Month: February 2019

A few days ago, one of my friends sends me a link to one episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about student debt. Although the title is student debt, I feel like it was more like criticism to those for-profit universities with really high tuition rate and poor education. I was quite surprised about the for-profit school since I feel Americans don’t concern about education that much, especially for those lower income families. They can always make a living as long as they want to work. Education is not the only option. China has such a for-profit university as well, as I mentioned in the first post, but the definition of poverty in China is way lower than it is here. Those farmer families can only earn 100 bucks a month, their lives are so terrible that investing huge amount of money in such universities becomes a reasonable choice. On the other hand, higher education in the US is much more common, even students’ grade is not good enough to apply to better university, community college can also provide cheap and decent education, which is certainly a much better choice than those for-profit universities.

But I was wrong, according to the data provided in that show, 13% students would like to take out a student loan to pay the high tuition, about 4 to 5 times more than the tuition of community college to get into these schools. Then the question is when for-profit schools have been reported for poor education quality, why does student choose to spend so much money to get into these schools instead of community college? 

After researching this question, I found that community school wasn’t such an ideal option either. For instance, the ratio of students who finish their 4-year program was much lower than that of for-profit universities, people even claim that their scheduling system and student services are worse than for-profit, but the article I read doesn’t provide any evidence for this statement. However, it still presents a good explanation for this difference. The author points out one likely reason community college completion rates are so low is that their heavily subsidized prices – they get tens of billions of dollars in direct government subsidies every year, which makes these colleges need not respond very effectively to student needs since much of their funding is detached from students. On the flip side, for-profit schools are much more student-centered and have a much stronger incentive to provide better services.

Another data about the popularity of for-profit schools compare to community colleges also somehow prove that for-profit schools can truly provide better educational resources. Between 1990 and 2010, for-profit colleges saw much faster enrollment growth than community colleges; 179 percent compared to 44 percent. This data collected from such a long period of time. If for-profit schools are really so terrible that its education is almost like a scam, the public should have been informed. Instead, the steady and fast growth rate shows that they are still not a bad option.

 

Then I tried to research about poverty. For people who live in poverty, attending college is a reasonable investment, while it’s hard to believe that so many teenagers don’t even have enough money to pay for their education in a developed country. The first thing I found was that the poverty rate in the U.S is not a small percentage, 16.3% of woman and 13.8% of a man, and their wage also seems to be pretty low. For a family with 3 members, the poverty threshold is about 19000 annual income, which is only a third of the average salary of a Penn State graduate. Although I didn’t grow up here, I have almost no idea what the life quality of 19000 dollars per year is like, but the huge difference between the income of a well-educated teenager and a poor family is enough to attract people invest a large amount of money in education.

After investigating the for-profit schools, I suddenly realized that public education is not just a problem in China. Oftentimes people only focus on those best universities since they stand for the best people and the best technology in a country, but neglect the need of equally huge amount of people in the bottom of the society. Many people still believe that education can help capable young people to jump into a higher social class, but the percentage of such people are always small. Most people still need to stay in the bottom for a few more generations, so in this case, a more affordable and useful higher education would largely improve their lives.

Citation:

https://povertyusa.org/facts

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/13/even-for-profit-universities-are-better-than-americas-terrible-community-colleges/

This week, when our deliberation group discussed our topic, mental health in the U.S colleges, it reminds me an article I have read before, in which the author claimed that about 40 present of international students in the U.S colleges are suffering from depression. I know a lot of international students, and most of them seemed really happy. Even they may feel stressed out sometimes, it was still far from depression. But I do think that students today are confronting much stronger competitions, and it’s likely that mental health is becoming an issue for college students. Therefore I did some research to see what is the situation.

Here is what I found. “Researchers from the World Health Organization, led by Columbia University Psychology Professor Randy P. Auerbach, surveyed nearly 14,000 first-year college students from eight countries (Australia, Belgium, Germany, Mexico, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Spain, and the U.S.) and found that 35 percent struggled with a mental illness.” This number is way beyond my expectation. Often times, people tend to feel that anxieties, as well as other related maladaptive behaviors, are just part of the college life. For instance, Sleep deprivation is legendary in college life, and many wear it almost as a badge of honor. However, the serious problems associated with sleep deprivation are clearly documented, and it’s also closely related to mental health issues or other domains. Other similar maladaptive patterns happen in many other aspects of college lives, including eating patterns, sexual, and drinking. All of these numbers and research have shown that mental health has become an issue in colleges, and some action needs to be taken.

One major proposal for this issue is improving the number of counseling centers in university and encouraging students to meet with professionals instead of self-medicating. Though schools around the world have made serious investments in mental health resources, the researchers found that colleges are still ill-equipped to deal with the surge of mental healthcare needs. The lack of access to counseling service cause many students to choose to self-medicating by drinking and doing drugs. However, “This just doesn’t work. In addition, the college years are frequently the time when addictions develop.” explains Dr. Sherry Benton.

