Category: College

There are high chances of losing an opportunity to join the college of your dreams due to many reasons out of which, community service is one. It is considered that there are many students who will be wanting to join the same college as you, thus making the competition too high.

Are you wondering why community service is so important and what is the impact it causes on your college admission? Then here is an article for you guys to understand better about these services and their impact.

What is community service?

It is a service that is considered to be a non-paying job performed by one student or a group of learners for the benefit of their community or its institutions. It is a service that is different from volunteering since it is not always done on a willing basis.

The benefits of community service are as follows.

• Volunteering helps you make new friends and contacts which results in increasing your social and relationship skills
• It increases self-confidence and in battling your depression.
• It can provide career experience and can teach you valuable job skills
• It brings fun and satisfaction to your life
• Why Is Community Service so Important?
• According to research, community service is essential to colleges due to the reasons that are as follows.
• Students will start working effectively on campus outside of class.
• Students are likely to commit to the university’s mission.
• They share the institution’s values.

Volunteering in your community will exhibit a level of civil consciousness and compassion for others, and it can display issues that you’re passionate about. Collectively, this will help form an absolute picture of who you are as a person.

Make the most of your community service experiences by:

• Choosing schemes that relate to your desires and interests.
• Binding to one or two meaningful projects for a maintained length of time, rather than rushing to complete the most volunteer hours.
• Prioritizing the schemes or projects you have chosen.

How will colleges evaluate your community service?

Institutes value this service that you are eager about that you are committed to, that improves your society or school and that produces skills and increases your knowledge of diversity and ethics. It is recommended to follow the points that are mentioned further.

Students must engage in the chosen service which means that the volunteer possibilities you opt should rise from the interests and passions of yours.

It is told that there is no need for playing with community service by seeking high-profile or fascinating service opportunities. The emotional and ethical knowledge and skills generated by community service activities are even more important.

Students should spend at least a year on continued service or community engagement (referring to working in groups on community issues, like decorating a local park or taking part in an environmental action).

It is also considered that individual service is also valuable, but community engagement develops problem-solving skills, group awareness, and a perception of the common good.

Students must additionally work on community service projects that expand their opinion of diversity by collaborating with diverse groups on school and community issues.

Thus it is not about how much service you do and it is not about serving your community in ways that no candidate has ever served their community earlier.

According to the research, consistency and commitment are important as working on one scheme over a long period of time is better than working on ten different schemes to secure hours.

How to Find Community Service Opportunities

Do you have a specific interest or skill that can make you a passionate and generous volunteer? Use it as a community service compass with the help of your college itself.

Communicate with your school or college- counselors and most of your teachers can help you to find community service opportunities that suit your interests and academic need.

How many hours of the service do you require?

Colleges will not look at the quantity of community service you complete, but at the quality of the work you accomplish although generally, you must aim to accomplish at least 50 hours of the service throughout your high school career.

But unless your school or college has a community service requirement for graduation, the total amount of time you spend doing the service is not really much important.

Although we agree, just a few hours over the course of four years would not approve that you are very civic-minded but it will definitely help you in getting into a better college. There is no need to fatigue yourself or fall behind in institutions because you have set a high goal of numbers of the service hours.

How to write about the service on your college applications

If you can think of an important experience that genuinely influenced you, a thoughtful essay about community service may be the way to go. Thus, If you choose to write an essay about your community service which you will be submitting while your college admission or in response to the short question and answer that is given by the college you are planning to get admitted, there are certain principles you must follow which are as follows.

Remember what colleges consider important when it comes to community services such as a real passion, supported commitment, community engagement, ethics, diversity, emotional awareness, and skills developed.

Be thoughtful and reflective. Describe everything you learned from the service and the experience you earned that helped you in the growth of your knowledge and skills.

At the very same time, be honest and specific or try to be true to yourself. Avoid general statements on how the service made you a better person or motivated you to recognize what you have. Think strongly about what you have really learned through the service.

Focus on one story or experience so that it will make it simpler to get precise and develop a more individual idea about how your community service activities have impacted you and your aspect.

Conclusion

Community service is very important to colleges. It helps you in displaying your leadership qualities and how much dedication you are and that leadership needs to be in an area of continued and illustrated interest. Sometimes the best way to do that is through a service opportunity that is just the right as this co-operation. Focus on hard work, long-term engagement, and something you are truly enthusiastic and passionate about.

A twitching, vomiting and ice-cold 19-year-old was lying on the ground. Groaning. His struggles were ridiculed and recorded for snapchat, he was kicked in the stomach and slapped in the face as members of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity at Pennsylvania State University horrifyingly attempted to rouse a teenager they killed, rather than alert authorities. Timothy Piazza’s 2017 death was a result of hazing rituals. The ‘Gauntlet’, as they call it is a game in which potential new members or ‘pledges’ of a fraternity or sorority are forced into drinking copious amounts of alcohol. Down a beer. Take numerous vodka shots. Chug from a bag of wine. Or they would be forced into doing much worse things.

The death of Timothy Piazza did not ignite remorse from the members who killed him. No. “Make sure the pledges keep quiet about last night and the situation” was what one member involved in Piazza’s death was urging others to do, along with deleting text messages from a group chat that Piazza was in, so there would be no evidence on his phone (ABC news broadcast). They wanted to cover up their illegal actions. They didn’t care about Piazza. They didn’t see the hazing that they were taking part in as an issue. Like so many other young adults who take part and encourage hazing they disguised their actions as ‘rituals’ that are a ‘rite of passage’. Hazing is a cruel and inhumane practice and serious actions need to be taken against it. Not just wishy-washy statements from universities about how they “will not tolerate hazing at XYZ”. But, as stated previously, serious actions must be taken; harsher security should be implemented around student residential colleges and organisations such as fraternities and sororities need to be disbanded, as they are only perpetrating hazing

Maybe it is a good idea to provide a clear understanding of what hazing is exactly as provided by a dictionary: a ritual in which a new member of a university, a university club or society is humiliated or abused.

Now, if that definition did not ring alarm bells as to why hazing is cruel and that serious action needs to be taken against it, let me reiterate it for you. Hazing is outstandingly barbaric and leads to devastating consequences. Of course, the most obvious consequence is the deaths, but there are plenty more besides Timothy Piazza. In September of 2017, Louisiana State University first-year student Maxwell Gruver died of alcohol poisoning after being forced into participating in a hazing ritual at Phi Delta Theta fraternity. In November 2017, Andrew Coffey died after being viciously hazed at a party. A bottle of bourbon was taped to Coffey’s hands, he was made to drink the entire thing. He passed out, was dragged onto a couch and left alone. Then, he died. And again here is an example of fraternity members more worried about getting in trouble than about the dying person in front of them. But perhaps the consequences of hazing are seen more in those who live through the experiences and are left damaged and oftentimes mentally unstable. These people survived what I would even go as far as labelling as involuntary attempted murder. And it leaves them with mental and physical scars that are a reminder of the experiences they went through. Not to mention that they have to see those that inflicted the torment on them every day at university or in their fraternity or sorority house. And those who even make the slightest attempt at speaking out against the behaviour they face are viciously ostracised from the group.

After Jo Hannah Burch was forced to crawl through an ice cold creek in the dead of night as part of a sorority ‘tradition’ at Young Harris College, she reported the incident to school officials. Subsequently, the members of her sorority mocked and ridiculed her. Due to this she suffered from depression and was constantly paranoid, not leaving her room in fear of what the other girls might do to her. Burch’s story is not an outlier. In a University of Maine study on hazing in colleges, it was found that 73% of students in fraternities and sororities experience a form of hazing and 71% of students suffer from negative consequences of a similar manner to Burch’s. I must contest that American students are not the only ones suffering from hazing. A recent report into hazing at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales conducted by the Australian Human Rights Commission found that first-year female students were forced into taking part in an initiation called the ‘ladies lounge’, where they were made to get “excessively drunk” and then give lap dances to male students. Events such as the many I have given leave students feeling even more vulnerable than they were before, which is a hard feat considering that they have just left home for what is likely the first time and are completely on their own, trying their hardest to go about their studies and make friends. Their desire and desperation to be accepted was quite frankly used against them in acts of disgusting abuse and humiliation, what older students (or members in the case of fraternities and sororities) would call a ‘bonding’ activity and simply something to see whether these teenagers would be a ‘right fit’ in their friendship group. Clearly, I have illustrated that hazing is barbaric and all of this overwhelming and widely publicised evidence supporting this claim prompts the question; why? Why are on-campus student residencies not put under harsh security measures and why are sororities and fraternities still in existence. The answer leads nicely into my next point. Hazing is not as an irregularity, but rather, the norm.

This is the reasoning behind the university’s stock response and reaction to hazing incidents on their campuses. An answer so often used that every single university that was involved in the previously mentioned events expressed; they all have a “zero-tolerance policy” to hazing. Don’t get me wrong, this is true, they reassure the parents that hazing is banned on their campuses. Though hazing doesn’t cease to exist. But what can the university do if the hazing practices are happening in the dead of night, underground, unbeknownst to them, strategically hiding their ‘rituals’ under a blanket of secrecy. Until someone dies. And this is precisely what happens, such policies against hazing are in place, but they lead to the organisations engaging in hazing in even more dangerous settings and circumstances. These policies only fire the secrecy surrounding sororities and fraternities and when things go wrong, as they evidently do, members start rushing to protect themselves rather than save an injured or dying person, as the members of both Piazza and Coffey’s fraternities did. But let’s return to my main point. Universities only implement easily broken policies because they see hazing as a normality, something that cannot be stopped and so to do the students that both join and run these organisations. In a case of hazing at Pennsylvania State University, Marquise Braham sent a message to his residence-hall advisor seeking help in understanding why he was undergoing such cruel hazing (just to name a few of the things Braham was made to so you understand the seriousness of the situation: he was forced to swallow live fish and kill, gut and skin animals). Her response was, to say the least, underwhelming. “Yes it will get worse,” she wrote. “I’m sorry to say hahaha but it will”.

