Students cheat, steal, lie and are mentally ill

Two completely separate surveys released this week have some disturbing news about today’s high school and college students. One found that 30 percent of high school seniors shoplifted something from a store in the past year, 64 percent cheated on a test and 36 percent plagiarized their school work from the Internet.

 

The most interesting part of the survey, conducted by the Josephson Institute, an ethics group in Los Angeles, was that the same students who admitted that they cheat and steal considered their actions ethical.

 

The other survey by the New York State Psychiatric Institute, found that 45.8 percent of college students had at least one psychiatric disorder, ranging from alcohol abuse disorders (20.4 percent) to personality disorders (17.7 percent). Most of these students were not receiving any treatment for their problems.

 

In extreme cases, of course, untreated psychiatric disorders lead to national tragedies like the Virginia Tech shootings, but when I was a college teacher I daily witnessed students with obvious psychiatric problems who ignored my suggestions that they seek treatment. I noticed, for example, students who had wounds on their arms that looked like self-inflicted mutilation and students who habitually kept the sleeves of their sweaters pulled down over their hands so they would not have to touch anything in the outside world.

 

The college had programs for dealing with students with personality disorders, but they seemed very ineffective to me. Treatment was voluntary and few students wanted to be treated. Students were supposed to inform me the first day of class if they had learning disorders, but this almost never happened. Unlike high schools, where teachers receive files full of information about each student’s individual problems, federal privacy laws prevented the college from sharing information with teachers. We had no idea who we were dealing with in the classroom.

 

I had a reporter on the student newspaper who had on several occasions deliberately spit on people he was interviewing. Later he threw chairs at people in the news room. It was only then that he admitted that he was being treated for a personality disorder. When I got the college to schedule a meeting with him to discuss how to deal with his problems he refused to show up. The college’s official position was that I could not remove him from the newspaper nor restrict his behavior in any way. The college eventually dismissed him after he injured another student.

 

Are parents aware that when they send their children to college that 47 percent of their classmates have potentially dangerous personality disorders and that most of these are untreated? Once again, we have new evidence that college campuses are much more dangerous places than parents believe.

Comments

[J.S.]

I've been reading your blog for some time now, and I've resisted the temptation to comment on many of your postings. However, in this post, you reveal what I think is the fundamental flaw in all the postings I have taken issue with in the past: you are a habitual exaggerator with the journalistic tendencies of a tabloid editor. Your closing sentence suggests that "47 percent of their classmates have potentially dangerous personality disorders". If you even casually read the article from which you got this (itself a popularization of the journal paper), it states clearly--in the first sentence--that psychiatric disorders are common among young people regardless of whether or not they are in college! Furthermore, the only 47% number quoted is for students *not* enrolled in college (and it is actually 47.7%--or 48%, if you are using only two significant figures and are numerate). It is as though you carefully pick the biggest, scariest numbers you can find, apply them to "students" and then apply moral panic language backed only with personal anecdotes, none of which constitute *data*. By the data in the latter article, and your own paternalistic logic, parents should make sure their 18-24 year olds spend as little time as possible with peers, as there 45-48% of them may have "potentially dangerous" personality disorders. Finally, your headline: technically true, but surely misleading. Students do in fact lie, cheat, steal, and have mental illnesses. But, taken as a sample, so do nearly every other population of humans. In fact, some of the data you provide suggest that students differ from their non-student peers only in that they are less likely to smoke and abuse drugs and more likely to drink to excess! One would think that with your strong anti-alcohol for students bias, you would have amplified that last point, too.