In the middle of a stressful finals week, I made this simple realization. College is NOT healthy. I would not go as far as saying that college IS unhealthy because that's not quite true. You can make healthy choices in college, but college by its nature is not very healthy at all. There are a couple categories that specifically are not healthy: physical health, mental health and emotional health.
Physical health is notoriously bad considering the freshmen fifteen is such a widespread phenomena. Between dining hall food and a potential increase in drinking, freshmen often feel the effects quickly after entering college. Many students also have to adjust to creating their own workout schedule. In high school, sports team practices would be enough to keep students fit, but now they must motivate themselves.
As for mental health, that's also another type of health that college does not support well. College life is stressful due to all the different expectations and pressure to do well at everything. Anxiety, depression and other mental health illnesses are unfortunately very common on college campuses.
I've seen in the news recently that college counseling centers have been hiring more and more staff to handle the number of students using the on campus counseling services. Despite these efforts to help students, many universities still have long wait lists for getting a meeting, which causes students to fight it alone. College is certainly a hard place to be when you have mental health issues.
Emotional health is also not very healthy in college. This is definitely a tricky one. Freshmen definitely feel all the emotions being away from home for the first time and surrounded by all new people. Then throughout college, the hookup culture plays into emotional health too - 'catching feels' is looked down on and seen as a weakness.
Overall, college is not a healthy place to be. During finals week when stress levels are at their peak - you can see how unhealthy college can really be. People think about dropping out and some follow through because it's such a stressful place to be. College didn't use to be like this, but over the years college has become a place that is not healthy. Is college worth the investment to put your health at risk?
