What worries the college generation? 45% believe the world is unraveling | Bruce Anderson
A new Harvard Graduate School of Education study reveals some scary figures about the current generation of college-age kids.
Anxiety and depression are becoming endemic and the causes are identifiable.
“The study was conducted in December 2022 as part of the School of Education’s Making Caring Common Project,” says Inside Higher Ed. “It identified several key drivers of young adults’ emotional challenges, including finances (56%), pressure to achieve (51%) and a perception that the world is unraveling (45%).
“Social media was lower on the list of influential factors; it only drove anxiety and depression among 28 percent of young adults.”
I get it. I hear them. I see it. And I wonder whether or not this is confined to this generation, or whether it is becoming a horrible top-to-bottom phenomenon.
The finance bit is an easy mark: When you are 17-25 you’re poor, and less and less likely to feel comfortable asking for bailouts from the folks. The rising cost of automobile maintenance, rental housing and other essentials hits younger folks harder than the older generation.
If you are in the 10th year of your career, you can have a reasonable expectation that your salary or wages will keep pace. At 19, working an entry-level position or a job designed to be filled by transient students, you can expect a minimum wage – and what that buys you is well documented and scary.
“Pressure to succeed” has always been with us, to some degree – but the sense that all actions must be dedicated to “purpose” and “efficiency” has never, in my experience, been greater. Where’s the sense of fun?
My colleague and chair, Kelly McHugh, a model of stability and optimism, points out that when you are 19, any failure is seen as the final thunder – impending and total collapse. And, of course, it isn’t but that’s easy to see from the height of experience – experience 19-year-olds have yet to acquire.
As we shift to promote more educational choices, my hope is that they will choose coursework that gives them a wider experience, so that when they do enter upon the working world, their paths to success will be multiple, not singular. Intellectual and job skills should be firmly placed in many “baskets” so that a singular failure does not mean personal apocalypse.
But the most frightening of all of these is that 45% of those suffering from worry – from depression and anxiety, from fear – are those who experience a “perception that the world is unraveling.”
More to the point, they believe their world is unraveling – the world they’re being handed, in an unrelenting and inevitable way. This is a good bit more alarming than fear of a car payment.
The job market could not be better, unemployment is at the lowest ebb in 50 years. Stocks rise and fall but the market is generally very good. We’re at peace (more or less).
The world is wide open: Despite debt, education – higher and higher levels of it – are available to a much wider crew than ever before. So why do they believe the world is “unraveling”?
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Because we tell them it is. Not us, per se, but their universe. The world’s acoustics echo with it. We’ve allowed the message of hopelessness to sneak in and dominate us. With despair, with awful predictions and most of all, with anger. Most of it made up. Dramatic.
The world of politics is a major contributor – if not the lead element. Where are the dreams and the buoyancy – and the kindness?
There has always been a wide and often ugly streak of Elmer Gantry here: con men feigning piousness for self-enrichment of various kinds, political and economic. Today, they permeate and suffuse our political world.
This generation is worried because they’ve been told – by “us” – how awful the world is. And that is truly depressing. For everyone.
Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay, Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: College-age folks are buying a line of bull about the world unraveling
