Steve Sailer writes: Something I’ve noticed over the decades is that depression and other non-psychotic mental troubles are fairly common among college students. And a lot of the hate hoaxes seem to have roots in emotional difficulties that are tied in with romantic disappointments, putting on weight, and flunking classes.
Jackie Coakley’s ever-evolving broken glass gang rape story about Haven Monahan at the U. of Virginia is a good example. She tended to crank up the story as a way to get out of taking finals, and then became a star of her therapy group for rape survivors by inventing outlandish details. Her self-therapy through lying made her something of a feminist star on campus.
Perhaps all this mental travail is inevitable at these ages and colleges don’t play a role one way or another. But has anybody studied, for instance, whether some kinds of college are worse for the mental health of some kinds of kids but not of other kinds? Or is that too touchy for universities to study?
For example, are all students happiest moving away to a four year college immediately upon graduation from high school (as is widely assumed by upper middle class Americans today). Or would some do better first living at home for an extra year or two and attending a local junior college? Is there some way to predict who?
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* Disappointed expectations can be very hard on the psyche. Telling kids whose 120 IQ puts them at or near the top of most of their high school classes they are amazing special flowers sets them up for disappointment when they, as a matter of statistics and college selectivity, will likely be average.
A lot of liberal arts colleges and big state universities are 60-65% female, so suddenly women who go there will see their relative sexual market position take a very sudden drop the moment they step on campus.
A slightly above average woman in the 60th percentile of attractiveness would get used to 60th percentile boyfriend in high school, but in a 60% female school, she’d be expected to only find a ugly 27th percentile boyfriend. And in a 65% female school she’d be stuck with a 10th percentile man, i.e. fat short and acne covered.
* Decades ago when Ranjeesh Baghwan(sp?) was out and about recruiting for his cult, he specifically targeted college students, the same with other cults – like the one that pestered people at airports. The reasoning according to people who studied cults was because for many this was their first time away from home, they were lonely and a bit scared, they wanted to make friends, etc. The cults exploited this vulnerability by befriending them and slowly guiding them into the cult.
The point is I guess is that these students are still kids in a lot of ways – at least according to neuroscience that men don’t fully mature cognitively until 28 or so. So they approach college the same way they approached high school(which is their only frame of reference unless they spent their teenage years extensively around adults, working) s0 most have a really screwed up reality orientation. So it leads to a lot of problems and stumbling on their part.
The other issue is that our society is swamped with electronic entertainment, kids born say 20 years ago were born immersed in it. They have no idea what life is like growing up without a cell phone, ipad, television that targets them as well as advertisers. Much of it has usurped the role of parents which is really bad. This is also not good for them in the least in terms of cognitive or behavioral development according to studies that are popping up. It’s worrying the researchers looking into it.
Drugs play a role given our society’s penchant for drugging the snot out of people for almost every issue. What is it, one in three are on psychotropics? I know it is a obscene number.
* Students are fragile because they’ve grown up in a bubble, a Nickelodeon world with bright colors and rounded corners, driven from place to place in air conditioned cars.
There’s also fashionable element. In the nineties books like Girl, Interrupted and Prozac Nation made mental illness trendy amongst a certain social set. It became a social marker, a sign that your family could afford a pointless degree and you could afford drugs. In a victim-worshipping climate, it also gives you instant victim status – “The patriarchy has upset my gyn/ecology”.
Many of the latest PC outrages have mental illness – or what used to be called hysteria – at their core. Jackie Coakley was obviously nuts. Bahar Mustafa, the London student who wanted to #killallwhitemen , actively campaigned citing her mental illness as a reason to elect her as student representative.
* I used to be a lecturer. These problems occur because we tell the students they are adults and treat them like children. Every silly and childish excuse is believed. Every other student’s grandmother mysteriously dies before finals – and then you meet them at the graduation ceremony. We encourage them to concoct mental illnesses.
If that brat at Yale had spoken to her company boss that way, she would have been fired. Note that she felt she had the right to abuse her teacher as if she was his boss and at the same time expected to be coddled like a baby.
When my gay father was 17, he was drafted into the air force. Most of his friends were killed. Saying I am to depressed to go on a bombing mission over Germany would have got you shot.
Another problem is that we do not know whether to treat them as customers or as students. They often feel that they have paid money and deserve a degree in return.
This, I am afraid, goes hand-in-hand with an expensive education. At school level the problem is solved because in the UK and NZ we have (or had) national exams called A-levels/NCEAs that are, at least partially, marked outside the school.
At university, the teacher and the marker are often one and the same. This problem is only partially offset by having outside markers from other universities come in to mark some of the scripts.
Maybe a solution would be to have university level exams set at a national level. This would make it easier to draw meaningful comparisons between the teaching quality at various universities with similar intakes.
It also has to be said, the quality of teaching is often terrible. Universities do not know whether they exist primarily to teach or for research. At the moment, you can get away with being a dreadful teacher if you have a tolerable research record.
Finally, we have the most intractable problem of all, PC. Many of the problems with university teaching could be solved by having national tests administered externally. The problem of PC would require a culture shift and I don’t see that happening any time soon.
* Was John McCain the first war hero called one for suffering rather than winning? Maybe that was the the start of it.
Trump got a lot of crap for his comments about McCain, but they struck a nerve because they contained an element of truth. McCain was a way station between Audie Murphy and Jessica Lynch.
