Research Blog 8: Interview

I interviewed my roommate Meghan about the impact of privatized student loans on an individual's mental health. I chose to speak with her because of the struggles she has experienced with anxiety and finances since I have lived with her. Through our interview, it appears that Meghan is a prime example of a student loan victim. She pays for her own education via students loans suggested to her through the Rutgers student aid office, and incurs multiple other monthly expenses associated with renting a home (ie. rent, food, gas/electric, water, internet, phone). She stated that she works two part time jobs during the week in addition to a 12 credit course load. During the course of our conversation, her nervousness and anxiety in regards to her finances were evidenced through statements such as, "I work 35 hours a week for what? $250 at the end of that week? That doesn't even begin to make a dent in the kind of debt I'm dealing with." Meghan additionally mentioned that the amount of time she spends at work has affected her performance in school. Despite being a third year college student, Meghan has only accumulated 33 credits. She says, "I just don't know how they can expect us to keep up with school when some of us have to work huge amounts of hours just to cover our day to day expenses, forget long term payments. I've failed classes just because my professor's don't want to give me an extension when I have a lot of hours at work. But I need that money, so I guess there's not much I can do." This example of Meghan's performance in school perfectly illustrates Pedersen's concept of stress carry-over whereby stress in one area of life impacts another aspect of life. However, her financial anxiety has impacted her in other non-academic ways as well. After her first year of college, Meghan mentioned that she began drinking to excess which in turn led to a semester of failed courses. She explains, "the stress of it all just became too much. It was much easier to just have a good time and not think about it". This provides another great example of stress carry-over where Meghan's financial anxieties affected Meghan's mental health leading to substance abuse which in turn negatively impacted her academic performance. The last point that Meghan made in our interview regarded campus academic and student counseling services. After being put on academic probation for a semester and meeting with an advisor regarding her academic performance, she was given a referral to the campus's counseling services to speak with a counselor to manage her stress. This particular experience illuminates the concept of stress individuation. The current practices in place to help students manage with stress, much of which stems from finances (in this case in particular), do not address the root of the problem but instead individualize the problem and position the stress and anxiety ridden individuals as what Hacker has termed, personal responsibility crusaders.

Prior to researching the topic of student loan privatization and the effects it has on an individual's mental health, I did not realize how relevant this topic was to virtually every individual's college experience. Not only did I not realize how wide spread this problem is, but I did not realize that it would effect someone so close to me. Meghan has experienced many of the ramifications of student loan privatization that I have encountered through my research and provides a prime example of why privatization along with it's high interest rates and corrupt practices should be exposed and reformed.

Research Blog 7: My Case

Default: The Student Loan Documentary

Relevant Links:

Default: The Student Loan Documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvQR93C6n2E

The Proposal to Forgive Student Loan Debt:

http://www.forgivestudentloandebt.com/content/proposal

To frame my argument about the relationship between higher education privatization and experiences of stress, anxiety and depression in college students, I will look closely at the film Default: The Student Loan Documentary. This film examines the current state of the student loan industry and the resulting economic and personal stress experienced by student borrowers. Student loan experts, activists and borrowers come together in this film to chronicle the life of privatization from its advent through modern day in an effort to expose the true culprit of the financial stress experienced by college attendees and graduates. Default ties in many of the themes that I have discovered thus far in my research. Most prominently, this film addresses the widespread personal responsibility shift that has occurred through the passage of Acts such as the Higher Education Act of 1968 and the Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act. As Lauren Asher, President of The Institute for College Access and Success explains, students from low income families attending college during America's Golden Age would have been able to graduate from college with no debt by working only a minimum wage job part-time during the semester and full-time during the summer, while that same student today would have to borrow private loans to make their way through college today. This film will be useful in providing multiple specific cases which illustrate the devastating effects of the private loan industry. From Matt who owes more than $200,000 in student loan debt and has experienced stress carry-over into his personal romantic relationships, to Gregory who worked three part-time jobs each semester of college and still graduated with $30,000 in student loan debt, and Jelisa who was awarded two different government grants, works a part-time job during the semester, and still needed student loans only to graduate in $60,000+ in student loan debt, it becomes clear through this documentary that the root cause of this issue does not lie in any deficit of the individual, but in a corrupt loan system. Lastly, this documentary offers compelling ways to solve this student loan crisis. Methods such as "outing yourself" involve vocalizing the financial stress experienced by individuals in an effort to highlight the socio-systemic cause of financial stress, while grass roots movements allow students the opportunity to advocate for their own causes and beliefs. But perhaps the most radical of solutions was proposed by Robert who wrote The Proposal to Forgive All Student Loan Debt. While this proposal did not pass congress, it provides an interesting an interesting viewpoint on the ways our loan dollars could be put to use if not lied up in the student loan industry. While I am not yet sure how I will incorporate The Proposal into my argument, I have attached the link for further consideration. 

