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Crushed by Cornell

ARE STUDENTS UNDER MORE PRESSURE THAN EVER?

THE STUDENT WALKS INTO MY WRITING CLASS LOOKING listless and sheepish. He has been absent (and silent) for two weeks, and owes me a project. He shrugs and says, “Sorry, just hit a wall.”

This happens every semester, but especially in the spring and especially with seniors. Yet this is different from regular “senioritis”—it runs deeper. Some of these students are phantoms, never knowing what is going on, while others start strong and then vanish. A few quit school entirely, a few weeks before graduation. Cornell’s intensity and pace have chewed them up.

It’s an old story, but lately things seem worse. I hear about depression, tension with housemates, parents laid off or demanding high grades, the job search crushing the soul. Sometimes there is just an empty desk. While I am supposed to tend to my patch of academe— planning classes, grading work, lecturing—I am not supposed to care too much, just enough, the administration tells me, to be vigilant.

But I ask questions.

Is this generation overwhelmed by more work than previous ones, or just weak? Did these students float too easily through high school, protected by their parents and teachers, only to collide with Ivy League demands? Do they run to a counselor where I would have toughed it out?

One student says this generation has more pressure and distractions than mine did, but another snorts that it’s all a mindset: complain about your work while you watch the ballgame.

Numbers provide a hint. The Cornell Police say requests to transport students to mental health facilities climbed from 46 in 1993 to 73 in 2002. Campus counseling and psychological services staff report a steady rise in clients served from 1,772 in 1995–96 to 2,160 in 2002–03, of whom 2,115 were students. Their ills are familiar—depression, anxiety, family problems, academic worries—but the numbers keep growing. Medical leaves of absence granted for mental health reasons more than doubled over the past eight years, to 121.

One academic advisor told me that students come to college now with more mental and medical problems, sometimes because improved treatments allow them to attend when they could not have before.Many have suffered from depression, eating disorders, and other afflictions since high school; some have medical histories that go back to elementary school.

Answering the workload question proves elusive. Students say they battle to juggle everything, especially the group projects at the semester’s end. Older alumni scoff that they had Saturday classes and survived, but one colleague, who has taught here for thirty years, doesn’t doubt that the demands are greater since more group work has been added. Another colleague says that if faculty assign more work now (he’s not convinced we do), it’s to combat grade inflation. Expect an A for what used to be B work? Earn it.

Students’ obsession with grades makes them frantic. They come to our offices to negotiate, offer excuses, demand answers, and tell us they need an A for medical school or cum laude honors. Their parents want A’s or, they believe, their potential employers do. And the quest for a job often leaves seniors in despair, as they seek the reward after years of laboring for their Cornell degree—and barely get interviews, let alone job offers.

So, as I look at my listless senior and ponder what to do, I wonder if I am being a softie or an understanding teacher. I wonder about his future, and where all of this is taking us.

— Scott Conroe, MPS ’98
Lecturer, Department of Communication
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

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