Getting a good education is fun. It is absolutely necessary. It is very interesting. It is also super hard.
In Finland, we have a national healthcare system for college students. You pay some money every year and when you need healthcare, you get it for free. Except if that healthcare is therapy, you don’t really get it. The lines to therapy are huge and on their website, the student healthcare system YTHS states that if you feel like you can deal with your problems by yourself, it would be better if you did that. Sure, the situation has been made worse by corona since, during lockdown, many people felt extremely lonely and isolated. But the problem is much bigger than that.
I personally blame the market logic that has spread into academia. With the rise of neoliberalism, efficiency has become more and more important in the workplace. It does not really matter whether you’re enjoying your time at work, resting enough, or otherwise taking care of yourself as long as you make maximum profit for whomever you are working for. I have worked for a non-profit childrens’ education centre once but other than that all my jobs have always been for employers whose goal is to make profit. The difference is huge; in the non-profit, we were given sufficient breaks, the older employees made sure we were hydrated and ate well, we had time to chat with each other when it was quiet and weren’t immediately told to do something useful and so on.
The same ideology has spread to higher education. In Finland at least, you have all kinds of incentives to graduate as quickly as possible. You for example get some of your student loans paid off by the government if you graduate on time. There are also punishments for staying in school for too long: for example, after five years of studying you will not be granted any more student grants or student loans. I guess the government thinks this makes you want to graduate faster but in reality, if you miss the five-year mark, you need to get a job to be able to live which slows down your graduation even more. In general, student grants and loans are not really sufficient to cover all your living costs (though at least we have student grants unlike many other countries), which means you need to work on the side of your studies or at least all your summer breaks (unless your parents are rich, that is). Just studying in itself can be exhausting and with all the work you have to do in order to pay for your food and rent, it becomes even more exhausting. No wonder so many people burn out and need therapy.
I understand that unfortunately, the government can’t just give everyone however much money they want. However, with our current system where students are expected to be as efficient as possible with their studies and also work (and don’t forget all the extracurricular activities, you’ll need those for your CV), so many are bound to burn out. When they enter the working life, they are already exhausted and things are probably not going to slow down, at least if they work for a profit-seeking organization.Â
Getting a good education is incredibly important in today’s world, but I completely understand why people drop out of college. The joy of learning is taken away by the constant need to be efficient and achieve things. We are already suffering from a mental health crisis and something needs to change in order for things to get better.