Stress and Success: What College Students Don’t Seem to Understand.
Higher Education is often extremely stressful for students. According to a recent survey by OnCampus Research, “over 50% say they feel stressed ‘very often,’ and 42% feel nervous or anxious at a similar rate. Conversely, only 23% say they ‘very often’ feel confident in their ability to handle their personal problems.” Students enter the university to better understand biology or philosophy but end up learning, in excruciating first-person detail, about depression, self-loathing, and anxiety.
Most colleges and universities now have whole buildings full of mental health professionals to aid students when these forms of psychic suffering become too intense. That’s right, there are a sufficient number of mental breakdowns, panic attacks, and serious bouts of depression that schools have, for some time now, quietly responded with whole teams to treat the problem (well, not the underlying causes, but at least the most salient manifestations [and probably as a way to indemnify themselves]). What’s more, most faculty members are now required to undergo training to spot mental breakdowns and manic episodes. While many college-bound high school students yearn for the “college experience” which TV and movies have tacitly sold them, few, if any, know what reality has in store.
If this makes college sound lugubrious, that’s because — for the majority of students — it is. The costs (and often debt incurred) are now extreme due to diminished government funding, shifts in college leadership strategies, and rising costs associates with non-educational amenities needed to attract new enrollees (why lower student to teacher ratios when you can have a state-of-the-art climbing wall?). Moreover, the stress is caused by the fact that the stakes of college are much higher now then they were a generation ago when it comes to life trajectories post-graduation in what has become an increasingly competitive job market. And college has always been a somewhat difficult time of adjustment when all the securities and comforts of youth evaporate as young people are thrust into a novel and strange environment of increased responsibility coupled with an alien social landscape.
College students as a population don’t face a mental health crisis, they face a gauntlet-like situation which we’ve made increasingly stressful. This is not a matter of individual weakness or moral failing. It is a product of the conditions students must now confront. The problem, in part, lies in how we prepare and support undergraduate students, not in the mettle or constitution of this or that young person.
So what can be done? Many things! What I want to focus on here is just one part of a larger solution: how we might better prepare students to approach the college experience so that they might thrive rather than wither. Students ought to know that, among other things, success (broadly understood) in college or university is more affective, social, and cultural than intellectual and technical.
By saying that success in college is “affective” and “social” and “cultural” I mean it depends on something like mindset, self-awareness, engagement, and motivation as well as knowledge of the big picture of academic culture and sense what really matters or counts rather than the ability to perfectly perform technical tasks. Of course, intellectual and technical abilities will be required, but they are far from the only skills that matter. When intellectual and technical abilities eclipse or occlude other skills, goals, and understandings this lopsided and confused sense of purpose becomes a source of stress and suffering.
It’s not the smartest or most technically proficient who do well in college. Rather, it’s those who both understand the academic (socio-cultural) game and work on their ability to play it well. As professor Drew C. Appleby notes
“When I began teaching, I mistakenly assumed that academic performance was simply a result of intellectual ability. But as my career progressed, I became increasingly aware that other factors also influence student success as I noticed that some of my brightest students failed to thrive academically and that many of my less-intellectually-gifted students often exceeded my expectations. I eventually realized that what are now called “soft skills” in the workplace can play an equally important role in the classroom.”
With Appleby, we must agree that brute intellectual ability does not guarantee success. But we might want to know a bit more about how this suspicious phrase, “soft skills,” is playing into Appleby’s explanation of who thrives.
Soft skills are often understood in opposition to “hard,” technical skills. Soft skills are “interpersonal skills that are linked to emotional intelligence (EQ), such as communication and teamwork (Caudron, 1999; Halfhill & Nielsen, 2007; Shuayto, 2013).” Sometimes soft skills are referred to as personality traits, non-cognitive skills, non-cognitive abilities, character, and socio-emotional skills (Heckman & Kautz 2012).”
An imperfect metaphor is that hard skills are like an engine and soft skills are like the oil that helps it run smoothly (without blowing up, overheating, or catching fire). Or perhaps hard skills are like the technology inside of your smartphone and soft skills are the design of the software interface as well as the look and feel of the phone itself which makes it easy and pleasant to use. So in reality, EQ and IQ, soft skills and hard skills are not really opposed. They are better thought of as complementing each other, helping each other out. They are like peanut butter and jelly, better together than each element taken on its own. Students incorrectly think that reason and intellect drive success in college, the truth is that it’s a combination of soft skills and intelligence, with soft skills often being a far more powerful contributor to adroit action, proper judgment, and, in the final analysis, well-being and success.
As the mostly-online Fall 2020 semester approaches, it may seem like the value of soft skills for flourishing in college will be put on hold. After all, everything will be mediated by a computer and the only thing that will matter is the brute quantitative grading of tests and exams. Nothing could be further from the truth, which is that soft skills matter more when classes are online. Not only will student engagement in online seminars be decisive, so too will it matter a great deal how students approach their classes, their interactions with peers and professors, and their understanding of what it is they are doing and why.
Online learning, and the grades that come out if it, will be odious if soft skills are neglected this Fall. Looking beyond higher education, neglect of soft skills will have even more dire results both mentally and materially for those who think these admittedly fuzzy skills are useless. Don’t just take my word for it: according to Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post, the technical nerds par excellence at Google
“decided to crunch every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. The report shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.”
Hopefully, the dubious sounding claim that success in college in more about your EQ than IQ now seems much more plausible. Simply knowing this fact is not enough. Students must change their mindset and behavior in accordance with this new perspective.
For more on how to get the most out of the college classroom (online or off), check out www.habitusedu.com, @habitus_edu on Twitter, habitus_edu on Instagram, or like Habitus on Facebook.
