Infographic!

https://infograph.venngage.com/p/169998/should-higher-education-be-free

Mini Gripe

Why do people call people in college "College Kids" while they call people in the military "Army Men" when for the most part, they're all around the same age?

Mental Illnesses and College Disclosure

College can be a very stressful time for many students; but if you have a mental illness, it can be a nightmare. Many students’ grades and social life suffer because they can’t get help or feel like it won’t make a difference. Some even drop out and in extreme cases commit suicide.

When looking at mental illnesses, most colleges consider depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD, ADD, and ADHD to be the along the most reported mental health cases in colleges and universities. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 1 in 4 students have a mental illness and that 40% of students that have these ailments do not seek help.

Some students don’t disclose their illnesses for fear that teachers and peers will judge them differently or think that they’re faking it for an easier work load. Especially since most mental illnesses are normally something that you can’t really prove to people right away. Some people just don’t even know where to start. For others, it is a struggle to get real documentation from a psychiatrist or doctor. And then there are people like me who have a combination of all of these things and just feel overwhelmed. When college students asked if they have disclosed their information to the college or not, the answer was split 50/50.

One of the survey respondents in the NAMI survey said that “I was concerned that the information would become part of a permanent record that could be viewed negatively. I still feel that there is a lot of stigma and the benefits of disclosing do not outweigh the risks.” (9)  One might ask “What risks? There isn’t any risk in just telling someone” But for students who suffer from mental illnesses, there is a list of reasons one might have. Including fear of their information not being kept confidential or fear that other’s perceptions of them will decrease once they know.

There is a lot to do on college campuses to help mentally ill students not feel out-casted or demeaned for just being themselves—even if being themselves might need a little help. 

http://www.nami.org/collegesurvey

Online Classes

If you’ve been attending college for long enough, chances are that you’ve taken some sort of online of distance learning class before. Everybody has their own experiences and opinions with them and some people like them while others don’t. This is one of the few instances where everybody is right no matter what they think; and it’s all boiled down to learning styles.

Sometimes teachers have a hard time adjusting to online classes because they assume that the same students that are applying to their traditional style classes also apply to their online classes. However, this is not the case. Many distance education students choose to learn online because they actually learn better being able to explore the subject on their own time.

According to a study done in 1991 by Dille and Mezack, distance learning courses often lead to social isolation and require you to rely more heavily on personal learning skills. Therefore, students with less of a need for concrete experiences may be better suited for online learning classes.  Students who prefer online learning also tend to want to know “why” things happen on conceptual or theoretical terms. Having the internet at your fingertips would certainly help with this. On the other hand, people who need more concrete experiences tend to do better in traditional classrooms because they require more interactions with their teachers and peers. (130)

Even though distance learning courses may be a better option for many people, it still struggles to be viewed as a legitimate way to get your degree. Most colleges and universities only accept online classes that have been affiliated with their own school. Some don’t even offer distance learning classes at all.

This may be because these classes aren’t trusted enough. Many online programs are worried about academic dishonesty coming from their students. Patricia McGee of the University of Texas states that academic dishonesty includes plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, misrepresentation, and/or misbehavior. (2) Students may feel more comfortable doing these things online rather than in a physical class because they feel a sense of anonymity—even though their name is attached to it. Information is so easily obtainable on the internet, and it is impossible for a professor to be able to find all of the sources that a student might have copied from, and students abuse this knowledge despite many of them knowing that there are websites and soft-wares available that help teachers find copied or referenced works.

I had a technology class while I was in high school in which the teacher told us that if we could find the answers online then we could use those answers in our work. My friend and I were excellent at finding what we needed online. At the end of the school year, we graduated and both won National Technical Honor Society awards; but we didn’t feel like we deserved them, even though the teacher advised us to use the internet to our exposal. Honestly, I hardly remembered a thing. Yes, I can take apart a computer and put it back together again, but I hardly know the difference between megabytes and gigabytes. I wonder how people who obtain their college degrees going through classes like this feel. 