Research Blog 6

This table comes from Daphne Pedersen's study "Stress Carry Over and College Student Health Outcomes". It is helpful in illustrating her theory of "stress carry over" and the types of types of stress that are the most prominent, and most likely to affect other areas of an individuals life. From this graph we see that school carry-over outweighs all other types of carry-over bringing us to the conclusion that the college experience is the most stressful aspect of a college-aged individuals life. This will be helpful in strengthening my argument that stress among college students is increasing, and that their stress stems from the increasing expectations of them set forth by Privatization. 

This chart comes from a PDF distributed to students at the University of Illinois at Chicago by the campus Wellness Center and is designed to give students an empirical evaluation of their stress levels. Students were tasked with tallying points received based on different categories of stress they have experienced within the past three months. A stress score of over 300 signaled a need to visit the Wellness Center for counseling. This chart and the attached pdf is helpful in reinforcing Dana Becker's assertion that stress among college students has been individualized instead of being though of as a social health problem as this chart is meant to determine and individual diagnosis for individual treatment. 

Literature Review 3

                                                         

Becker, Dana. "Stress: The New Black Death?". One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble With Stress As An Idea. Oxford University Press. New York, NY. 2013. 1-18.

Becker, Dana. "Getting and Spending: The Wear and Tear of Modern Life". One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble With Stress As An Idea. Oxford University Press. New York, NY. 2013. 18-48.

Dana Becker is a professor of social work at Bryn Mawr College. She recieved her graduate education in Social Work at Bryn Mawr College and has done extensive research on the concept of stress. Her previous work examines the various relationships between mental health and social conditions in the United States. Due to her extensive exposure to the topic of stress, Becker should provide an authoritative voice as to how stress has become such a prominent aspect of American life that it has become salient in virtually all situations as well as ways to create alternatives to reduce the prevalence of stress among individuals.

The first two chapters of Dana Becker's book are what I will examine here. She begins the book by citing numerous effects the concept of stress may have on our mental and physical health, stating that our current society has been "elevating stress to the status of an actual disease" (Becker 3). She terms this concept the medicalization of stress whereby a social phenomenon is transformed into a disease. This is an important concept to consider when thinking about the widespread nature of stress in America, because the health care sector has transformed the idea of stress into a money-making industry which perpetuates a desire for stress alleviation which Foucault classifies as "technologies of the self," or strategies used to attain a particular state of happiness (Becker 5). Similarly, Becker notes that the solutions available to Americans to cope with stress are middle-class solution middle-class problems. She clarifies this when she states, "The achievement of a 'healthy lifestyle' requires more than individual 'healthy choices.' When the stressor is poverty, we need to reckon with inequalities that make the universal attainment of a healthy lifestyle so exclusive" (Becker 13). She further illuminates the effects of the American obsession with mental health when she claims that stress has the ability to "produce people who can act and think about themselves in certain ways" (Becker 5). She validates this with a discussion of Type A personalities and the physical ramification this obsessive personality type has on individuals, such as heart attack, stroke, and high blood pressure. But Becker claims that this Type A personality is harmful for the individuals, but even more harmful for society as a whole. "Type A was the first of may attempts to quantify the social and psychological nature of our society in terms of the individual" (Becker 44). This exemplifies the vicious cycle that Americans remain trapped in as stress is produced by social and societal factors, yet is only treatable on the individual level.

Dana Becker's book will be explicitly helpful in my research as it provides a mode of analyses that contrasts sharply with many of my other sources. Because many other scholars on the topic of stress offer solutions which Becker explicitly refutes throughout her research, her book will be helpful in understanding why the solutions that have been proposed thus far are not working.

Research Blog 5: Working Bibliography

References:

Avard, Stephen, et al. “The Financial Knowledge of College Freshmen.” College Student Journal 39.2 (2005): 321-339. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.

Becker, Dana. One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble With Stress As An Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.

Default: The Student Loan Documentary. Dir. Aurora Meneghello. Perf. Anya Kamenetz, Carmen Berkeley, Alan Collinge, Robert Applebaum. Krotala Films, 2011. Film.

Lewin, Tamar. “Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen.” The New York Times     26 Jan. 2011, sec. Education: 1-3 The New York Times. Web. 7 Mar. 2014.

Pedersen, Daphne E. "Stress Carry-Over And College Student Health Outcomes." College Student Journal 46.3 (2012): 620-627. ERIC. Web. 4 Mar. 2014.

Research Blog 4: Research Proposal

Research Proposal

Topic:

College students at today’s higher education institutions are experiencing unprecedented levels of stress. Not only are students faced with situational changes and shifts in personal responsibility when they enter college, but also worries about their ability to effectively pay back student loans and guarantee themselves a job when they enter the vicious job market. These heightened expectations have led to stressed and depressed students who rely on prescribed medications even before they enter college (Lewin 2011). Unlike America’s Golden Age when pursing a college degree would only catapult a student towards the American Dream, twenty-something’s of 2014 are all but required to earn a Bachelor’s Degree if they want a career and a successful life.