Returning back the case of hazing at the University of New England, when cases such as the one mentioned earlier were reported to the university, a senior member of staff merely reprimanded the student who spoke out against the initiation rituals for being drunk and “putting herself in that situation”. Two students were brave enough to share their stories of abuse and torment, at two separate universities in two separate continents. Yet both received subpar responses. This type of thinking surrounding hazing needs to be quashed immediately. Action is not being taken against these practices because the behaviour is seen as normal. It is my belief that opinions regarding hazing will only start to improve once drastic actions have been taken, in which people will begin to realise that maybe, just maybe, these practices are wrong. And even those who do see them as wrong at the current time don’t try and stop the behaviour, lamenting that it’s just part of the system and there is no way of getting rid of it. Well, there absolutely are ways, Security cameras. Random security check-ups in residential colleges. And perhaps the most important, completely disbanding sororities and fraternities. But if no university takes these actions then the cycle will continue. A hazing death. A stock response from the university. And then no further action is taken, because it’s just the normality.

Introduction

Nolan Burch’s night started out similar to any other college students. He went to a pledge event for the fraternity he was rushing at West Virginia University, Kappa Sigma. He hung out and partied with his future brothers, presumably having a good time. The night then quickly turned sour. Burch and the other pledges were then blindfolded, brought to a second location, and were forced to excessively drink by brothers as part of a hazing ritual. That had been the goal of the whole night, according to texts from another brother. Those texts from that night read, “Nolans getting my family bottle of whiskey,” and “I’m probably just gonna get him real (drunk).” (O’Shei, 2018) When the pledges were brought back from the second location about 90 minutes later, Nolan couldn’t even walk himself back into the house and was laid down a table by some fraternity brothers. The party raged on as Nolan laid there, completely still. Brothers took pictures and videos of him, danced on the table he was on, and continued on with their partying. (O’Shei, 2018) By that time, Nolan’s blood alcohol level had reach .493, more than six times the legal limit. (West Virginia Frat, 2015) It wasn’t until about more than half-an-hour later, when a brother who hadn’t been in the room walked in and finally noticed Nolan. His face had turned blue and he barely had a pulse. On the 911 call placed from the house, you can hear the brother who found him trying to perform CPR on him and save his life, repeatedly saying, “One, two three. Nolan, breathe for me, buddy!” (O’Shei, 2018) But, it was no use, Nolan died two days later, only a week after his 18th birthday. Stories like Nolan’s happen to college kids every year on campuses all over the country. In fact, there has been at least one hazing death reported by a U.S. student/school organization almost every year since 1953. (Nuwer, n.d.) One of the most common places these deaths occur is in fraternities and sororities on college campuses. Because of this fact, traditional Greek organizations on college campuses, fraternities in particular, should be suspended until they seriously reconstruct how they run because they continually perpetuate cultures of sexual assault and violence, hazing, and alcohol/drug abuse, which is harmful to the college and its student body, even past college years.

Sexual Assault and Violence

One problem a lot of college campuses face is sexual assault and rape. During their time in undergraduate, approximately 23.1% of female students and 5.4% of male students go through one of those events. (Campus Sexual Violence. n.d.) A way Greek life contributes to this problem is their way of creating power through alcohol. For example, in 2018, the National Panhellenic Conference banned the 26 sororities they monitor from throwing parties with alcohol. (Jackson, 2018) If these sororities want to have any sort of event with alcohol, it has to be a joint event with a fraternity. So now, on college campuses where these sororities exist, all the power to throw off-campus parties with alcohol now shifts to only the fraternities. This shift in power now creates a potentially dangerous situation because they have all of the power and, most of time, all of these fraternities are comprised of men. Now they control what there is to drink, who’s allowed in, and where the parties are, leaving few other party options for people who don’t feel safe at these events or if the fraternities have a reputation for bad behavior. It creates an unequal power dynamic between males and females on campuses, creating more potential situations where sexual violence can occur. In fact, according to Seabrook and Ward (2018), “fraternity members were three times more likely to commit sexual assault than nonmembers,” and if the only places where people can go and socially drink and hang out is frat houses, the amount of sexual assaults and rape that occur may spike. (Seabrook & Ward. 2018) This fact can also be blamed on another way Greek life contributes to problems with sexual violence which is their views on sexual violence and who is to blame. Seabrook and Ward did a study comparing participants’ opinions on who is to blame in a case of sexual assault. Their variable factor was whether the male was a member for a fraternity or not. They found that males rated, “the perpetrator as less guilty, and the victim as more culpable and less credible,” in cases where the perpetrator was part of a fraternity. (Seabrook & Ward. 2018) This idea is a summation of a common thought fraternity members’ share. They will often excuse their brother’s bad behavior because they are part of the same group and they don’t believe that someone they know can do something that bad. A lot of them also hold, “more traditional attitudes towards women,” meaning they see women as inferior to men and as sexual objects only around to pleasure men. (Ramirez, 2017) This mentality is why there are so many stories of perpetrators getting off scot-free. Women and their safety just aren’t as valued in Greek life culture due to the power difference between sororities and fraternities, the traditional view of women some brothers hold, and this attitude of protecting people they hang out and sweeping their bad behavior under the rug with instead of addressing the problem of sexual violence that exists in this culture.

Hazing and Being Part of a Group

Many people believe that one positive that comes out of Greek life is having a new group of friends that you can create life-long bonds with. But, do you actually want to be part of a group of friends that only allow them to hang out with you if you let them beat you up, make you drink excessively, or embarrass you beyond belief? Hazing has been going on in colleges for a long time, with the first death due to hazing being recorded in 1873 at Cornell University. Mortimor Leggett was pledging the Kappa Alpha Society when he fell to his death in a gorge while blindfolded. (Ramirez, 2017) But, in recent years, more and more students have been reporting incidents of hazing. Ramirez (2017) reports that, “73% of students involved in a Greek letter organization reported they experienced at least one hazing behavior.” One of the most compelling instances of hazing comes from James Murtha for the Houston Chronicle (2018). In 1956, he decided to rush Alpha Sigma Phi at Marietta College in Ohio. Some of the lesser intense behavior he talked about include, “cleaning toilets, scrubbing sidewalks with toothbrushes, and polishing shoes of the ‘actives,’ while they verbally abused him and called him names. But the worst came with the end of their “Hell Week.” Murtha and his pledge class were blindfolded and drove to a “sacred site” in the woods. They were then forced to climb up and down a hill and an embankment of a stream while brothers whipped them with rope and hoses and kicked them. They then had to mount a log and pretend to “screw” a log named Gracie as again brothers beat them. Murtha remembered, “stand[ing], soak[ing], dripping. My butt burn[ed]. I feel a welt beneath my ribcage. I shake. Not cold. Pissed.” He also remembered thinking, “Did these guys look forward to beating us? Who invented this crap? Why do they propagate it? Do I want to call this scum ‘brothers’?” (Murtha, 2018) He makes the point of asking why this is still happening. Why are we still letting students hurt each other so bad that they are being killed? Just for some life-long friendships?

Another way Greek organizations hurt students is through rejection. Being rejected creates a different type of hurt than hazing, but it hurts none the less. Martin, Richman, and Leary (2018) did a study analyzing the depression symptoms and overall life happiness of girls before and after they were either rejected or accepted by the sorority they wanted to rush. They found that even after three months after bid day, the rejected girls’ levels of depression and satisfaction with life never returned to their baseline measurements. Being rejected from these groups caused these girls distress. Even though it isn’t physical harm, this proves Greek life is harmful to students.

Alcohol Abuse

One of the first things people think about when they think about frats and sororities is alcohol. According to Ward, Galante, Trivedi and Kahrs (2015), alcohol consumption leads to, “an estimated 599,000 injuries, 646,000 assaults by intoxicated students, sexual assaults of 97,000 people, and 1,800 college student deaths,” each school year. And while most people already associate college with excessive drinking in general, Greek organizations take it to another level, making already dangerous situations worse and making it more likely for members to develop life-long drinking habits and self-esteem issues. To start, students involved in Greek life are at an increased risk to perform risky behaviors associated with binge drinking. For example, they are more likely to drink and drive, have sex without getting consent, and drinking to a point of not remembering what they did the next day. (Brown-Rice & Furr, 2015) Sorority members that binge drank were also more likely to, “be injured, drive under the influence of alcohol, be sexually victimized, and engage in unwanted sex than non-Greek female binge drinkers.” (Brown-Rice & Furr, 2015) This is indicative of the common sentiment that Greek organizations carry that excessively drinking is cool and that’s why many people are attracted to Greek life. They drink more and more frequently than non-Greek students. (Ward & Galante & Trivedi & Kahrs, 2015) Because of this increased risk of binge-drinking, members of Greek life are more susceptible to other risks that come from binge-drinking. Some of those risks include alcohol dependence, disordered eating, and increased self-esteem issues. For example, Ward, Galante, Trivedi and Kahrs (2015) found that students that are Greek associated, especially females, use more disorder eating techniques to avoid the extra calories from drinking and to get drunk faster. They eat less or food with less calories to avoid those calories. College-aged females are also more susceptible to body image issues and binge-drinking goes hand in hand with body issues because of the extra calories it brings. If they’re sorority members, they have an extra social pressure to look good because there is a certain image that society has of sorority girls in its head, which is skinny. (Ward & Galante & Trivedi & Kahrs, 2015) Because of the increased social pressure to drink in Greek life, all of these factors snowball into bigger issues that can affect them later into their lives, like eating disorders and alcohol dependence.

Conclusion

Until they can change the way they run to get rid of the harmful effects they cause on college campuses, traditional Greek organizations should be suspended on all college campuses. They increase the risks of sexual assaults on campus, increase the amount of violent injuries and death on campus through their hazing traditions, and cause students to develop alcohol-related illness including addiction and body image issues related to the calories in alcohol. All of these issues stem from the power they have on campus as the main off-campus party locations due to their popularity and access to alcohol. One possible way to fix this strong tradition to make all houses dry or to enforce alcohol violations properly and with heavier consequences. Heavier consequences like expulsion and ending the chapter on campuses instead of fines will also decrease the amount of hazing injuries and deaths and sexual assaults because it will actually hold those Greek members physically accountable instead of just being able to paying them off or sweep them under the rug to be forgotten about. While some people argue that Greek organizations allow people to create meaningful, life-long friendships, how much are those friendships actually worth if they’re built on a tradition of alcohol abuse, suppression of sexual assault victims, and seriously hurting or even killing people that want to be friends with you?

