The Mental Health of Our Students Must be Our Top Priority
As I write this I am reeling trying to comprehend how 7 students lost their lives on the UVA and U Idaho campuses last Sunday evening. It is just too much. My heart is with these families and campuses.
I just returned from our national organization IECA’s fall conference in San Diego. When a group of admissions directors was asked who are the highest-risk students, the answer was ALL OF THEM!
The Director of Admissions at Claremont McKenna College asked parents to please look at their children and ask themselves, “are they ready for a high-risk community?
On the college side, most places are now talking about how they have expanded mental health services on campus. The University of San Diego has brought in an outside, 24-hour telehealth counseling service to help. In addition to their existing wellness center, they also set up pop-up wellness centers around campus during particularly stressful times.
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Last Friday, this article came out in the Washington Post. It makes you question whether you want to attend a college like Yale. A similar report came out about Dartmouth earlier this fall. Last year Brown settled with the DOJ after they wrongfully denied readmissions to students on mental health leave. Maybe a question everyone should be asking is, what is the policy on mental health withdrawals at the campuses you are looking at? We will certainly add this to our question list as we are visiting colleges. Or more importantly what support is on these campuses so our young people do not feel the need to withdraw?
When this Yale article came out on Friday morning, we were riding the bus to the University of Redlands. A colleague spoke about his brilliant student who accepted her spot at Yale, only not to make it through the first year because the atmosphere was too intensely pressured. She is currently not attending college. When we visited the Claremont Colleges, a student tour guide explained the different campuses to me in this context. “We have the best lives at Scripps and Pitzer. CMC, their life is ok, Pomona is very stressful, and the Harvey Mudd kids have no life and do not sleep.” Coincidentally while all of these colleges are very selective, this is also almost the reverse order of how selective these colleges are. Scripps's 2002 acceptance rate was 30%, and Pomona and Harvey Mudd’s are in the single digits, with Pitzer and CMC in the middle. Are these super-selective colleges and the Ivy League really a golden ticket? Maybe yes, still for the student who thrives in an uber-competitive environment, but this decision NEEDS to be about FIT.
As a parent, the mental health stuff is so real that everyone, myself included, sometimes gets paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. We often become afraid to push our kids. That fear is real, rational, and scary. It takes away or modifies our ability to parent. That worries me, but at the same time, it also serves as a reminder to all of us that home should be a safe haven.
Please check out this short podcast from Kelly Corrigan on why she wishes she had not said the word college to her kids so much.