However, some people believe that investing more in counseling centers is not the most effective way, and the huge amount of investment is required to provide enough access to mental health professionals. Instead, online mental health resources will provide students with low-cost accessibility to healthcare resources. It can also combine with the app for passive Symptom tracking. it can record movement patterns, social interactions (such as the number of texts and phone calls), behavior at different times of the day, and vocal tone and speed by built-in sensors in smartphones. In the future, apps may be able to analyze these data to determine the user’s real-time state of mind. Such apps may be able to recognize changes in behavior patterns that signal a mood episode such as mania, depression, or psychosis before it occurs. 

solution-online mental care. All of these data would be extremely helpful for professionals to know better about the situation.

Besides providing more resources, it’s equally important to teach students how to determine if they need help. I have watched an interview with many people with depression, many of them said that at the beginning of their depression, they believe that they can address the mental health issue by themselves as long as they put some effort. But until they finally talked to the professionals, they realized that it’ not likely that people with depression can cure themselves by their thoughts. Now I think many people still believe people’s power in maintaining homeostasis, while that may cause a lot of unnecessary suffering. To address this issue, schools, especially high schools, and university should certainly shoulder the responsibility of educating students about these mental health issues and teach them to reach out for help once they found some early signs of mental problems.

Finally, some people also suggest to remove the cause of the mental health crisis, which is the pressure from schools, but I don’t think that is an option. College lives getting more competitive is a natural trend result from various aspects of modern society. The pressure and competition will always be there even though easing the burden of schools since school is not the origin of the competition, the labor market and the society is. Therefore, people should focus more on teaching students to embrace these pressures, and learn to seek help when they can no longer take it

Citation: 

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/04/4-ways-to-be-proactive-about-your-mental-health-in-college.html

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201402/the-college-student-mental-health-crisis

http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/recognizing-warning-signs

I watched a documentary called homo academicus recently, and even though many situations in this documentary seems familiar to me, it was still really inspiring. In this documentary, four students from Harvard travel to different regions in the world, and experience the different education in these areas. Since it’s a long series, I only watched the first episode, the one about the Asian education system. So I am going to focus on the comparison between China, other Asian countries, and the western world.

The first place they traveled to Korea. They went to a street full of tutoring class, where numerous students studied hard and wish to get a good grade in the super competitive college entrance exam. Even for young students, a few students at the age of 12 said that they had to keep studying after leaving night school, and normally they go to bed at 12. For China, in my memory, it’s not usual for 12 years old kids to study till 12 at night. I normally stopped studying in 10:30 when I was 12, and for many other students, they spend even less time on studying. But that was the situation when I was young, education in China is always becoming more competitive. Besides, Chinese education also really similar to the education in Korean in many aspects, such as tutoring class. According to my dad, in a relatively large city, the average fee for tutoring per year is about 8000 dollars, which is over a third of the middle-class family’s annual income. 

This type of super stressful and competitive education may seem inhumane for the western world, but as someone who has experienced similar education, I don’t think to study hard is torture to Asian kids. From their childhood, these kids are trained to be able to concentrate on studying. It’s a little bit cruel for young kids, especially when they are about 6-8, but they will get used to it finally. I even feel that the student life for Asian kids is even better than kids here since basically everyone is facing the same enemy, the exam, they can build a much stronger friendship, and students really have no time to do some stupid things such as bullying others or learn to smoke the cigarette. It’s kind of like meditation, students actually have extremely pure life. They can always empty their mind, and don’t have to make choices and think about many trivial things.

But certainly, this way of studying has drawbacks. It’s fine that student’s don’t have too much motivation for studying when they are still in the school, because they can still passively accept all the knowledge mentioned in the class. But someday when they have to make choices themselves, many of them are confused. Western education, on the other hand, is all about motivation. The freedom that American children have is unbelievable for Asian kids. They are taught to make their decision ever since they were young. Instead of concentrating on those knowledge mentioned in the class, they are encouraged to choose what they love and give themselves a motivation for further studying. 

However, there are also problems with this way of education. I have seen a memorable sentence in an article, “American education is for genius, while Asian education is for normal people.” I think it’s not only accurate description for the difference of two education system but also points out the cons of American education. It tells everyone to follow their heart, but not everyone can understand what they wanna do in the future. Sometimes people get tired of numerous choices during their teenage year, without pressure from outside, can they really stand up again and keep moving forward? For Asian Education, no one gonna excels, but people don’t fall too far behind either. While for the education in the U.S, smart kids can be extraordinary, while some kids have pay for wrong choices they make when they are young. 

The last thing I wanna discussed is why Asian people care about education so much. Education is also important here, because it’s also related to of people would be able to do things they love as a job or earn enough money to support a family, but the study doesn’t seem to be such a big deal here. I don’t really have a answer for this right now, my understanding would be that most Chinese people are less satisfied with their lives, and therefore more eager to invest in the future, which is the education of their kids. Also in Chinese culture, children are kind of like a succession of parents lives, so parents always want to impose their wish and their dreams on the younger generation. But in the western world, kids are more like a independent individual. Since they are still young, normally they don’t have such a strong will to change their lives by education, and therefore care less about their education.