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