The difference here is at “tail-gate” it’s the kid who gets to choose which to be competitive in. In an elite college, there may be more pressured to mold into a Havard wo/man or the ideal MIT as the woman in the article said. I’d think that allows less self exploration at a critical stage.
You can’t include military suicides to compare MIT suicide rates. I’d like to know how it compares to non-collge kids excluding military. MIT admits their rate is higher than average college rate. It seems to be higher than CalTech’s. Of course, suicides have a deeper origin than just demanding course loads and has been developing for some time. The in teresting question to ask is how related is it to the drive to get to MIT or other elite U’s.
@Lookingforward,
It really depends on the major as well. Even at the schools who admit every warm body, by the time you reach upper-level courses in, say, EE at an ABET school, you will find few kids who are not some combination of smart and hard-working. In other departments, that may not be as true.
At most schools who admit practically everyone, many of the weakest students drop out before they even get to upper level courses, much less do they graduate.
PT, I do agree. My state’s publics are far too easy to get into. Many kids idle their way through their time there. But, ahhh, the top majors there are nationally known, tremendously strong.
@ igloo-
I don’t have the figured handy, but extremely competitive schools, like MIT, Cal Tech, the Ivies and so forth, have suicide rates higher than the statistical norm for people in those age groups, have read studies in the past that all say the same thing, and the difference between the norm for the age as a whole and kids in those schools is well beyond the standard deviation.
This shouldn’t be so surprising. The kids who get into that elite level of school have been under pressure to achieve just to be able to get into that kind of school in the first place, they have been cognizant of GPA and SAT scores and such probably since middle school based on my experience, and they often have parents with great expectations. Then, too, many of these kids were the creme de la creme of the schools they went to (big fish in the little pond), now suddenly they are in an pond where the big fish are the norm, so now you have competition even above what they faced before.
You add up all that pressure, and when a kid feels like they aren’t 'making the grade", it leads to depression and thoughts of suicide. A couple of years ago I seem to recall that MIT, for example, had roughly a half dozen students a year commit suicide, out of X thousands, I went to a school that was several times the size, and we had less suicides with a population roughly 3 times MIT’s that also was not anywhere neat MIT’s level in terms of admissions (it is these days, very different school).
It shouldn’t be that big a surprise, when there are a lot of expectations on the kids to be ‘the best’, this happens. The highest suicide rate in the world among young people is found in South Korea, and it is because culturally there is a lot more pressure on the kids there then in other countries.