References

1. Brown-Rice, K., & Furr, S. (2015). Differences in College Greek Members’ Binge Drinking Behaviors: A Dry/Wet House Comparison. The Professional Counselor, 5(3), 354–364. doi: 10.15241/kbr.5.3.354
2. Campus Sexual Violence: Statistics. (n.d.). Retrieved November 10, 2019, from https://www.rainn.org/statistics/campus-sexual-violence.
3. Martin, J.L., Richman, L.S., & Leary, M.R. (2018). A lasting sting: Examining the short-term and long-term effects of real-life group rejection:. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8c69/0147df117d687d0c52c3ea372a166a5a8d7f.pdf?_g a=2.176121826.134614399.1572808528-771076731.1572808528
4. Murtha, J. A. (2018, September 13). I was hazed in a fraternity. I never forgot what happened. Retrieved October 27, 2019, from https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray- matters/article/fraternity-hazing-haunting-memory-13227406.php.
5. Nuwer, H. (n.d.). Hazing Deaths Database. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from http://www.hanknuwer.com/hazing-deaths/.
6. O’Shei, T. (2018, December 4). Hazing, heartbreak and, finally, helping: What’s next for Nolan Burch’s family. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://buffalonews.com/2018/12/04/nolan-burch-hazing-west-virginia-university- fraternity-death-drinking/.
7. Ramirez, D. (2017, May 10). Greek Life or Death. Retrieved October 27, 2019, from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jf4n056#main.
8. Seabrook, R. C., & Ward, L. M. (2018, December 28). Bros Will Be Bros? The Effect of Fraternity Membership on Perceived Culpability for Sexual Assault – Rita C. Seabrook, L. Monique Ward, 2019. Retrieved November 3, 2019, from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1077801218820196?casa_token=hdHjpcU JS60AAAAA:EruMvCC_hO9sHfdFY0_NCD5YsvvscVrfC8y06eZEurtDJcw1THqrbZw
9. kRx-JB7nsSecN6NVaY-A#.
10. Ward, R. M., Galante, M., Trivedi, R., & Kahrs, J. (2015). An examination of drunkorexia, greek affiliation, and alcohol consumption. Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education, 59(3), 48- 66. Retrieved from http://www.libproxy.wvu.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/177354922 0?accountid=2837
11. West Virginia Frat Pledge Nolan Burch Had 0.493 Blood-Alcohol Level. (2015, June 11). Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/west- virginia-frat-pledge-nolan-burch-had-0-493-blood-n295101.
12. Nuwer, H. (n.d.). Hazing Deaths Database. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from http://www.hanknuwer.com/hazing-deaths/.
13. O’Shei, T. (2018, December 4). Hazing, heartbreak and, finally, helping: What’s next for Nolan Burch’s family. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://buffalonews.com/2018/12/04/nolan-burch-hazing-west-virginia-university-fraternity-death-drinking/.
14. West Virginia Frat Pledge Nolan Burch Had 0.493 Blood-Alcohol Level. (2015, June 11). Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/west-virginia-frat-pledge-nolan-burch-had-0-493-blood-n295101.

Introduction

While college is often one of the best times of a person’s life, it is also often one of the most challenging. College students are under immense pressure to succeed in all of their activities while still doing well in their classes and graduating within four years. This especially holds true for collegiate athletes. Student-athletes are under constant pressure to succeed in both the classroom as well as the athletic field. Balancing these challenges can be overwhelming for collegiate athletes to handle. Stress from academics and the new social structure of mental toughness can grow to be too much pressure for collegiate athletes to handle. Student-athletes are trained every day to improve their physical strength, but athletes do not receive enough mental health coaching to improve their mental and emotional strength. Even though mental health is becoming a new topic of discussion, many people treat it as a taboo that they do not want to talk about. Mental health is something that everyone has, whether it is poor mental health or good mental health, it concerns everyone, and this topic needs to be discussed to improve overall mental and emotional strength.

Many athletes prior to collegiate sports are recognized as the elite performer in their areas, which can lead to confusion when athletes arrive on campus and everyone is just as good as they are. Overall a little over 7% of high school athletes go on to play varsity sports in college and less than 2% of high school athletes go on to play at NCAA Division 1 schools. The few that do make it are more talented than their peers in high school and can face extreme competitor anxiety once they realize that they are no longer that special player on the team. As expected, college athletes have spent years of their child- and young adulthood honing their athletic skills. Hours per day spent on courts, tracks, fields and in the weight room, culminate with the opportunity to play at a high collegiate level. For years more they dedicate increasing chunks of their time to preparation, conditioning and competition. In many cases, life revolves around their sport—it defines them and gives them purpose. Less than 2% of collegiate athletes make it to a professional level with their sport, leaving 98% to undergo some serious life re-evaluation. Unfortunately, universities under the NCAA do not talk about these situations or prepare athletes for what will occur.

While research and knowledge about mental health in college athletes has grown significantly, the lack of focus on how the constant pressure to succeed in both the classroom as well as the athletic field effects college athletes and leaves a breach for improvement of mental health among athletes at all competitive levels. In January of 2014, Madison Holleran, a close friend to many of my teammates, took her own life at Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. This tragedy opened my eyes to the inescapable truth about mental health in student athletes. Despite the preventions they have on campuses to help athletes endure their struggles, it is only ever reactive, and it was not enough for what the athletes needed. College campuses need to find a way to proactively help student-athletes, to go beyond dispelling the negative, to build and strengthen the positive in this group of people that trust their school to help. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that mental health is an important topic of discussion among the athletic pool and preparing coaches, staff, and support groups to discuss these issues openly and to make sure that the people who surround student-athletes expand their knowledge in Positive Psychology and implement it into each athlete’s life.

Positive Psychology

Through years of research in clinical depression, Martin Seligman saw an opportunity for psychologist to extend their help to the entirety of the population. Seligman believed that everyone could benefit from reinforcing skills of positive resilient thinking, not just people with mental pathologies (Compton and Hoffman 2012). This led him to push the movement of positive psychology to build research on “what makes life most worth living”. Eliminating or reducing problems are just one way to improve the human condition. Focusing on positive experiences, positive character traits, and positive institution are other areas of focus that improve the human condition. Along with these areas of focus, Seligman identified more components of a life well-lived. Seligman’s theory of well-being, PERMA, includes five significant elements: Positive emotion, Engagement, Positive Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. Each component factors independently in contributing to well-being and is sought for intrinsic purposes (Compton and Hoffman 2012). PERMA, and other discoveries similar to it, provide a framework for people to become more conscious of ways they can examine their own well-being, and illuminate simple pathways to improve their lives. The positive psychology framework is important for evaluating the needs of many populations, and specifically focusing on collegiate student-athletes in this research paper.

Collegiate Athlete

More than 460,000 students participate in NCAA collegiate athletics every year. This student athlete population is subject to unique variety of stressors that can compromise their well-being, including arduous athletic, academic, and social demands (Wolanin 2016). This research suggests that in addition to education and other extracurricular activities, college student-athletes typically spend more than 40 hours per week participating in sport-related activities, which cumulatively can lead to increased physical and psychological exhaustion. According to Wolanin et al. study on elevated depressive symptoms in college athletes, the rates of depression among athletes highlights the need for increased mental health screening for athletes as part of standard sports medicine care (Wolanin 2016). Prior research in this area has recognized the problem with collegiate athletes and mental health yet few studies have given thought to the important of continuing to discuss these issues openly to ensure that people who surround student-athletes are equipped to handle their unique mental health challenges. The volume of environmental stressors in college athletics, including academic pressure, time management, sports performance, sleep deprivation, coaching styles, potential injury, and social interaction can make athletes vulnerable to multiple mental health risks factors. On top of this, adapting to an independent lifestyle away from home, and forming new relationships, can be mentally unnerving. It becomes tougher when the sport you have always enjoyed playing becomes a stressor due to performance pressure, and constant evaluation by coaching staff and teammates. More attention needs to be directed at student athletes by adopting ideas of positive psychology in the future practice of people in their support system—not only coaches and trainer but limited to staff they see frequently in their collegiate career.

Psychological Health/Injuries

Collegiate athletes are subjected to a wide variety of environmental stressor and to compound this, research from Anderson and Williams (1988) states that many of the psychology disruptions that athletes experience may be predictors of injury. They proposed that athletes that have a history of stressful life events, personality characteristics that exacerbate stress, and few coping resources are more likely to exhibit greater attentional disruptions during stressful situations. The increased patterns of activation and disruption have been proposed to be mechanisms for greater injury risk (Anderson and Williams, 1988). Injuries are unavoidable in sport participation, and while many are minor, causing little to no detriment to an athlete’s physical or mental state, major injuries can trigger a psychological response that unmask serious mental health issues. In their study following the recovery of injured athletes, Anderson and Williams (1988) found that during early phases of rehabilitation, athletes expressed frustration and depression due to incapacitation and the consequent disruption of normal function and sport involvement. Throughout their recovery process, depression was linked to a negative appraisal of rehabilitation success, leading to apathy and poor adherence to treatment. Increased impatience to return to their sport was the main instigator of frustration and depression. It is critical to understand the role that physical activity plays on psychological health and the disparities that exists within athletics. Majority of the literature on physical activity state the positive correlation with exercise with positive effects on psychological health (i.e. life satisfaction, emotional satisfaction, quality of life, sleep quality, and energy levels). However, despite the potential psychological benefits of physical activity and exercise, collegiate student athletes are still heavily prone to mental illness. Previous studies in this field state that collegiate student-athletes are jut as likely as the general population to experience depression and other mental health issues (Reardon & Factor 2010). In Cox’s (2015) most recent study of 950 NCAA Division 1 student-athletes, there has been a recent increase in reported depressive symptoms amongst athletes. 33.2% of athletes experienced symptoms of depression in this study. Athletes with higher rates of depression were more likely to be underclassmen, female, recently injured, or currently in the competitive season (Cox 2015). To address the difficult state of mental health in college athletics, it will be necessary to introduce elements of positive psychology to help athletes improve coping strategies to provide proactive treatment.

