already making Stigall’s drink before she started her order. The barista slid the black coffee to Stigall and told her the total, a process that appeared well rehearsed between the two. “I come here every Tuesday and Thursday after my 8 am class and have breakfast with my mom, or really I come here anytime I can in between classes” said Stigall.
Stigall, a first-year at Mars Hill University, a liberal arts school in Mars Hill, North Carolina, said she had always struggled with sadness and frustration in high school, but when she began college her conditions escalated. “After the first few weeks of my college career, I went to the doctor because it was just getting too overwhelming. I was having three to four panic attacks a day and longer episodes of depression.” Stigall said that in the beginning the semester it felt like there were too many massive changes happening all at once, one major change being that she went to a nearby college but many of her friends were hours away at their universities. She had a new job to fit into her schedule, a large workload that came with her intended major and had fewer people around her to talk to.
After the first weeks of college Stigall started taking medication for her depression, switched her major to undecided, changed three of her classes, and began journaling. “I see other kids stressing about low grades and I just want to tell them ‘go with it!’”Stigall was told in her first-year orientation that the average US first-year as well as first-year at Mars Hill University averaged B and C grades at the end of the year. “I keep that in mind ‘OK I’m learning and I can learn from my failures”. Stigall continued, “I got a 30 on my first American Government quiz… next quiz an 80, so that’s my new baseline.” Stigall decided to take her next quiz that afternoon. She called me to say she earned a 90 percent.
Marica Thom-Kaley is in her first year as Dean of Students at a small liberal arts college in rural Virginia called Sweet Briar College. Thom-Kaley is tall and lean and wore reading glasses that she used to push back her hair as she answered phone calls in between our talk. When the phone rang Thom-Kaley darted around her office, fitted with a large desk and a sitting area, complete with pastel cushioned chairs and a large white couch positioned under a window overlooking the campus.
Thom-Kaley said that technology is partially responsible for less stigma surrounding the treatment of mental health, but it has come at a cost. “I never had to think about the things that are constantly on our students’ minds,” Thom-Kaley said in her office. Thom-Kaley explained that information is more readily available now and with that comes a constant stream of news, good and bad. This means that students are constantly exposed to and aware of the problems that face their communities and beyond. “No wonder kids are scared and stressed out; they have to think about themselves but also a million other problems.” Thom-Kaley continued, “granted, our generation maybe should have been more concerned, but these were not ever things that occupied my mind as a young adult and certainly not constantly reminded of.”
Students need to feel like they’re succeeding all the time with quantifiable results or they feel like they are failures, Thom-Kaley has observed. “Colleges need to teach students how to not be so concerned with the little things” Thom-Kaley sighed. Students, Thom-Kaley explained, are often so focused on succeeding that they are too afraid to fail.“It’s not about never failing; it’s about teaching students how to take those failures, feel the pain, and learn from it.” Thom-Kaley’s job, she explained, is to help students find the resources they need to succeed, and that covers all aspects of their life. “ We want to meet our students where they are at and then teach them how to deal with their problems.”
Thom-Kaley said that often times students are not prepared for the failures that come with college. “They might feel like they are not prepared for class so they decide to skip one, and then one somehow turns into two, and then they are embarrassed or even afraid to show up to the third class”. Thom-Kaley’s office phone rang, and she promptly got up to answer it. With briskness, Thom-Kaley replied to the phone, “tell your daughter she needs to stop freaking out,” Thom-Kaley said matter-of-factly yet kindly, “she can come to our office right now even and either I can or someone else will be able to help her”.
“Everybody put your participation trophies down because author Jonathan Haidt has some news for you: We’ve been coddling Generation Z their whole lives,” reads the description of a Life Hacker video titled: “This Social Psychologist Explains What’s Wrong With College Campuses Today”. In the video, Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at New York University, suggests that “Generation Z” has been so coddled by their parents that the separation that comes with college has spiked rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Generation Z, those born after 1995, have developed what Haidt calls “moral dependence” from too much adult supervision and involvement. Haidt explains that college campuses are supposed to the place where students are exposed to things that are provocative and upsetting but that students should not react by thinking these things are dangerous but instead as right or wrong. Haidt said that this change occurred on college campuses around 2012-2013. A comment on the video by user “blah blah blah” wrote, “I’ve been teaching college kids since 2010 and I will say that overall they seem less prepared for everything than previous generations, let alone the critical thinking and independence mentioned in this video… In higher ed, this has lead to a realization that more attention needs to be paid to support services in addition to degree content.” MonkeyT2 replied, “I know many who bash Generation Z’s work ethic. They are the same ones who are first to comment that the hallways in the elementary school they attended are smaller than they used to be.”
“You can always fool yourself into seeing a decline if you compare bleeding headlines of the present with rose-tinted images of the past,” Ted Talk speaker Steven Pinker said. Pinker, dressed in a fitted blue button down with a head of curly white hair, looked like the modern-day, well groomed and well dressed Albert Einstein. Pinker, a professor of cognitive science, has written sixteen published books about language, the mind, and human nature. In a 2018 Ted Talk titled: “Is the world getting better or worse? A look at the numbers”, Pinker argued that despite the overwhelming amount of media saying otherwise, the world is actually safer than it appears. “Indeed, we’ve become safer in just about every way. Over the last century, we’ve become 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car crash, 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job, 89 percent less likely to be killed by an act of God, such as a drought, flood, wildfire, storm, volcano, landslide, earthquake or meteor strike, presumably not because God has become less angry with us but because of improvements in the resilience of our infrastructure,” Pinker smiled. “And what about the quintessential act of God, the projectile hurled by Zeus himself? Yes, we are 97 percent less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning,” Pinker laughed. “And how has this fact been covered in the news?” Pinker asked his audience. “A tabulation of positive and negative emotion words in news stories has shown that during the decades in which humanity has gotten healthier, wealthier, wiser, safer and happier, the “New York Times” has become increasingly morose and the world’s broadcasts to have gotten steadily glummer.”
Why, then, do parents feel the overwhelming need to protect their children; and children feel all the more anxious? “News is about stuff that happens, not stuff that doesn’t happen,” Pinker explained. “You never see a journalist who says, ‘I’m reporting live from a country that has been at peace for 40 years,’ or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists.” Also, bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day. The papers could have run the headline, “137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday” every day for the last 25 years. That’s one and a quarter billion people leaving poverty behind, but you never read about it.” Pinker stressed that while is it important to acknowledge suffering and danger when it occurs, it is even more important to show how it can be, and has been, reduced. Pinker repeated that the greatest danger of our pessimism toward progress is fatalism. “Problems are inevitable and solutions create new problems which have to be solved in their turn.”
“We live in an age of outrage,” Haidt said. “Students say they feel like they’re walking through a minefield,” Haidt suggests that all colleges should teach students cognitive behavioral therapy in their first-year orientation to help them learn critical thinking skills as well as ways to question distorted thoughts. The Life Hacker video ended with Haidt’s words echoing in my thoughts, “we all have to take it down a notch, admit that we don’t know everything, grant that the other side is probably morally motivated as well, and just go in with good faith.” Stigall feels like the problems are inescapable. “If something happened in school it used to be contained to there but now it follows you on your phone.” As for safety, Stigall said in high school she used to worry whenever there was a lockdown drill that there was a school shooting but does not have the same fears now. While in college Stigall feels physically safe, emotionally she feels fragile. Stigall said, “I want a professor to be able to recognize when I need help and reach out to me. I want to know it’s okay.”