(Referenced works in the links below) 

http://www.thejeo.com/Archives/Volume10Number1/McGee.pdf

http://www.tandfonline.com.echo.louisville.edu/doi/abs/10.1080/87567559909595802

How Poor College Students Struggle

Often times I wake up in the morning and feel overwhelmed by my day to day duties. I wake up with barely any sleep, go to class and get fed massive amounts of homework, go home and try to get everything turned in on-time, and then head off to work so that I can continue to go through this struggle thought to be an opportunity. I see some of my peers getting on just fine, though. Those are the ones that come from money.

Money plays a large part in the college experience and can even decide if you graduate or not. I know that if I wasn’t getting my school paid for by UPS I wouldn’t be able to afford college and would probably not go. Although I appreciate the opportunity to work my way through school, in the back of my mind I envy those who don’t have to work at all.

College classes seldom take into account that the average student has to work in order to even attend class. For a student to graduate on time in a four year university, they would have to take around 6 classes a semester with 4 classes being considered full-time. With the recommended amount of study time for classes being 3 hours for every credit hour, there would be no time for a job if you are a full time student taking on the expected amount of classes. People who have to work to go through school end up taking on less classes at a time while still feeling overly stressed; and because they take on less classes, they have to go to school longer to get their degree and therefore work longer. This adds to the amount of stress they feel and can even make college seem not worthwhile. 

The students that come from money also have more social advantages. You often hear people say that college is more about the connections you make than the degree itself. If you have to work and study all of the time, you barely have any social life and most often, you only want to hang out with the people that you truly care about instead of trying to make new connections. This could stagnate your career if you only get close to a few people.

Another issue that the poor can’t contribute to is internship opportunities. Once again, between work and school, the chance to pursue internships is diminished. It would almost be like taking on a second job—something that most people that work and attend college dread.

Finally, the students that don’t have to work while attending college get better grades. They have more time to study and complete assignments than their peers—giving them the competitive edge. They also tend to get more sleep, which keeps them alert and healthy during their day to day activities. What really gives them an edge, however, is that they have time for themselves. They can watch a few hours of Netflix and play video-games. They can take a nap or cook a nice meal. However little the comfort, it is something that the students that have to work to attend college seldom see.

The wealthy students seem to have their entire college career overwhelming with great opportunities to better themselves while the poor students struggle to even pay off what they owe, and the school doesn’t recognize it. 

Check out this  study

http://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=scholar_week

Research project idea

How much stress school puts on students

This I Believe

This is my This I Beleive essay along with the script. Enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/greymichmaus/this-i-believe

We All Got Left Behind

My story is very similar to many other millennials. I was an excellent reader when I was young and was placed a number of grade levels ahead when they measured my reading level. My mother was very proud and encouraged me to keep reading at my own pace.

Not too long after that, however, the No Child Left Behind act was passed. Gradually, me and all of the top readers of our generation began to fall back into the reading ranks.

The No Child Left Behind act was meant to be a series of standardized testing that would measure how well the schools are teaching children. But what it really did was change how the entire school system operated.

The teachers started to only teach what would be on the tests and minimized talking about anything that wasn’t going to be tested. The tests control what children do or do not learn in class. That was the mark of when schools stopped producing exceedingly bright students. From then on, it was up to the forever busy and stressed out adults to make sure that their children were actually learning things.

My best friend tells the story of when they were little and loved going to school. But after No Child Left Behind was passed, they lost all of their spark. Often, they came home from school and their mom asked what they learned that day. They would always respond with “nothing” because it was the same thing that they learned the other day. And even when the next school year came and they thought they would get to move on to more interesting things, they were still stuck on simple mathematics because a few kids were still struggling. Eventually, that person grew to dislike school and they never really tried as hard again because they knew that it would all just come back around again soon.

This is a common trend among individuals who need a challenge to thrive. With standardized testing and re-occurring topics, nobody is challenged. Everyone stays at a level that is just hard enough to get the majority of the students to pass the tests.

This is why I believe that the No Child Left Behind act is ruining the education system and needs to be overruled. We need to be thinking about the future and what type of people—what type of adults this learning system is going to create.