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College Pressures

In the article, "College Pressures," William Zinsser expresses a wish that college students at Yale, as well as across the country, would "savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step" (1979, p. 379). Instead, he notes students operate on stress overload brought on by a number of factors, most of which is brought about by the overwhelming urgency and need to succeed. Despite the fact that college is supposed to be a time when avenues for further study are explored and developed, students fear that if they are unable to find a field and succeed in their classes then they will fail in life. Zinsser discusses these many pressures that college students face while attending university listing them as "economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure" (1979, p. 379).

By economic pressure, Zinsser refers to the rising cost of tuition, books, housing and other school costs, mentioning school loans as steep as $5000 (1979 levels) by the time a student graduates after four years, providing it only took them four years to graduate (1979). Because of the economic pressure, parents pressure their children to go into "practical" fields like business, medicine, or law so that they may find a good job as soon as they graduate and so get out from under the debt load. So a student may be more interested in becoming, for example, a teacher, musician, or artist, but instead they go into these other fields to please their parents and to obtain the income they feel they need. As Zinsser points out, in the middle of all this is the competition between students who are all competing for the same graduate schools and jobs. In an effort to appear better than other students, one student may turn in 10-page paper instead of the required 5-page paper. So, next time more people turn in 10-page papers instead of 5-page papers and then it escalates from the...

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College Pressures. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:31, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689008.html