I recently found out that we go to the 20th-most-stressful college in the country.
Shortly after coming back from spring break, I was up late and avoiding my homework by browsing The Daily Beast. One article, "The 50 Most Stressful Colleges," caught my attention. I was curious to find out where Brown ranked in their authoritative, definitive calculations. Apparently, Brunonians achieved 20th place and are the least-stressed Ivy League students.
The article's methodology focused on tuition and "competitiveness" when calculating different campuses' stress levels. It defined "competitiveness" as academic rigorousness, but also included selectivity, college crime rates and, for some unexplained reason, the difficulty of the schools' engineering programs.
Using U.S. News and World Report rankings struck me as a flawed way to measure how academically challenging a school is. Those rankings use factors like endowment size and the rate of alumni donations, both of which are unrelated to students' workloads. U.S. News also relies on measuring selectivity and standardized test scores, which relate to students' stress and work before starting college.
According to The Daily Beast's U.S. News-driven methodology, Stanford is officially the most stressful college in America. Brown ranks just below Georgetown and right above Tufts.
Regardless of The Daily Beast's questionable methods, though, I couldn't be sure what the point of the rankings was. Should I be proud that I'm apparently experiencing less stress than students at Stanford or Harvard are? Should I feel self-conscious about supposedly not working as hard as they are?
Seeing the rankings made me recall a Harvard Magazine article I'd come across last month. The story was called "Nonstop: Today's superhero undergraduates do ‘3,000 things at 150 percent,' " and the rest of the article was just as humbling as the title.
According to Harvard Magazine, "Students today routinely sprint through jam-packed daily schedules, tackling big servings of academic work plus giant helpings of extracurricular activity in a frenetic tizzy of commitments." The article adopts an awestruck tone as it profiles the hectic daily lives of various Harvard undergrads. It also includes passages that consider the consequences of minimal downtime and persistent sleep-deprivation.
The Harvard story depicts a trend based on anecdotal evidence from individual sources, evoking concern over the students' well-being — while maybe bragging about their productivity along the way. The Daily Beast's rankings try to summarize a universe of college experiences through questionable methodology, turning stress levels into a form of competition in which it isn't exactly clear who is winning.
I doubt that either approach to generalizing stress, whether supposedly statistical or subjectively anecdotal, is helpful to college students actually experiencing it. Students at schools across the country feel pressure no matter where they fall in The Daily Beast's rankings, and highlighting individual workloads leads readers to question their own productivity and make judgments on other people's choices.
Describing and trying to quantify stress is not nearly as useful as attempting to help students deal with it. A three-part series in The Daily Princetonian included ways to minimize stress and more broadly support mental health. Many of the articles' findings can easily apply to other campuses. The series refers to using psychological services, exercising during homework breaks and taking semesters off as ways to lessen academic stress.
Another method can even involve stuffed animals. The Huffington Post recently linked to a story in the University Daily Kansan about college students who still proudly sleep with their "childhood bedtime companion(s)." According to the article, those childhood mementos can "provide comfort in times of stress and insecurity" and, for some people, ease the adjustment to college.
One of the Daily Princetonian articles also discusses how Web sites like PrincetonFML (or our Brown version) can create commiserating communities that diminish stress by reminding students that they aren't isolated — they aren't the only ones feeling at times they can barely stand the academic pressure. When Brunonians posted their own "FML" moments during finals season last semester, they weren't competing over stress levels or describing how impressively productive they were. They were generally demonstrating moments of vulnerability and inviting sympathy.
Making sweeping statements on students' stress levels may make for compelling copy, and presuming to be able to tell students whether they are more stressed-out than most may attract page views. However, the most useful way to approach the topic of stress is to pursue solutions.
William Tomasko '13 is from Washington, D.C. and can be reached at william_tomasko at brown.edu.