Athletes and Counseling

Unfortunately, in the athletic world, which idolizes mental toughness, perseverance, and strength, there is a stigma attached to poor mental health, and athletes fear that coaches and administration may not be supportive of their struggles. In my experience, coaches often advise my teammates and I to treat our emotional distress the same way we would treat our physical pain. Quotes like “its temporary” and “shake it off” are comments that are frequently made in the athletic world from coaches to athletes. The collegiate athletics organization should work toward reducing stigma related to mental health in order to encourage athletes to seek the help they may need. The current practices in universities attempt to promote positive mental health but this is usually following a tragic incident, making to reactive rather than proactive. Collegiate athletics organization need to prioritize helping athletes make their individual lives better and emphasizing a normal and successful life. Emphasizing resilience, self-regulation and self-efficacy, emotional intelligence and self-awareness through character strengths can create a positive environment where athletes can flourish and encourages positive well-being.

Applying Positive Psychology

Resilience is simply the ability to bounce back from adversity and to grow from daily challenges. As discussed in class, the Penn Resiliency Project primary goal is to increase student’s ability to handle everyday problems and teaches optimism through cognitive flexibility. Resilient children have better intellectual skills and self-esteem, but the most powerful predictor was self-regulation, both cognitive and emotional. Activities that can develop such skills may be critical to coping with and overcoming a potentially negative environment. Building resilience in college athletes could prove beneficial for athletic and academic performance, leading to greater overall well-being. Collegiate athletic organizations can utilize this construct of positive psychology fairly easily in the attempt to address the current dilemma in college athletes. Since resilience is a way of thinking that can be taught and can be learned as a skill, a simple step of preparing athletic staff or hiring a sports psychologist to implement this construct can help student-athletes persevere through adversity.

Being able to override and change your responses to specific circumstances through the ability to control your thoughts and feelings and being able to sense that you will be able to do something if you put in the effort are important ingredients in building resilience. A functional self-regulation process allows an individual to believe their emotions can be altered, while possessing the consciousness to monitor moods and emotions accurately. This is important in the process of destigmatizing mental illness because it helps create the association that negative emotions and help-seeking are not weaknesses, but rather strengths in the process of remaining resilient through adversity. Student-athletes ability to identify and regulate moods and emotions during stressful situations can be essential to success and well-being. Along with self-regulation comes self-efficacy. Resilient people understand their strengths and weakness, and through applying their strengths towards self-awareness leads to a development in self-efficacy beliefs. Self-efficacy helps influence the integration of positive interventions that promote healthy behaviors, weaken unhealthy behaviors, and maintain favorable adaptations. Without self-efficacy, student-athletes may lack the belief that they are capable of changing their own behaviors, and therefore might not even try to attain their goals. Both self-efficacy and self-regulation are important ingredients in building resilience in athletes and promotes higher levels of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize the meanings of emotions and their relationships and to reason and problem solve on the basis of them. Emotional intelligence is involved in the capacity to perceive emotions, assimilate emotion related feelings, and to be able to understand the information of those emotions and manage them. Through emotional intelligence, it may be that a person has some measure of self-awareness regarding the interaction between their thoughts and feelings and modify their responses for more positive outcomes. Student-athletes can benefit from emotional intelligence by learning to use their emotions to facilitate cognition, as well as motivate themselves to change their behavior. It broadens and build an athlete’s coping skills, allowing them to approach their problems rationally and effectively, and perceive a potentially stressful event as a challenge rather than as a threat.

Broadening and building positive emotions can increase a person’s awareness of their psychological strengths which can help people recover from psychological problems. In the beginning of this semester, our class was assigned the Values in Action survey, which classifies strengths using a common language of personality traits inherent to every human being. People who frequently use their signature strengths may ultimately make more progress on their goals and have higher overall well-being because they are making a choice to make their strengths stronger rather than dwell on their weaknesses. Student athletes can potentially derive benefit from this survey because it influences athletes to use their strengths to set goals towards desired performances outcomes in injury recovery, optimizing performance, and other environmental stressors they deal with in their daily life. Using strengths to navigate difficulties can be useful for student-athletes, through the identification of their positive attributes that can resolve problems and stressful events.

Directing their attention towards positive aspects can lead to an increase in self-awareness through mindfulness. Mindfulness is choosing to pay attention to one’s own ongoing experience in a way that allows openness and flexibility. The conscious observation of one’s physical, mental, and emotional experience in the present moment requires paying attention to these bodily feelings without judgment. The practice of mindfulness meditation can help collegiate athletes increase their positive emotional states, enable them to focus their attention on conscious self-awareness and goal setting, and avoid negative and unhelpful habitual responses.

Conclusion

Although positive psychology may be one of the best tools for supporting psychological well-being in collegiate athletes, the educational curriculum used in counseling sessions and among coaches and staff do not include positive psychology interventions. Positive psychology is an effective, proactive approach to support psychological well-being that is relatively simple to learn and implement into universities across the nation. The culture that coaches and their staff create can be a determinant of the psychological well-being of athletes. Having a support system for athletes can create an atmosphere that has the potential to lower stress improving the quality of student athletes’ experience and their level of success. Being a student-athlete, I understand the everyday battle of balancing academics, athletics, and my social life at a Division 1 university. I strongly believe that if more funding was put into proactive approaches to help student-athletes deal with everyday stressors then their overall subjective well-being will increase. I don’t see any negatives to adding sports psychologist in every university in order to prevent events like Madison Holleran and Mary Cain from occurring again. The current environment of college athletics is not doing enough to address the mental health issues arising in student-athletes and continuing to take a reactive approach to this sensitive topic will result in more heartbreaks.

References

1. Compton, W. C., & Hoffman, E. (2012). Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Flourishing, 2: 1-22. Jon-David Hague.
2. Cox, C. (2015). Investigating the Prevalence and Risk-Factors of Depression Symptoms among NCAA Division I Collegiate Athletes. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
3. Reardon, C. L. (2010). Sport Psychiatry: A Systematic Review of Diagnosis and Medical Treatment of Mental Illness in Athletes. Sports Medicine, 40(11), pp. 961-980. doi:10.2165/11536580-000000000-00000
4. Williams, J. M. (1998). Psychosocial antecedents of sport injury: Review and critique of the stress and injury model. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 10(1), pp. 5-25. doi:10.1080/10413209808406375
5. Wolanin A, Hong E, Marks D, et al. (2016) Prevalence of clinically elevated depressive symptoms in college athletes and differences by gender and sport. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50:167-171.

College is a big part of any person’s life. It will be the most toughest years of your life. For as long we can remember in school teachers are always saying what you do now starting from elementary school till you graduate high school will have an impact on your life for the next few years. From tv shows to movies they depict college has the most fun you will ever have and the friends that you make will be at your wedding some day. But before you can even get into college it is the grueling admissions process. A process many students and parents may dread. You have to register on the common app site, apply for scholarships if you want / need them, keep up a certain grade point to get into your school of choice, take and retake the SAT’s and ACT’s to get that grade for your dream school. If you are a musician or athlete keep up in those areas to hopefully get scouted for a scholarship. A lot goes into and preparing to apply to colleges that many people do not understand until they go the point. Going to school is very expensive, so for some people it is not an option, or having to take out students loans and paying them back till the day you die. A majority of the people that get accepted into college is done so on a fair basis but with the wake of ‘ Operation Varsity Blues’ that paints a different story. If you thought getting into school was hard, try fitting in once you get past the grueling admission process. There are many stories we hear about sororities and fraternities hazing and doing unspeakable things that cause national attention. And Operation Varsity Blues and hazing and greek life in general is a social issue because we have friends and family who are in or going through the college process, with it being spring many students are finalizing where it is they want to go next fall, and with the scandals going on it may hinder on that choice if the school they want to go to is involved in such acts.

If you ask anybody who has been watching the news for the past month they have definitely heard about the biggest college scandal to ever exist. On March 12 of this year that included universities of Stanford, University of Southern California, University of California, Los Angeles, University of San Diego, University Of Texas, Wake Forest, Yale and Georgetown University. At the centerfold of the scandal is a man name William Singer. He organized the whole operation from the wealthy parents contacting him to setting them up to various other people in the scheme to override the system.Some of the parents paid anywhere between $200,000 and $6.5 million to ensure that their child got admitted to the school of their choice. Singer helped wealthy parents cheat on standardized tests for their children, and he bribed college coaches to falsely designate the children as recruited athletes, smoothing their path to admission

Though there were at least 50 people were charged with in a nation wide scandal to gain access to the elite schools above in exchange for money and bribery. There were lawyers, business owners, and doctors involved. Of the whole scandal 2 names have been plastered on repeat in the news and throughout the case. Lori Laughlin and Felcity Huffman. Lori of the beloved Aunt Becky from full house, whose on the day this broke #aunybecky was trending. It was such a shock to so many people because they ever thought nor pictured her and her husband who is also charged Massimo Giuanni in doing something like this. And Felicity Huffman of Desperate Housewives. Those charged include wealthy and powerful parents accused of paying millions of dollars in bribes, exam administrators and athletic coaches accused of manufacturing students’ achievements, and private admissions counselors accused of coordinating it all. Lori and her husband Massimo who had a very successful line at target for years got caught when it was revealed that they paid a whopping $500,000 for their two daughters Olivia Jade Giannulli and Isabella Rose Giannulli to get into the University of Southern California on a rowing scholarship but the two have never rowed in their life. Olivia is an social media influencer who has almost 2 million followers on youtube and 1.4 million on instagram. She has lost various partnerships with brands like Sephora, and Tresemme, and her clothing line with Princess Polly is no longer available. She’s also worked with other brands like Amazon, Clinque, TooFaced, those of which will never work with her again. Olivia is not the only one who lost work opportunities and deals. Days after the scandal came out her mom got fired from the Hallmark channel where she was in a few Christmas movies and a series, called When Calls the Heart, and will no longer be apart of Netflix’s Fuller House. Days following their arrest they were each released on a $1 million bond, where they used their house as a collateral. Their daughters are reportedly furious at their parents and what they did. They ruined their lives, and especially for Olivia who is on social media and has her own business, what her parents did ruined all of that for her. Their lives will never be the same. Their brand is tarnished. All she really cared about was her Youtube channel and brand deals. Olivia has publicly stated numerous times she doesn’t care about school. She would much rather make Youtube video that go to school. In one of her Youtube videos she said “I don’t know how much of school I’m gonna attend but I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all,” she says in comments about “the whole college thing.” But I do want the experience of like game days, partying. I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.” and capitalized on her campus presence by posting content sponsored by Amazon, apologized after commenter backlash, calling her remarks “stupid” and “super-ignorant.” (Dicker 2019)

A few years before the scandal broke Felicity Huffman and her husband William H. Macy made a $15,000 donation to the Key Worldwide Foundation. A bookkeeper for the charity wrote back saying that the money would help “provide educational and self-enrichment programs to disadvantaged youth.”

