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. 

Technology in the Classroom?

Since technology has been on the rise, so has the desire for technology in the classroom. Teachers see it as a way to identify with the younger population and speak in terms that they understand. There have been both good and bad changes to the system to accommodate that want as well. Some changes we hardly even notice because it just seems like second nature to us now while other changes seem like teachers are just pushing too hard. For example, when we go to write an essay, we automatically go to write it in a word document. However, now some teachers are having you dissect virtual frogs instead of real ones which completely takes away from the hands on learning experience that some kids need in order to thrive.

Additionally, schools are now requiring you to have your own personal computer. This severely limits those that cannot afford a computer. And even then, I have personally seen students who were finally able to get a computer, only for their families to fight over who got to use it or overly limit their use so that the students could not get any productive work done. Often times, it takes much longer for students to grow accustomed to using a computer or the software if they show up late to the technology scene as well and then they feel stunted and discouraged.

For the schools as a whole, technology can be very expensive to embrace. First you have to buy hundreds of computers and their accessories, more than likely build a computer lab, and spend money on the internet bill that comes with it. As an after-thought, many school districts then have to deal with tech support and spend time teaching students and educators how to use the computers.

In my high school, we got a large grant to get more technology and improve the existing computers. The school board decided that they would buy smart-boards for select classrooms and computer labs as well as a few class sets of I-pads that were to be passed around. I have never seen any one of those smart boards used even once. The teachers found them difficult to use and didn’t know how they worked and the students were never allowed to play with them and figure out how they worked for themselves. So they just sat there taking up space. The I-pads came out three times in my classes since they were introduced. Half the time spent with them was trying to get the school Wi-Fi or the software that we needed to use to even work properly; which proved such a hassle and a waste of time that they were never seen again. I shouldn’t even have to mention how much time was lost to students trying to find out a way to play games on them instead of doing the assigned work.

A certain level of technology adaptation is to be expected and rejoiced, however, if we over-do it to the point that it does not benefit the majority or the classroom or becomes obsolete, the sentiment is lost.       

This article talks more eloquently and in depth about the cost of technology on education. 

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/why-technology-always-increases-costs-quality-education

"If you want technology to improve the quality of education, you need to invest both in the educator and the technology." 

The Cost of Higher Education

When you think about going to college, the first thing many people think about it how much it is going to cost and if you can afford the repercussions if you can’t afford it directly. For many people this means working long hours or taking out loans.

There are other side effects that many people don’t even think about. We all know that tuition has been steadily climbing for decades and it seems to have no end in sight. However, we never think about all of the students that are not even thinking about going to college because they know they will never be able to afford it and don’t want to be doomed to be in debt like many of those before them. These students often know they won’t be able to afford college way before it is actually time to apply so they sign themselves off during their last years of high school.

Some people decide to put themselves through college by working long hours and taking fewer classes. This means taking a longer time graduating than originally thought of—which sometimes lets down many friends and family who have large expectations of you. On top of that, college becomes a larger investment than previously thought as well because you have to pay for more than four years. Sometimes you have to pay twice as much than you have previously thought, which means you have to work longer at that dead-end job that you hate but begrudgingly go to anyways.

So you have to go to work every day to pay for college, but going to work and school at the same time can be stressful and time consuming. And you definitely can’t stay home from work to complete your coursework because you need to pay the bills, so you have to skimp on or even skip a few assignments to keep your head above the water. Thus, your GPA that you fought so hard to maintain in high school gets flushed away all because you can’t afford a traditional college experience.

And for so many unfortunate students, dropping out is the only answer to their financial problems and all of their dreams and aspirations get thrown aside. The stress that money put on college is just too much to bear for some. Wouldn’t it be great if college was seen as its job in itself? Even better, wouldn’t it be great if college was free? 

http://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155766786/whats-driving-college-costs-higher