Final In-Class Essay for ENG 101
Spring 2008

On this page, you will find:

Writing Prompt Instructions for in-class writing

In the following excerpt from the 1979 article “College Pressures,” critic, writer, editor, and teacher William Zinsser discusses the various pressures facing college students in the 1970s in the competitive world of post-secondary education.

College Pressures

Dear Carlos:  I desperately need a dean’s excuse for my chem mid-term which will begin in about 1 hour.  All I can say is that I totally blew it this week.  I’ve fallen incredibly, inconceivably behind.

Carlos:  I left town because I started [freaking] out again.  I stayed up all night to finish a take-home make-up exam & am typing it now to hand in on the 10^th.  It was due on the 5^th.  P.S.  I’m going to the dentist—pain is pretty bad.

Hey Carlos:  Probably by Friday I’ll be able to get back to my studies.  Right now, I’m going to take a long walk.  This whole thing has taken a lot out of me.

Carlos!  I’m really up the proverbial creek.  The problem is I really bombed the history final.  Since I need the course for my major, I . . . .

Carlos—Here follows a tale of woe.  I went home this weekend, had to help my Mom, & caught a fever so didn’t have much time to study.  Now, my professor. . . .

Carlos:  Aaaagghh!  Trouble.  Nothing original, but everything’s piling up at once.  To be brief, my job interview . . . .

            Who are these wretched supplicants, scribbling notes so laden with anxiety, seeking such miracles of postponement and balm?  They are men and women who belong to Bransford College, one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale University, and the messages are just a few of the hundreds that they left for their Dean, Carolos Hortas—often slipped under his door at 4:00 a.m.  But students like the ones who wrote those notes can also be found on campuses from coast to coast . . . [at public] and private colleges across the country that have high academic standards and highly motivated students.  Nobody could doubt that the notes are real.  In their urgency and their gallows humor, they are authentic voices of a generation that is panicky to succeed.

            My own connection with the messages is that I am master of Bransford College.  I live in its Gothic quadrangle and know the students well. . . . I am privy to their hopes and fears—and also to their music and their piercing cries in the dead of night (“Does anybody ca-a-are?”).  If they went to Carlos to ask how to get through tomorrow, they come to me to ask how to get through the rest of their lives.  Mainly, I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think.  There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches.  They don’t want to hear such liberating news.  They want a map—right now!—that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, Social Security, and—presumably—a prepaid grave.

            What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future.  I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step.  I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.

            I see four kinds of pressures working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure.  It is easy to look around for villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard.  But there are no villains; only victims.

            “In the late 1960s,” one dean told me, “the typical question that I got from students was ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world?’  or ‘How can I make a contribution?’     Today, it’s ‘Do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?’ ”

Many other deans confirmed this pattern:  One said:  “They’re trying to find an edge—the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal.”

            Today, looking very good is no longer good enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school.  They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they will make a lot of money.  They also know that the odds are harsh.  Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170 students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of 7,000 . . . .

            They live in a brutal economy.  Tuition, room, and board at most private colleges now comes to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees.  This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich.  But they are equally battered by inflation.  Tuition covers only 60 percent of what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what colleges receive in endowments, grants, and gifts.  Now, the remainder keeps being swallowed up by the cruel costs—higher every year—of just opening the doors.  Heating oil is up.  Insurance is up.  Postage is up.  Health-premium costs are up.  Everything is up.  Deficits are up.  We are witnessing in America the creation of a brotherhood of paupers—colleges, parents, and students, joined by the common bond of debt.  Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part time at College and full time during the summer, to accrue $5,000 in loans after four years—loans that he must start to repay within one year after graduation.  Exhorted at commencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth.  How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning?  I have used “he,” incidentally, only for brevity.  Women at Yale are under no less pressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society.  In fact, they are probably under more pressure.  For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society hasn’t yet caught up with this fact.

            Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure.  Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.  I see many students taking pre-med courses with joyless tenacity.  They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist.  It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people.

              “Do you want to go to medical school?”  I ask them.

               “I guess so,” they say, without conviction, or “Not really.”

               “Then why are you going?”

               “Well, my parents want me to be a doctor.  They’re paying all this money. . .”

            Poor students, poor parents.  They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt.  The parents mean well, they are trying to steer their sons and daughters toward a secure future.  But the sons and daughters want to major in history or classics or philosophy—subjects with no “practical” value.  Where’s the payoff on the humanities?

 It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do indeed pay off.  The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics—an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field.  Still, many parents would rather put their money on courses that point toward a specific profession—courses that a re pre-law, pre-med, pre-business, or, as I sometimes heart it put, “pre-rich.”  But the pressure on students is severe.  They are truly torn.  One part of them feels obligated to fulfill their parents’ expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser.  Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them . . . .

Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.  “I had a freshman student, Linda,” one dean told me, “who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time.  I couldn’t tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”

The story is almost funny—except that it’s not.  It’s symptomatic of all the pressures put together.  When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still.  I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight.  I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie.  I hear the clacking of their typing in the hours before dawn.  I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due:  “Will I get everything done??”

Probably they won’t.  They will get sick.  They will get “writer’s block.”  They will sleep.  They will oversleep.  They will freak out:  Hey, Carlos, help!  Part of the problem is that they often do more than they are expected to do.  A professor will assign five-page papers.  Several students will start writing ten-page papers to impress him.  Then more students will write ten-page papers, and a few will raise the ante to fifteen.  Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment.

Ultimately it will be the students’ own business to break the circles in which they are trapped.  They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their classmates’ fears.  They must be jolted into believing in themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their future.  “College should be open-ended:  at the end, it should open many, many roads,” says Dean Hortas.  “Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along.  It’s almost as if they think that the country has been codified in the type of jobs that exist—they’ve got to fit into certain slots. They ought to take chances.  Not taking chances will lead to a life of colorless mediocrity.  They’ll be comfortable.  But something in the spirit will be missing.”

I have painted a drab a portrait of today’s students, making them seem a solemn lot.  That is only half of their story.  If they were so dreary, I wouldn’t so thoroughly enjoy their company.  They are easy to like.  They are quick to laugh and to offer friendship.  They are not introverts.  They are unusually kind and considerate.  Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extracurricular activities.  On the contrary, they juggle their crowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musical and dramatic groups, and write for campus publications.

 But this in turn is another cause of anxiety.  There are too many choices.

Academically, they have 1,300 courses to select from; outside class, they have to decide how much spare time they can spare and how to spend it.  This means that they engage in fewer extracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did.  If they want to row on the crew and play in the symphony, they will eliminate one.  If I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largely ignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out and play, it’s because that’s where the crunch is, not only at Yale but throughout American education.  It’s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing generations so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.

I tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination.  I tell them that change is a tonic and that all of the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed.  One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year.  They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of managers, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway producers, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians—a mixed bag of achievers.  I ask them to say a few words about how they got started.  The students assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do.

 Luckily for me, most of these professionals got into their field by a circuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours.  The students are startled.  They can hardly conceive of a career that was not pre-planned.  They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.