Emotional health of undergraduates

This article from the New York Times reports "The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago".

Undergraduate Education Thread

Martin's previous post was helpful in outlining many of the issues involved in understanding grade inflation. The expanded transcript used by Indiana University and other institutions is also something that we should look at closely if the issue really is that employers are getting confused as to the value of the qualification that a person brings with them. In terms of other constructive ideas that may help improve the level of education experienced by undergraduates, we have blogged here about the potential for undergraduate research internships to improve outcomes for students. Other colleagues in Geary have been conducting research into the development of access programmes.

Individual departments and schools might also consider some of the options below. In general, such ideas must come from the bottom-up and many departments and schools are actively working on versions of them. This is a short list to put some ideas into the debate. Much of the debate about grade inflation in the last week has actually been a confused debate about educational standards. If this is so important to commenters, perhaps some of them will look at some ideas like the ones below or others that are constructive and give them some time for discussion.

- Accelerated programmes for gifted students. I am currently reading some papers on this and will post later in the week.

- I posted before on the extent to which students with advanced spatial reasoning abilities might be under-appreciated in the current system. Examining ways of countering this would be a constructive step.

- "Mathcamp"programmes taking place before formal semesters for mathematically rigorous courses.

- More targeted advice for students applying to elite institutions, either graduate schools or companies.

- Greater push from the universities to respond to the increasing risk of prolonged unemployment among graduates. To attempt to pin this risk down to educational standards is ridiculous. There has been a major structural change in the Irish labour market that was largely unanticipated. It is necessary for the universities to respond to this. One small suggestion would be for philantrophy to consider funding internship programmes rather than capital programmes for a brief period to ensure that the social return on their earlier investments into Irish higher education is not obliterated by a generation of graduates losing out.

- Greater use of prizes and other incentives for performance. We have blogged here before that this may have particular impact on male students.

- Better use of technology and more lecturers who "hack" unwieldy college technology systems by finding ways of directly engaging their students.