College is often seen as the time when people explore their freedom and get to make a host of new choices. As students, we get to pick our schedules, majors and whether we attend class. Outside of school, we get to choose what we eat, extracurriculars and most other aspects of our lives.
But freedom doesn’t come from just moving away from home. Our freedom as students effectively comes from the safety net that the University provides, allowing us to make mistakes and bounce back. However, many students fail to use these “safety net” services even when they would benefit from them. The administration needs to do a better job getting students to accept the help they sometimes need.
The clearest example of how the University provides a safety net is through academics. First-years are given assistance through the entire first-semester enrollment process. Then for every semester after, students must meet with an advisor before signing up for classes. Furthermore, many upper-level classes have prerequisites or need instructor permission. These are the primary safety nets provided to students. However, there are many resources opt-in resources as well: tutoring, essay editing or going to office hours, to name a few.
Yet, many people fail to use these services. I think one of the main reasons people don’t seek academic help is pride. With the majority of the University students coming from the top 10 percent of their high school classes, there is a basic academic confidence many students carry. But at the same time most of us do not get 4.0 grade point averages — not even those in the top of the class — so there’s definitely room for improvement. The University could require students to get one tutor during their first year or at least go to a few office hours each semester. This could go a long way to increasing student participation. Just reminding students the service is there isn’t enough — people hear about the service and then forget it. By requiring people to actually use these services from the beginning, the hesitance to enter will be lowered, making using them again less intimidating.
Counseling and Psychological Services is another underutilized resource. At some point, every student is going to deal with a significant amount of stress. CAPS is a great organization from which everyone can benefit, yet the majority of students never use the service, judging by the fact that a staff of 28 can handle all of the demand. This is not for lack of outreach by CAPS, which holds highly publicized free mental wellness screenings in Newcomb every semester and has a website where people can arrange for an appointment. Once again, I think the administration can take concrete actions to encourage long term use of services like CAPS. A CAPS representative could meet with first-years and have RAs offer to sign up anyone who just wants to see what the service is like. In an ideal world, every student would be able to go and speak with someone from CAPS once, but there is neither the time nor the staff for that right now. All that can be done is more aggressively push these services that student really do need but hesitate to use.
Encouraging the use of these resources doesn't have to be through requirements, indeed forcing people to do things is not always constructive. One of the best possible actions the administration could take to promote tutoring and CAPS would be to create a button to access these resources on Collab. Many students use Collab every day and the site can create a great deal of stress as students struggle to complete assignments. A simple change like this would allow students to access resources right when they realize they need them, instead of procrastinating and ultimately forgetting about them.
I could go into a plethora of other “safety nets” the University provides: alcoholism support, health awareness, career services, medical services and financial services. In general, these are underutilized. That is a problem, because using these services is key to creating a vibrant and stable University community. If students who make a mistake start to spiral downward and don’t use any of the resources available to them, it hurts us all. Never did John Donne’s famous quote “No man is an island unto himself” resonate so strongly as it did last year. Just to give a sense of how much effect individual tragedies can have on others, CAPS saw a 15 percent increase in students requests for counseling since the events of last year. The administration needs to encourage more concrete interaction with University services not to stop people from making mistakes, but to make it easier for students to recover from them.
Bobby Doyle is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at b.doyle@cavalierdaily.com.
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