Research Question:

The overwhelming presence of stress among college students suggests an absence of a solution to this mounting problem. In his New York Times article Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen, Tamar Lewin suggests that, “Often people think they are the only ones having trouble” (Lewin 2011). This sentiment is echoed throughout much of the literature available on the topic of stress in students particularly in relation to financial stress. Similarly, the film Default: The Student Loan Documentary highlights the situations of several loan borrowers buried in massive amounts of debt without the resources to dig themselves out. One borrower, Matt, attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and left his undergraduate education $200,000+ dollars in debt which threatened not only his financial security but also his emotional health and relationships. However some scholars believe that financial stress is a social problem deriving from a lack of financial preparedness in high school. A study conducted by Stephen Avard found that the overwhelming majority of graduating high school seniors were unprepared to deal with the finances they would encounter in college and he suggests that financial education in high school would lessen the problem of financial stress in college students. (Avard et. al. 1). Dana Becker also supports the idea of stress as a social problem when she explains, “The stress concept often obscures injustices and inequalities by seducing us into viewing those injustices and inequalities as individual problems” (Becker 7). So far, many of the solutions to the problem of stress in students have focused on coping for the individual instead of considering the role of privatization in creating a much broader social health problem. Throughout my research I seek to answer the question: How is stress as a social problem individualized among college students?

Theoretical Framework:

The very title of Dana Becker’s book One Nation Under Stress: The Problem With Stress As An Idea provides an interesting framework for analyzing the problem of individualized student stress as it suggests that 1) stress is a problem and 2) that stress is not concrete unavoidable fact but an idea which can be perceived differently by different people. I particularly plan to utilize this framework when comparing the contrasting viewpoints of stress as individual deficit versus stress as a social problem. Author Daphne Pedersen also examines stress in students as it affects multiple aspects of everyday life which she defines as stress carry-over (Pedersen 621). This concept refers to the idea that stress in one area of an individual’s life can adversely affect other aspects of an individual’s life. As mentioned earlier, students do not often realize they are not alone in their struggle with stress which in turns leads to alternate manifestations of stress within the individual. The concept of stress carry-over will be useful in analyzing the ways in which stress manifests in the individual who does not share the difficulties of their struggle with others.

Research Plan and Additional Questions:

I will begin my research with an analysis of the ways privatization broadly affects the college experience and mental health. This progression will lend itself to a discussion of stress in college students and the different types of stress that students experience. I then plan to introduce the frame works with which I will answer my research question, and employ them in an analysis of how stress manifests itself and morphs within the individual.

            Several other questions which lend themselves to a discussion of stress in college students are: When does stress first develop in students? Does social interaction have an effect on an individual’s stress level? Which types of stress seem to have the greatest effect on an individual’s everyday life? How is stress treated as a social problem? Is stress treated as a social problem?  How is stress commodified? How do scholars suggest dealing with this increasingly prominent phenomenon?

Literature Review 2

                                            

Daphne E. Petersen is an associate professor currently teaching at the University of North Dakota with a Ph.D. in Social Psychology and the Psychology of Health. Her extensive psychology background will be useful in analyzing the underlying mental health effects of privatization in college students.


Pedersen, Daphne E. "Stress Carry-Over And College Student Health Outcomes." College Student Journal 46.3 (2012): 620-627. ERIC. Web. 4 Mar. 2014.


Pedersen's article "Stress Carry-Over And College Student Health Outcomes" examines the way that one stressor may be transferred to other aspects of that individuals life. She states that "the transition from adolescence to emerging adulthood is a time of great change, and often, of great stress," (Pedersen 620) and cites multiple areas of stress in a students life, workload, social obligations, and family relations. However, and important and reoccuring theme that Pedersen addresses in the beginning of her article is the "subjective" nature of stress (Pedersen 620). For each person stress comes from different outlets and is experienced in very different ways. The particular framework of the article is of stress "carry-over" where "the experience of stress may spill from one domain or role to another, one person to another, or across stages of life" (Pederson 621). This has been evidenced in the case study provided by Hamilton and Armstrong in their analysis of dorm resident, Alana, and appears across much literature available on student stress. 

This article further expands the "carry-over" framework by distinguishing two specific categories of carry-over: school-spill over and family-spill over (Pedersen 623). School spill-over involves the inability to maintain an even balance between school and other aspects of life. Some students may feel that they can not have a social life due to the capacity of their school work-load, or may feel that they are unable to maintain family ties due to the same reason. Similarly, family spill-over refers to the idea that one is not able to reach their full academic and/or social potential because of family interference. Both of these ideas refer back to concepts discussed in some of my other sources, but which do not have a term for this phenomenon. This article will be useful in contextualizing several articles from the New York Times which cite examples of stress in multiple areas of a students life but which do not give a framework with which to contextualize this phenomenon.