Academics must stop trying to save struggling freshers

As one of the first of the university’s professional staff to officially welcome the newest members of our undergraduate community each year, I want to get it right. So, at our annual orientation programme, I tell incoming students I believe in them.

Coming from someone they’ve never met, this statement could sound disingenuous. But instead, I share my concern about the misrepresentation of their generation as ill-prepared, under-motivated, and emotionally fragile. I know that the students who arrive on our doorstep are not these things. They are intelligent, highly capable, and more resilient than they may understand themselves to be. More importantly, that’s exactly how they can expect I will treat them during their tenure as college students.

A harmful crisis narrative has, however, taken hold in popular media which has served to elevate the existence of normal, everyday stress to clinical diagnoses. Worse still, wide swathes of young people have adopted the narrative, and in far too many cases, a shared sense of helplessness. And, while social media influencers may have exacerbated the phenomenon, it didn’t start with them. It started with us, the adults responsible for preparing our young people for life.

Now we have a responsibility to clean up our mess.

How do we do that? We must accept some uncomfortable facts, chief among them being that some of the most valuable opportunities to learn are those that arrive during moments of hardship. The student who walks into the room at the start of orientation, nervous about making friends, could feel comforted by the parent who spends the day texting with them, and who sits in the parking lot during the evening’s social activities. But if that student spends their day speaking almost exclusively to their parent, they miss out on valuable information and the opportunity to connect. This safety net against discomfort robs them of the chance to recognise that there are people like them sitting in the same room, eager to find those who share their interests, eager to connect.

Similarly, when parents and guardians step in to rescue their student from a challenge, they unwittingly communicate that their student lacks self-sufficiency and resilience. For example, the student learning to live in community and struggling with a room-mate could be rescued by the parent or guardian who places a call to the housing office. While the phone call may have the desired effect, the struggling student learns that when uncomfortable, a distressed call home makes the problem go away. They are denied the opportunity to advocate for themselves, use available resources like a resident adviser, and to feel the accomplishment of finding a resolution.

It’s not just parents and guardians who step in and intervene. It’s also those of us working in higher education who engage in this behaviour. It occurs when we bend rules for the student who habitually ignores reminder emails or fails to read their syllabus, and ends up missing an important deadline. We risk depriving that student of the opportunity to learn the hard reality that deadlines mean something, and to figure out how to approach the next deadline differently.

Our shared goal should be to launch capable young adults, not co-dependent late-stage adolescents. When you delve into the intention behind our choices to provide safety nets, rescue, and eliminate failure, too often it appears to be the discomfort of the adults that prompts these interventions. Without diminishing the desire of caring adults to help the young people in their lives, I challenge us all to lean into our own discomfort.

Given the cost of a college education, we may also be driven by a desire to preserve the investment. But I urge us to hold off. If our young people are to be future ready, they won’t be best prepared if the path they took was perfectly flat with no resistance or obstacles. College-going, like life, will be rocky, and they may stumble. Let us not lose sight of the great privilege that it is to be able to fail while in college.

It would benefit young people to learn how to deal with difficult personalities in the residence hall rather than in their first professional job. Or to learn from the sting of an F on an assignment passed in after deadline instead of being placed on warning in their future job for the same indiscretion.

I would rather our young people approach the life they will lead after college a little bruised, a little tired. Showing up that way tells me they got to the collegiate finish line having engaged in learning that occurs both in and out of the classroom. It also suggests that they got there knowing that it’s not just me who believes in them; they can believe in themselves too.

Jennifer DeBurro is vice president of student affairs and dean of students at the University of New England in Maine, where she oversees the campus counselling centre, housing and residential life, student resolutions and other student-centred units.