But the foundation, prosecutors said on Tuesday, was little more than a conduit for a massive SAT-fixing and college admissions-rigging scheme. And the youth helped by the payment was far from disadvantaged: She was the couple’s elder daughter” (Deb 2019). The money that went to the fake charity was to pay for her daughter Sophia’s SAT score would be higher. She was granted extra time to take the test and the proctor that was with her helped change the answers on the exam to raise her grade. As of April 8, 2019 Felicity and 13 other parents have pleaded guilty of using bribes and other forms of fraud and other forms of bribe.

‘They then arranged for Huffman’s daughter to take the SAT at a location controlled by an administrator who had been bribed by Singer, the complaint states. Riddell, the brains of the operation, then flew from Tampa to California to cheat on the test for Huffman’s daughter. Huffman’s daughter received a score of 1420 out of a maximum of 1600 on the SAT, a score about 400 points over her Preliminary SAT exam a year earlier. Huffman later discussed the scheme in a recorded phone call with Singer, the complaint says.’ (Levenson)

The fact that these wealthy parents have an obscured amount of money they can use it to get them legit tutors and people to help them excel. Because of all the parents involvement in this scheme other students who are way more qualified did not get the spots they deserved and worked for to get into these schools. It affects all of us because we all know how the rich and famous are already ahead using their names to get them anything they want. But the fact that they use their money to buy their child a spot into a school they do not deserve to go to, proves to show change needs to be lighted among the college admissions process. There are so many students who have tutors and work three jobs to be able to afford to go to school. They may have had a child young and stopped going to school and owence they got a bit older they wanted to finish school to set a good example.

Social life is an important part of any college career. But some people in the college search only limit there list of schools to one that include greek life. Even going through my social media of people from high school I see so many people joining a fraternity or sorority. I understand why someone may want to join. No matter what organization you end up joining, there is going to be at least 50 people in currently from your bigs to gbigs and your family. You are bound to make at least one friend. In the USA today article written by Nicole Glass states that about 85% of Fortune 500 executives were apart of greek life. Other benefits include, helping make friends, to build their resumes, partying, or to learn leadership skills, or the connections that can be made when it comes to job searches, you create a network. Greek life goes all the way back to 1825 where since then only 3 of the U.S. presidents were not part of a fraternity. Something that all greek organizations are taught and told is that hazing is a big no. Joining such fraternities and sororities come with initiations, rituals and ceremonies that new pledge members must follow and complete to be fully accepted as a sister or brother. Some school chapters take it way too far with what pledge members have to do to gain access and their approval from their soon to be brothers or sisters. But endangering your life just to prove to them you are worthy is no worth it, especially if it costs you your life, like it does too so many kids across the country. Going through the new member process and proving your worth joining such chapter is a critical time for any new member when they take it too far, that’s it. The problem is that the college’s do not do such a good job of watching over such organizations is when bad things happen. Or when someone dies that’s when everyone agrees some kind of change needs to be made. In the article written by Cheryl Drout and Christie Corsoro titled ATTITUDES TOWARD FRATERNITY HAZING AMONG FRATERNITY MEMBERS, SORORITY MEMBERS, AND NON-GREEK STUDENTS, they explain initiation rituals as commonly accepted aspect of Greek and other group oriented organizations. In the context of their organizations, they can often be seen as an exaggeration of the prevailing subgroup norms. Initiation rituals, or pledging, are often ceremonial, even mundane. Hazing activities, on the other hand, are typically officially condemned but nevertheless may be unofficially practiced by such organizations. Hazing typically involves risky behavior, such as intensive drinking, or potentially life threatening activities. Hazing, which is officially banned by all national Greek organizations, frequently comes to the public’s attention through the popular news media when the activities become fatal. (Drought & Corsoro 2003) If you are a college student or have been in the past, think about the parties that you go to. There is no one there monitoring and watching how much drinking goes on, which leads to drugs and sexual assault. Another issue is a lot of sexual assaults happen at these kind of fraternity parties and no one is holding them accountable. At the Alfred University Chuck Stenzel, locked in a dark car trunk, felt stinging cold on his bare arms. At least, he thought, Jack Daniel’s is keeping me warm.

It was a lung-crystallizing night, just 9 degrees. Wearing only T-shirts, three shivering young men — cramped in the back end of the old blue Chevy. Each pledge had been handed a pint of bourbon, a bottle of wine and a six-pack of beer. They were locked up until they drank all of it. More beer drinking games followed at the party. The fraternity brothers wanted the pledges to get sick and throw up, to fulfill a traditional part of their initiation.

Hazing is illegal in New York State. Members are sworn to secrecy and take brotherhood and sisterhood very seriously. It is a violation of their ‘code’ to speak of what happens when you go outside the walls. This proves to be true when Louise Continelli of the Buffalo News says Greeks get very upset when other Greeks or ex-Greeks reveal hazing practices,’ says Nuwer, who also addresses hazing in athletics, the military and secret adult organizations. Almost all Greeks take oaths not to reveal fraternity secrets, and so they regard whistleblowers as traitors — pure and simple. (Continelli 1991) Despite a long history of injury, death, and litigation, hazing within fraternities remains both a widespread and commonly accepted practice on most college campuses. Allan and Madden (2008) found that 55% of students participating in clubs, organizations, and sports teams experienced hazing. The most widely reported forms of hazing include forced alcohol consumption, humiliation, isolation, sleep-deprivation, and forced sex acts. (McCreary, Bray, & Thoma 2016) In some more recent news in June of 2018, at Louisiana State University after Maxwell Gruver died was force to drink alcohol as part of an initiation rite. Before he died he was called to the Phi Delta Theta house, that he was rushing and had to participate in something called “Bible Study’ where the pledges are asked a series of questions of the frats history and if they get it wrong they have to drink alcohol. They also had to participate in wall sits, where members walked across there knees. By early morning end he had a very weak pulse and they were not sure he was breathing or not. He was eventually taken to a hospital and later died. From his death the Phi Delta Theta house was suspended and Governor John Bel Edwards of Louisiana signed into law an anti-hazing bill that would make it a felony for those involved in hazing that resulted in death, serious bodily harm, or life-threatening levels of alcohol. And students found guilty could land in a Louisiana jail for up to five years. By the time an autopsy was done his blood alcohol level .495%. What makes this organization so alluring is the fact that they have these age-old rituals, shrouded in secrecy, that dictate how they gather, greet each other and initiate their young pledges. Being apart of something is something we all crave, something some people would literally die to be apart of. `

Another hazing incident plaguing universities all over is the death of Andrew Coffey. He was pledging Florida State University Pi Kappa Phi, where at a house party he was forced to drink an entire bottle of Wild Turkey 101 bourbon. And from that he died.

Both the college scandal and the hazing through fraternities that kill many students in schools across the nation, enough is enough. These two cases prove to be social issues because once the news break, people demand for a change.it affects how people within the community act and and feel. What they want to do with their future, which college to go with, they may question if they are going to be given a fair 100% chance of getting in on their own merits and accomplishments made all through high school, and with the hazing at fraternities and sororities, they need to be monitored better. Parents are not going to want to send their kids to a school that has a reputation of hazing with the fear that their child may be affected by it. With the admission scandal people are demanding that they change the admissions process and realize that people have been slipping through the cracks. It makes over achieving and straight A students think if they did not get into a good school is it because some other kid’s family put down more money or had an unfair advantage in the process? It highlights the inequalities that’s in the education field and how the wealthy and famous buy there way in and people of lower status get rejected time and time again. With the hazing there are websites and groups who go around and spread the word of hazing and most schools have anti hazing restrictions. , “The difference is, we’ve never had parents involved before. Fraternities and sororities have never partnered with parents who have lived this devastation,” and their stories are having a huge impact on students. There are campaigns that state “ these hands don’t haze” to show support of the cause and how they recognize it does happen but at this school there is absolutely no place for it . With all these cases coming into light, parents feel they need to step in and help. They are obviously devastated that there child they have raised, goes away to school and joins a sorority or fraternity and they treat like dirt, and end up dying proving their worth through ridiculous hazing activities that should not even be a thing. There is an organization called the National Panhellenic, that oversees these organization and parents have recently teamed up with them and want help create a change.

They all agree that will all the deaths the past couple of years on hazing, some serious changes need to be made. With the devastation that losing a child brings through hazing, the parents do not want it to happen anymore. That is why parents partnering with them, they hope to spread the word. Even for people who had been hazers, that is in the past, what you do now is what matters going forward.

College is all about different experiences and life lessons and goals. Living with questions of what if is no way to live at all. I met a woman at a protest this weekend in Downtown Atlanta- She is twenty- two years old and she has had the experience of being Miss Freshman and Miss Grambling State University at her school in Grambling, Louisiana, where she also graduated this Spring 2020. If we may, we will call her Queen. It was obvious that she was already a leader, plus she seemed sweet and elegant. I gave Queen a brief summary of the book “Paying for the party.” Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality is a powerful, carefully researched, and ultimately furious work of social science. In my opinion, it is targeting the experience of a woman making it through college or not. Simple. Queen explains that she feels like college saved her; especially at her position at the university. Before her title, as she explains them, her “haters” discouraged her in many ways, but she pressed through.

During her down time, she has experienced the fun side of campus and the gloomy days. Paying for the Party mentions ones’ upbringing or parenting in each chapter. It has been proven that many of those who are successful often come from wealth, which personally, i know can make a difference. Those who suffer, their parents most likely did not attend a college. This has major implications for the way we structure undergraduate education. Her mother and father did not attend college, so they did not understand the hype of greek life and organizations and any other extracurricular. During her sophomore year, she decided to pledge Delta Sigma Theta, Sigma

Alpha Iota, and many other academic clubs and organization. In my opinion, I felt like the book was suggesting that some colleges are seriously failing our students in areas of critical thinking, analytic reasoning and other high level thinking skills. When mentioning the book and sharing my personal statement, Queen agreed. At her HBCU, she expresses it as “survival of the fittest.” Her final statement expresses: “College is what you make it- No one can teach you how to live your life, you just have to do it! If it is meant for you, you will follow through. Remember- We party hard and stay up late, but most of all we graduate!”

