Being a Student in a System Designed for Failure

Whoever told me that college will be the best four years of my life clearly went to college a long time ago. If anything, these were the worst three years of my life so far - before you tell me, "maybe you just aren't making the most of it," let me explain.

Earlier, I decided that I had to let myself completely fail a class in order to salvage what was left of my sanity. To my family members, that may sound dumb - "just push through," they tell me. But when I asked my friends if that was the logical choice, they all nodded in agreement.

To us, failing a course to get A's or B's in the others instead of getting B's and C's in all the classes is the most reasonable choice. I don't know where you went/go to school, but if you get a D or a F at Rutgers, you can retake the course at a later time to replace that grade completely. Although that might sound great and all, like GOOD FOR RUTGERS!, but there's an underlying wickedness to this system: you're essentially forced to choose which classes you want to fail, and which classes you want to pass - but you can't choose to pass all of them.

You'd think that I would've learned how it works by now - every semester, my friends and I tell ourselves that we're going to work our asses off and live at the library and get 4.0 GPAs and land a big-time internship/job and blah blah blah. Then midterms hit us out of nowhere, and we're all already so behind in our classes. We swear to ourselves that we will catch up in time for the final. Nope. Finals come, we pull two weeks' worth of all-nighters, sponsored by Starbucks and Red Bull, and somehow we all walk out with a GPA that's at least 0.3 points lower than we expected.

Sometimes I believe that it's my fault. The semester tricks me into believing that I'm not worthy of higher education - that I'm better off working part-time jobs here and there instead of pursuing a career. More often than not, I find myself chastising my every being. I end up spiraling deep into depression and anxiety, spending more time crying and blaming myself instead of studying. But it's not just me.

The other day, one of my roommates said to me, "what's so bad about death? I can't think of why death would be so much worse than having to go through this." Me neither. Why do you think suicide is one of the leading causes of death among college students?

Let's calculate the average Rutgers student's week now, shall we? Let's call her Jennifer.

*These calculations are all made under what I've noticed across the past three years and what is standard to Rutgers - in no way am I a statistician nor a mathemagician, so please just take this as an example and not a representation of the entire Rutgers student population.

A week has 168 hours, so let's say Jennifer takes five (5) classes that meets for (80) minutes twice (2) per week:

800 minutes, or 13.3 hours a week spent in class alone.

That's 154 hours left (rounding down). Jennifer wants to get at least a B in all her classes, so in order to do that, she must put at least eight (8) hours - more if she's a credit intensive major - per class per week:

40 hours put into studying per week to get at least a B.

114 hours left. Some say one of the best parts of being in a large school is the wide selection of clubs and activities, so let's say Jennifer is in a sorority that requires eight (8) hours of her week and a club that requires five (5).

13 hours put into extracurricular activities per week.

111 hours left. Like most college students, Jennifer has to work a part-time job to help support her own personal finances because her parents are already paying for school. She works fifteen (15) hours (money is a whole different issue that I'm going to save for another day):

15 hours of working part-time per week.

91 hours left. In order to get a full-time job in the future, she must also have an internship that is most likely unpaid, because interns are the easiest way to get cheap labor. Let's say she must put in fifteen (15) hours per week in order to get the credit:

15 hours interning each week.

76 hours left. Let's not forget that our lovely commute here at Rutgers. Jennifer spends an average of thirty (30) minutes each way to and from class, work, and interning (if she's lucky), so that means:

960 minutes, or 16 hours per week in transit

60 hours left. If I stop here and assume that she spends the rest of the time sleeping, that means that Jennifer has 8.5 hours of sleep per night, which is pretty good. But we have to remember that Jennifer needs to time to do things necessary to human life: eat, pee, poop, socialize, shower, get ready, etc., which only really leaves her with maybe 6 hours of sleep per night.

That's fucking crazy. And that's a normal student (from what I have observed). Of course there are outliers (my heart goes to you guys), but generally, this is how it goes.

So before you ask why college students are so stressed out, so depressed, and so fucked up, consider the amount of time and effort we must put in to even attempt to be mildly successful in the future. Not to mention that as soon as we graduate, we must face a hefty debt that we might not even be able to pay off. And to make that even worse, we're being told that we need to go to grad school in order to be successful.

Right now, hard work alone can no longer bring us to where we remotely want to be. The stigma that America has put on higher education literally kills 1,100 college students per year.

I can no longer argue that "some people just aren't meant for school," because no one is meant for school in a system that's designed for failure.