Queen expresses her wanting to go to Grambling for an experience of “doing it on her own.” Most people when going to college, that is the first time that they experience doing for themselves. That time is also the time that students try to form a bond with their parents. Many undergrads, especially those who live on campus, are caught in the middle between dependence and independence, making their own rules and schedules but relying on their parents to help them navigate financial-aid applications and health insurance. According to “Paying for the Party,” “ Most american highschools have come to embrace a “college for all” mentality, encouraging students to proceed to higher education regardless of their academic performance.” (34) Queen agreed on how unprepared she was for college academically, which caused her to lack in other areas, like maintaining finances and choosing fun or activities instead of doing course work. Queen graduated with her bachelors of arts in English. Queen expresses that students who feel less emotionally prepared for college than their peers tend to have lower grades and other negative experiences on campus. In order to overcome these battles, she suggests spending months of her life simply in her dorm room, only because she knew she wanted to stay in school and she had a title to uphold. She felt like getting involved was her motivation to complete school. As mentioned before, since her reign of Miss Freshman she has also pledged and got involved in other clubs and she made it to her title of Miss Grambling.

Everything she was involved with, including deciding her major, she says, was close to her heart. Another way to cope with your problems, is to always do what you love. Her parents did not attend college, so they think that everything is always going to be perfect. Parents believe everything is always paid for and there is no real trauma in college. Academically Adrift explains: “The dormitory is often the place where students make their first social contacts in college, and the reported individual growth they experience by living on campus has been argued by others to have both social and academic dimensions.” ( 82) Arum and Roksa suggest that students receiving the full on-campus experience such as: living on campus, going to the café, and interacting with other students have proven to show an increase in fundamental opportunities and career growth. I read her the quote and she responded, “The lie detector determines, that was a lie!” It was explained that yes, living on campus at least for your freshman year is where you will begin to see growth within yourself. It’s where you create friendships, network, gain exposure, and seek out the variety of recreational opportunities that campus has to offer. She also expresses how much time has changed and the key to ones’ success is honestly based off who you know, what you know, and how you know. We really bonded over her reaction, because I was not sure if I was having the same experience as others.

While on campus, she worked at a popular food establishment on campus called “Wingos.” Paying for the party suggests:“Many strivers also spent time working in the dining halls or libraries on campus. The jobs were helpful in that transportation was not necessary, they were less physically demanding, and they brought in much needed money. At the same time, though, they placed disadvantaged students in a second- class position— literally performing service for more economically advantaged students.” (153) Armstrong and Hamilton expressed that students who needed financial support or additional support worked twice as hard in college as opposed to students who were financially set and fully supported. The Queen explains that, “those kids can be something else!” When going to college, we have to realize that everyone there is there for a different reason. Being a college student and having to work takes a lot of other skills; like time management, especially while some also manage raising a family. It can be a daunting experience, but getting that diploma in the end while earning your keep is definitely possible.

Miss Grambling State University was the perfect candidate for my essay. I choose her because it seems like she had a story to tell, because I could see the anger in her eyes even with her style and grace. I found out a lot of interesting things about her experience, which are off the record. Queen has lived on both sides of a successful college student and with her diploma she will be writing in the news department of CNN. She plans to stay involved in her community and give back to the Grambling community also. She also explained her entire career path. She plans to work at the CNN center for a few years then pursue her teaching career and she hopes to eventually land in law school.

Work Cited

1. Armstrong A. Elizabeth, Hamilton T. Laura: “Paying for the Party: How College
2. Maintains Inequality”. Harvard University PrArum, Richard. Roksa, Josipa: “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses”.ess 2013.

Abstract

The researcher studied the correlation between the students’ level of participation on campus – which was measured based on the number of organizations students partook in – with their overall campus experience and satisfaction. The data was collected through a sample of several groups of college students, and the data output was measured through a Chi-Square test. The results indicated that there was no significance between the amount of clubs students partook in and their satisfaction.

Introduction: Are Students more satisfied if they’re Involved?

1) Student’s Involvement in Campus

a) Campus life plays an important role in relation to a student’s college experience. Whether or not students decide to participate in campus events and organizations could be a factor in their overall view of the university – or so it’s hypothesized. According to Hegedus (2009), more than 50% of college students will, more often than not, be involved in extracurricular activities. It’s been reported that students who regularly make use of such resources showed increased promise in the workforce and supposedly have a greater college experience overall.

i) Students not involved reported their reasons being in relation to more of an inability to participate – rather than disinterest (Hegedus, Christine, 2009. Pg. 3). Reasons for such are likely a factor of transportation, work, and so on.

ii) Around 66% of students involved reported that partaking in extracurricular activities strengthened their leadership skills – while merely 24% stated that being involved was important to them. (Hegedus, Christine, 2009. Pg. 3).

2) The Importance of Student Involvement

a) A student’s willingness to participate in college extracurricular activities can shape their interactions with peers and faculty – allowing for more opportunities to build relationships and skills within an academic environment. According to Jorgenson, “… Social and institutional aspects of connectedness appear to be interlinked, influencing one another in creating an overall feeling of connectedness.” (Pg. 81). How this theory of ‘connectedness’ links itself with success, however, could rely on several factors. Firstly, it can be assumed that students themselves are to take the initiative to pursue their own success, and that their success – whether that be social, academic, etc., acts as an influence on their overall satisfaction. It’s also imperative that the environment created by the university and its faculty supports the student on their pursuit towards success.

i) It’s assumed that participation in extracurricular activities in college heightens student’s overall experience. Furthermore, it’s been observed that a student’s self-esteem tended to depend on whether or not they had any activities to participate in outside of studying, (Collins. 2001).

ii) Research studies have shown that certain student organizations and extracurricular activities not only promote student achievement, but also increase general satisfaction with the academic experience. (Yin. 2007). As Yin also points out, however, too much involvement can lead to an unbalance – and thus cause a negative effect on a student’s overall wellbeing.

3) How to Measure Satisfaction?

a) Satisfaction, in the context of this study, is measured mostly by student perception. This perception can encompass many aspects, such as learning, relationships, housing etc. These aspects come together to form the overall environment of a college campus. Thus, when we refer to satisfaction, what we are really referring to is a student’s perception of their environment and how it has benefitted them.

b) In regard to student involvement it can be argued, in retrospect, that whether or not students participate in activities outside of a classroom setting has little to do with their opinion on the campus as a whole. This could be related to personal factors as much as academic factors – In other words, it’s possible that students do not measure their satisfaction on factors based outside of academics as strongly as they would weigh resources that are more classroom-focused. This is where the study presents certain limitations, as most variables are centered around participation in recreational activities rather than in class. Therefore, these confounding variables could not be measured.

i) In a study based on the involvement of graduate students, the authors hypothesized that the most involved students would also be the most satisfied with their graduate school experience. Specifically, in regard to counselor education, it was believed if a student was involved in 10 or more hours of counseling-related extracurricular activities per semester, they would likely be satisfied with their graduate school experience. While the results did not show involved students were dissatisfied with their graduate school experience, the results also did not prove involvement had a positive effect on satisfaction. (Farley. 2011).

ii) As this study fails to address, the what students put into their class time contributes to a large portion of their satisfaction. The general notion is that students will get more out of college if they put more into it. If students become involved in class discussions, student activities, and residence hall programs, they will become engaged with and learn from other students and faculty. (Webber. 2013).

Methods

In the following study, a survey based off the College Students Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ; 4th edition) was randomly assigned to a sample of 250 college students in Florida Gulf Coast University. The questionnaire measured the correlation between student involvement on campus with their overall college experience and satisfaction.

Design and Procedure

In accordance to the CSEQ, students were asked a variety of questions regarding housing and transferring. Students were also asked if they participated in any clubs or organizations, and if so, then how many. At the end of the questionnaire, students evaluated the quality of their college experience in relation to multiple facets (such as administration, housing, events, programs, etc.). More importantly, students then rated their experience in college as a whole.

Study Objective and Data Collection

The purpose of the research is to test the presence of a correlation between the amounts of clubs or organizations students participate in in relation to their overall attitude towards their college experience. For the study, a classroom sample was selected from the school population. Students were randomly assigned to receive an extensive survey evaluating their college experience and attitudes. Other confounding variables, such as administration, commutes and such were measured and compared to the study’s main results. The tests put to use both nominal and ordinal type data.

Data Analysis

In order to measure the satisfaction rates of students based on the number of clubs or organizations they partake in, the test administered consisted of the Chi Square Test conducted through SPSS. The data collected from multiple variables were examined and analyzed accordingly in their relations to each other. The results indicated that a little less than half of the participants participated in extracurricular activities. We observed no significant difference between the students who attended clubs and those who did not in how satisfied they felt with their college experience. The P value (.798) was not significant and was shown to be greater than the alpha value. Through multiple runs of the study it was also confirmed that confounding variables, such as housing, grade level, and resources did not affect the results. Therefore, there is little to no statistical significance in the correlation.

Conclusion

It can be speculated through the results of the study that since the P was not statistically significant, that there is no correlation between student’s involvement in clubs or organizations and their overall campus satisfaction. These results would require further testing in regard to confounding variables such as the school’s classroom setting and approaches to academics, as well as surveying what students believe to be the greatest factor in their satisfaction – whether that be academics, relationships, recreational opportunities, and so on. These would have to be compared to the original data and cross examined for any possible significance.

References

1. Collins R. John, Valerius Laura, King C. Teresa. (2001). the Relationship between College Students’ Self-Esteem and the Frequency and Importance of Their Participation in Recreational Activities. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pr0.1990.67.2.457
2. Farley, K., McKee, M., & Brooks, M. (2011). The Effects of Student Involvement on Graduate Student Satisfaction: A Pilot Study. Alabama Counseling Association Journal, 37(1), 33 -38. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.fgcu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ954288&site=ehost-live
3. In this article, Farley, McKee and Brooks examine the correlation between student involvement in extracurricular activities and student satisfaction. They measure satisfaction through the use of a Likert-type scale, among many other surveys that gather data on variables such as ethnicity, age, gender, etc. However, the study – due to many limitations and confounding variables – could not find a correlation between student satisfaction and campus involvement. This study is useful, however, in establishing a method for measuring student satisfaction.
4. Hegedus M. Christine. (2009). Student Participation in Collegiate Organizations – Expanding the Boundaries. Retrieved from https://www.leadershipeducators.org/Resources/Documents/Conferences/Lexington/Hegedus.pdf
5. Jorgenson, D. A., Farrell, L. C., Fudge, J. L., & Pritchard, A. (2018). College Connectedness: The Student Perspective. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 18(1), 75 -95. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.fgcu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ1169938&site=ehost-live
6. In this study, the researchers conduct a study centered on student’s perception of connectedness on campus. The study was conducted through purposive sampling, where undergraduate students answered questions through an online survey. The results showed that student’s perception of connectedness is often centered on relationships with school staff and their peers. It was also calculated that students who feel more connection with others in school (typically through involvement in activities) were less likely to engage in risky behaviors. Overall, these results are useful for understanding any possible reasons behind a correlation in student satisfaction and campus involvement.
7. Webber, K. L., Krylow, R. B., & Zhang, Q. (2013). Does Involvement Really Matter? Indicators of College Student Success and Satisfaction. Journal of College Student Development, 54(6), 591–611. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.fgcu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ1018076&site=ehost-live
8. Yin, D., & Lei, S. A. (2007). Impacts of Campus Involvement on Hospitality Student Achievement and Satisfaction. Education, 128(2), 282–293. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.fgcu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ816872&site=ehost-live

Abstract

• Keywords: Information technology, Innovation, Social media.

Introduction

Modernisation is a trend of life these days. Gone are the days when one remained contented and satisfied with one’s lot, with one’s social status, manners, standard of living and so on and so forth. A change has become very common now. This is an age of information and technology.

Education has to be revolutionised in accordance with the times and new aims of life with changed needs and requirements of the people and the society. All that will have to mould education fully so as to make it modern. Social media allows people to share ideas, post news, ask questions and share links; allowing information to reach a wide audience. Websites and Applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. Most popular social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat etc.

College and higher education provides a platform for try new things, getting out from your comfort zone, learning about new things. Social media is one of the successes of Mantra for students. Literacy has changed or modified from being able to read and write, to the ability for individuals to understand information however it may be presented. Individual will need to gather information from various sources, process the information and store the information. Despite the positive impacts of social media has had on education, there are constraints also as we are faced the problems of difference between generations X and Y, Securities and private issues etc.

Literature review

• Aleksandrova and Parusheva (2017) in the study entitled, “SOCIAL MEDIA IN HIGHER EDUCATION FROM STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVE ” Review three main area of interest, namely using social media in the process of learning, creation and distribution of education-related content. The study examines the usage of and the attitude to various social media applications. Results show that the application of social media is largely initiated by students and not so much by teachers. Facebook groups are preferable social media for communication with colleagues and content sharing.
• Owusu Boateng & Afua Amankwaa (2016) this study focused on the impact of social media on student academic life in higher education. After studying the phenomena that are of interest to the study, and transcribing the various responses of the participants, even though some of the responses were not transcribed because they were all communicating same idea, the results reveal that social media is widely used by students of higher institution. At least every student makes use of one social media. Moreover, data revealed that, participants are in support of the idea that social media contribute a significant quota to the development of their academic life.
• M. Talaue et al. (2018) Based on the findings, social media becomes an integral part of the student’s full life, took up most of his spare time. The time spend by the respondents on social media stressed that the impact on their academic performance ends up negative. So, the social media, which also has a familiar name as a social networks or web, chooses students as its potential victims. All kinds of computer technologies, mobile phones have significantly expanded the scope of both positive and negative factors of the spiritual and intellectual development of the younger generation. Thus, it can be concluded that social media have a dual impact on student achievement, and it is necessary to approach adolescents’ use of social networks with ultimate responsibility.

Research Methodology

The following methodology was followed for the present study.

Objectives of the study

The present study aims

• To study the types of social media platforms used by college students.
• To identify the key success factors of social media on higher education.
• To find out the adverse effects of social media for college students.
• To know the initiatives taken by universities and colleges in India .

Methods of Data Collection

The present study was based on both Primary and Secondary Data.

• Primary Data: Primary data will be collected by interacting with students in Chandigarh.
• Secondary Data: The secondary data will be collected from published books, journals, research papers, magazines, daily newspaper, internet and official statistical documents.

Research Type

• The study is descriptive in the sense that it is carried out with the objective of describing a particular situation of students.
• The study is analytical in nature as an attempt has been made to find out the cause rather than result.

Selection of study area: The study area is in city of Chandigarh.

Selection of the sample size: 50

Findings

1. Most preferred social media for academic purpose

No of users who have registered is shown in Table 1 :-

Social Media No Of Users

• Facebook 45
• Whatsapp 49
• Twitter 10
• Linkedin 20
• Others 15

The rate of participant ownership of an account on social networking sites and academic-networking sites is shown in Figure 1.

Majority of the students use Whatsapp for sharing information. Only 32% have an account with facebook, 15% have an account with Linkedin, and only 7% have one with Twitter.

2. Key success factors of social media in higher education

1. Fosters communication and collaboration -Blogging represents a growing activity among professionals and students who appreciate blogs for their mix of informal commentary, links to resources and personal touch. SNSs offer people opportunities to share life experiences, vent frustrations, offer reflections on social issues and express themselves in a non-threatening atmosphere. SNSs also enable community involvement in locating expertise, sharing content and collaborating to build content, and allow knowledge workers to extend the range and scope of their professional relationships.
2. Social networking supports Research and Development (R&D). Researchers create new knowledge while using existing knowledge. Their activities often take place in a social context made up of informal exchanges, brainstorming, idea exploration and cross-fertilisation. Social networking allows researchers to draw from a social network of information and people outside of their traditional “circle of friends”.
3. Social networking promotes accumulation of social capital. Social capital, resources accumulated through relationships among people, has been linked to positive social outcomes, including: better public health, lower crime rates, and more efficient financial markets. Facebook lowers the barriers to participation so that students who might otherwise shy away from initiating communication or responding to others are encouraged to do so, and, amongst highly-engaged users, strengthens relationships that would otherwise remain weak.
4. Motivation and Learning Opportunities-believes that classroom blogging has the potential to motivate students, to build online collaboration, and enhance learning opportunities. Literacy in the classroom may be promoted through the use of storytelling and dialogue. This describes SNSs as educational tools because they allow students to develop ideas and invite feedback. Social networking helps teachers promote reflective analysis and the emergence of a learning community that goes beyond the school walls.
5. Learning Tool in Libraries. Clyde believes that blogging in schools is an information-related activity that requires and develops information skills in students and should therefore be supported by school libraries. Social networking can be used by librarians to raise their visibility, augment or eliminate stereotypical images of librarians, increase Research Article – SACJ No. 49, September 2012 15 research assistance traffic via Facebook message boxes and make library services and librarian assistance more convenient.
6. Enables Educators to be Better Advisors. Comments that students post on the site may provoke thoughtful conversation. SNSs may provide helpful information to educators and help them deal with certain situations better; one educator knew to go easy on a student when he saw his status change from “in a relationship” to “single”. Students may also feel more comfortable approaching educators who are present and friendly or who interact casually with them on Facebook; it gives students the encouragement they need.
7. Digital Learning as a Substitution Process. Online learning is a new social process that is beginning to act as a complete substitute for both distance learning and the traditional face to-face class. The believe that face-to-face courses, blended with online learning technologies and methodologies, are generally rated by students as significant improvements over face-to-face (only) classes.

Adverse impact of social media for college students

• These social media influence the academic performance of students negatively, because they distract from the students studies.
• Using social media require spending money and are wastage of time and by this way it will affect the students’ academic life. Addiction to social media is problematic issue that affects the students’ academic life. Students can play online games and visit these sites just by logging into them.
• It can affect the bonding process between the teacher and the student as social media becomes a communication tool rather than face to face conversation and thus the transactional distance is increased.
• Also since not all the teachers are experts with ICT they may be lax in updating the course content online which can slow down the learning among students.
• It may shift the attention from the primary goal of the learning process to developing ICT skills, which is the secondary goal.

Notable initiatives of use of ICT in education in India include:

• Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) uses radio, television and internet technologies.
• National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning: a concept similar to the open courseware initiative of MIT.it uses internet and television technologies.
• Eklavya initiative: Uses internet and television to promote distance learning.
• IIT-Kanpur has developed ‘Brihaspati’, an open-source e-learning platform (Virtual classroom).
• UGC initiated scheme called “ICT for teaching-learning process” for achieving quality and excellence in higher education.
• UGC is encouraging creation of e-content/learning material for the teaching-learning process and management of education in colleges and universities.
• UGC INFONET, A network of Indian universities and colleges, by integrating Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the process of teaching, learning and education management.
• Premier institute like Calcutta have entered into a strategic alliance with NIIT for providing programmes through virtual classrooms.
• Jabalpur University is using mobile learning centre.
• Apart from enhancing students’ learning experience, role of ICTs in Capacity building /training of educational personnel has a very large potential. National level institutes can provide a leadership role in enhancing technical and managerial manpower in different disciplines through ICT networks and collaborations.

Conclusion

“Knowledge Is Constantly Being Created, Shared And Received”

For an effective teaching-learning process “Social Media” is one of the successes Mantra for academicians. It is very helpful for future’s growth and development of higher education. Even Teachers have posted content for students to view or read outside the classroom. The curriculum now requires pupils to become “DIGITALLY LITERATE”. ICTs allows for the creation of digital resources like digital libraries where the students, teachers and professionals can access research material and course material from any place at any time. Social Media can allow us to gather information, post our thoughts, create discussions and get a varied response from people all over the world.

References

1. Aleksandrova and Parusheva.(2017). SOCIAL MEDIA IN HIGHER EDUCATION FROM STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVE. International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conferences on Social Sciences & Arts.4, 709-716.
2. Owusu Boateng & Afua Amankwaa. (2016). the Impact of Social Media on Student Academic Life in Higher Education. Global Journal of HUMAN-SOCIAL SCIENCE: G Linguistics & Education.16(4),1-8.
3. M. Talaue ,Ali AlSaad et all. (2018). THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF SELECTED COLLEGE STUDENTS. International Journal of Advanced Information Technology (IJAIT).8(4),27-35.
4. Dahlstrom, E.; De Boor, T.; Grunwald, P.; Vockley, M. ECAR: National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology.Availableonline:https://library.educause.edu/resources/2011/10/ecar-nationalstudy-of-undergraduate-students-and-information-technology-2011-report (accessed on 30 October 2018).

Attention: Think about that time when you did not have enough cash on you when you were with your friend and they just covered for you. Not a big deal, right? You probably venmoed them back or paid for the next time. Now, what if you needed to pay tens of thousands of dollars? You would probably take out a loan and work hard to try to pay it off. (AA)

Transition: Many college students are faced with this problem when they pay tuition and they are unaware of the options that are available to them to help reduce their costs.

Problem: College tuition has been rising, and it puts students like us in debt after graduation.

The costs of college continue to rise year over year.

Universities have been getting more expensive because of several factors: the increase in demand for higher education, an insufficient number of faculty, and a lack of funding.

According to Forbes in 2018, the average annual cost of a four-year university is $26,120 with a total cost of $104,480. In 1989, it would have been a total of $52,892 after adjusting for inflation.

The cost has more than doubled in less than three decades. (AA)

On average, that would be a 2.6% increase in tuition costs every year.

Student loan debt continues to increase and is getting more difficult to pay off.

After housing debt, student loan debt is now the largest debt Americans owe at $1.4 trillion.

CollegeBoard statistics show that the average amount borrowed for a college graduate in 1983 was $746, or $1,881 in today’s money. (AA) Contrast that with the average amount of $37,172 borrowed for a college graduate in 2017.

As this happens, wages have continued to stagnate. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reports that the average growth per year in salary was 0.3% from 1989 to 2016.

As a result, Americans have been struggling.

The Washington Post in 2019 reports that young adults cannot afford to buy a house or save for retirement due to student loan debt.

Student loan debt made it more difficult for 400,000 families to qualify for a mortgage or save up for a down payment

With student loan debt, people were only able to save half as much for their 401(k) compared to those without student loan debt.

Transition: So how can we mitigate some of that debt?

Solution: To reduce student loan debt after graduation, we should apply for FAFSA.

Let me explain what FAFSA is.

FAFSA stands for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and is used by students to help determine eligibility for financial aid for college.

The US Department of Education states that you will receive a Student Aid Report with your Expected Family Contribution, or EFC, after filling out your FAFSA. Based on the information in your FAFSA application, you may receive a Federal Pell Grant, which does not need to be repaid.

Over a third of high school graduates did not submit a FAFSA application.

Even if you do not qualify for federal financial aid, your FAFSA information may still be required to receive other non-federal financial aid programs like scholarships or college award packages.

FAFSA applications can help significantly reduce student loan debt.

According to CNBC in 2019, undergraduate students received an average of $8,440 in federal, state, college, and private grants.

If you are an Illinois resident attending the University of Illinois, the admissions office estimates your total expenses per year to be no more than $36,394. That means the average student here would be able to reduce their tuition by 23%. (AA)

You may think you do not need to submit an application for FAFSA because you will not receive any money or that it takes up too much time, but that is not true.

According to a 2016 article on NerdWallet, over $2.7 billion in aid in total was not taken.

More than $97 million in total Pell Grant money was available for 26,527 Illinois students. (AA)

The average time it takes to complete a FAFSA application is 21 minutes, according to the Department of Education.

It is even simpler now that the application auto-fills the tax information that your family provided the IRS with.

The application opens in October, which gives you more time to find the correct information and fill it out.

Visualization: Spending a little extra time to fill out your FAFSA application will help reduce stress in the future.

Receiving grants and scholarships will help lower the total cost of college. Imagine being able to begin saving money for retirement, while your peers are still struggling to pay off their student loan debts. You would have more spending money to go on vacations or splurge on luxuries or provide for your kids.

You would be a step ahead of others at every stage of life in the future.

Transition: So what can you do right now?

Call to action: When you go home, fill out the FAFSA application if you have not done so already.

Go to studentaid.ed.gov and click “Start here.”

Fill out all the necessary information and ask your parents if you are unsure.

You may be eligible for federal aid or other scholarships.

If you start now, you will have less to worry about in your future.

Student Loan Debt

Earning a college degree is expected after a person graduates from high school. The higher the degree, the more money is earned. It is the goal of many to be a college graduate, however, the financial status of those seems to be a huge factor as to why many do not go to college or take out loans. Student loans can come from the federal government, private sources such as banks or financial institutions, or from other organizations. However, applying for a loan is the last resort when it comes to paying for college because of its negative reputation. By definition, student debt is money owed on a loan that was taken out to pay for educational expenses. Students take out loans in hopes of being able to pay them back but many find themselves in debt. The total student loan debt has reached 1.5 trillion dollars but why has it reached this level? (Friedman 2019)

Generation of Americans have been borrowing money to pay for education for a long time and hundreds of thousands are in debt because of this decision. Students are encouraged to save money for higher education but, with college tuition rates rising it decreases the possibility to cover all costs without seeking some financial assistance. The higher the degree the higher the cost will be. For advanced degrees, according to an article on GoGrid, “a graduate student will no longer be eligible for the Federal Pell Grant or any need-based state financial aid.” Graduate students depend on loans and/or other resources to pay for their tuition. Student loan debt occurs more with graduate students because they have fewer options to pay for such an incredibly expensive tuition when compared to undergraduate students. The disadvantage of student debt can be the possibility of the student not graduating and still having to pay the money taken out.

Politicians are aware of the student loan debt being so high but no final plan to get rid of the debt is in place. According to Cautero, the average college graduate with a bachelor’s degree takes just over 21 years to pay off his or her loans. This interferes with the ability to buy a home or even save up money. Millennials, baby boomers, and Generation X all have one thing in common. Student loan debt affects everyone because this is a multi-generational issue. The borrowers struggle to afford basic necessities in life, including transportation, housing, and healthcare.

It is clear that student loan debt has become a crisis that has no solution at the moment. Millions of Americans are being affected regardless of age. There has been talked about passing a bill but time and time again, the Republicans continue to refuse to have a vote set in place. However, the Obama White House passed a bill to lower student loan interest rates, saving the average undergraduate $1,500 on interest charges in the year 2013. (Lederman & Elliott 2013) Lower student loan debt obligations leave Americans with more money.

The answer as to why hasn’t student loan debt has not decreased is because Republicans have blocked numerous votes on student loan refinancing. The issue is not a priority to those in the legislation. The Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, has said that she will not commit to upholding an Obama Administration written rule to target for-profit colleges. Instead of helping students in debt, Devos Education Department is allowing debt collectors to charge borrowers exorbitant fees on top of their loan payments. (Ross 2017) The crisis is getting worse for students because of the Trump Administration. Tuition rises as well as the interest rate for these loans. To make matters worse, Trump Administration proposes the elimination of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness because of the budget plan for the 2020 fiscal year. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program forgives the remaining balance on Direct Loans after someone has made 120 (10 years) qualifying monthly payments under a qualifying repayment plan while working full-time for a qualifying employer. This program was signed into law in 2007 and there have been rumors of it being shut down for budgetary purposes.

Student loans are a crushing burden to millions, especially those in the Latino and black communities that default at a higher rate than others. For many, the payments are proving unmanageable. By 2023, nearly 40 percent of borrowers are expected to default on their student loans. (Nova 2018) While borrowers are having trouble repaying, the only real winners are for-profit colleges and lenders who have taken advantage of the reduced enforcement of consumer protection by the Trump Administration. Research from The Center for American Progress (CAP), a public policy think tank, estimates 87 percent of black and 65 percent of Latino students take out federal student loans compared to 60 percent of white students. Among those who finish college, black bachelor’s degree holders default five times as often as white bachelor’s degree holders. They even default more often than white students who don’t complete their degrees, the CAP study found. (Jones 2019)

Nonetheless, Republicans and Democrats are both at fault for this severe crisis. President Bill Clinton traded the privatization of Sallie Mae pushed by a Republican Congress for an increase in Pell Grants sought by Democratic members of Congress. (Ross 2017) Both parties are to blame but only one has the willingness to take on the challenge to make a change for the future generations of students.

This is a systematic problem that continues to worsen while college tuition and the cost of borrowing money are rising. It is up to those in the state and local policymakers to set a plan in place because the federal government has turned a blind eye to this crisis.

Works Cited

1. Friedman, Zack. “Student Loan Debt Statistics In 2019: A $1.5 Trillion Crisis.” Forbes, 25 Feb. 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2019/02/25/student-loan-debt-statistics-2019/#7f2c694f133f.
2. McWhirter, Kathy. “Filing Your FAFSA for Grad School: Expert Tips and Resources .” GoGrad.org, 28 Nov. 2018, https://www.gograd.org/resources/fafsa-for-grad-school/.
3. Cautero, Rachel M. “How Long Does It Take the Average American to Pay Off Student Loans?” Thebalance.com, 25 June 2019, https://www.thebalance.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-pay-off-student-loans-4588027.
4. Lederman, Josh, and Philip Elliott. “Obama Signs Student Loan Bill Lowering Interest Rates.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 9 Aug. 2013, https://www.nbcnews.com/businessmain/obama-signs-student-loan-bill-lowering-interest-rates-6C10887330.
5. Ross, Scott. “Devos, Trump Make the Student Loan Crisis Worse.” The Progressive, Aug. 2017, pp. 44–47.
6. Jones, David R. “Communities of Color Hit Hardest by Student Loan Debt Crisis.” The New York Amsterdam News, 24 Jan. 2019, p. 5.
7. Nova, Annie. “More than 1 Million People Default on Their Student Loans Each Year.” CNBC, CNBC, 13 Aug. 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/13/twenty-two-percent-of-student-loan-borrowers-fall-into-default.html.