Two Megatrends Plaguing Universities with Jonathan Haidt

we love our universities but what's happening now is that we're all trying to kind of do University while two Mega Trends are making it much harder they're interfering with what we do on campus they're interfering with many institutions in American society one is the Mental Health crisis and the other is polarization everywhere I go all across the country anybody working with teenagers or young adults says the same thing that there's been a surge in the rate of anxiety and depression every campus Mental Health Center is overwhelmed they can't hire therapists fast enough but as you dig into the statistics what you see is something truly scary first we have to understand that college students today are not Millennials they are gen ZN 95 had a different childhood and have turned out different than the Millennials so the this is a this shows the rates at which Teenage Americans hit certain Milestones or engage in certain kinds of behaviors and so one is this is the percentage of 12th graders who have a driver's license nowadays a lot of kids don't even bother to get one they don't care they don't need one they're not going out very much because for one thing many of them have never even drunk alcohol or exper gone out on a date or um had a job for pay and so if you're not doing any of these things you don't really need a car and if you're not doing any of these things what are you doing games video games that's right so for the boys video games for the girls social media is what fills up a lot of the time so basically devices J Z got these really intense amazing wonderful devices in middle school or earlier whereas the Millennials didn't get them until college or later so that we think is one of the main reasons for the generational difference here's what has been the result so if we look at rates of major depression these are teenagers who said yes to five out of nine symptoms on a symptom checklist what we see is that from 20 4 to 2010 the rates were fairly constant girls have higher rates of depression and anxiety boys have higher rates of alcoholism violence things that make other people miserable um and what we see is that when Gen Z enters the picture the rate for boys does go up as a percentage that actually is a substantial increase but clearly it's affected girls more the rates of depression and anxiety have gone way up for girls and more moderately up for boys uh when we look just on college campuses just College students representative survey what we see is that in 2012 when everybody on campus was a millennial the percentage of students who said yes they have a psychological disorder and it was up to them to label it but the percentage who who self-identify as having a psychological disorder was very low for boy for women and men but now college is all gen Z they have much much higher rates of uh believing that they have a mental disorder and it's mostly depression and anxiety um some great work done here at pen State you have an Institute that collects information from all the counseling centers around the country why are so many students going into the Counseling Center what is the reason that they report when they come in through the front door and the reason as you can see uh going back to 2013 2014 to the present the only things that are going up are anxiety and depression nothing else is rising it's not even stress gen Z does not claim to be more stressed than a previous generation they just never got the chance to learn how to deal with normal ordinary everyday stress and I'll explain why later um so as as I mentioned there is some skepticism this is was in the New York Times a few months ago Richard fredman saying relax there is no epidemic and and it's not and there's no harm caused by devices your kids playing video games your kids spending hours and hours a day on devices relax it's it the only the only evidence that it's harming them is self-report these surveys that show that they say that they're more depressed but you know they're just more comfortable talking about it that's his argument in the New York Times but I believe that he is wrong and here's why this is data on the percentage of boys now for boys there's no change but this is data on the percentage of boys or the sorry the number of boys out of 100,000 in the population who are admitted to a hospital each year for cutting themselves or otherwise harming themselves so severely that they required hospitalization and so as you see the youngest boys age 10 to 14 almost never do that the so the rates are fairly are low for boys compared to the girls which you'll see in a moment and for boys there's been no change as we go from 2001 to 2015 but look at the rates for girls much much higher now here I've cut it off at 2009 much much higher this is an a manifestation of an anxiety disorder self harm is a is a is a product of anxiety anxiety disorders much higher rates for girls and young women as you see but look what happens after after [Music] 2009 what you see is that for the older teenage girls the rate has increased 62% this is not self-report this is not just changing diagnostic criteria these are Hospital admissions now interestingly the old the oldest group here who are millennials in this data set the Millennials were not affected because as I said they got social media when they were in college and later and there's not much evidence that it was harmful in college I believe I can't I'm working on a lit review now there's debate about this but my my conclusion from going through the data is that the problem is getting social media in middle school and that it's a problem especially for girls look what happens to the youngest girls age 10 to 14 girls they didn't use to cut themselves but their their rate has gone up 189% since they got social media in middle school again I can't prove causality but I have a lit review online which which I'm working on which is available uh if you go to the coding.com I'll post it there tomorrow um uh I I think the evidence does point to social media as being the reason for the huge sex difference in what has happened to teenagers it also shows up in suicide so the suicide rate was uh uh relative was higher for males in the 80s and 90s when there was a huge crime wave and a lot of violence but it's been stable in the 2000s until recently so for males it's up 25% now it turns out most age groups in America are going up suicide is going down around the world but it's going up in America for almost all age groups both sexes so the rise for boys is actually not not much more than what's happening to older men but the rise for women while it's higher than for men overall for teen for um uh for 15 to 19 year old girls it's up 70% which is much higher and for 10 to 14 year old girls who have a very low base rate but for them again the increase is gigantic 151% increase in pre-teen girl suicides in this country so something is going wrong especially for girls um 2015 hit a a peak higher than ever recorded before since we've been collecting data and the two years after that are right about the same level so it was not a one-year Spike so that's the first mega Trend the second Trend I want to talk about is political polarization so about 10 or 15 years years ago there was a debate as to whether America was becoming more polarized everybody agreed that we had Elite polarization so if you look at Congress if you look at the media if you look at the the intellectual leaders those who were in The Fry everyone agreed that that in the 80s and 90s we had Elite polarization what you see here is the degree to which the US Congress is polarized going back to 1880 uh a calculation to what extent can you predict everything about major votes if all you know is where a particular legislator is on the left right Spectrum if that allows you to predict you and then the two You can predict the two parties are far apart then Congress is very polarized just like straight party voting on a left right Dimension and so in the wake of the Civil War it was horribly polarized it was uh you know um and then for a variety of reasons it plummets in the mid 20th century and we have this period of very low polarization where there was a lot of bipartisan partisanship so there's a lot of reasons for that but what I want to point out is that that was the an anomaly it was a temporary period And what happened since the 1980s is this so the US Congress is more polarized than it has ever been or at least it's at the level that it was right after the Civil War it's dysfunctional it's very hard to reform um it's it's it is ineffective as a legislature uh so that's Elite polarization it's also now clear I think the argument is settled that we also have mass polarization if you keep your eye on uh um especially what we think about each other how much we hate each other but even if you look at what we think about the issues where it's harder to see um Pew has been studying American attitudes on a whole bunch of items they were able to go back to 1994 and look at uh to what extent are different demographic groups different on their attitudes to these issues and here's what they find so the way to read this is let's look at gender if you take this basket of 10 items and you take the absolute value of the difference between male and female back in 1994 on this basket of items by gender it was was eight or nine eight or nine points apart and now it's seven points apart so on gender there's been no change men and women are not further apart on this basket of issues but if you look at religious attendance it's 11% 11 points apart now it used to be only five points apart so Americans are now twice as far apart we are coming apart by religious attendance if you know whether someone goes to church regularly You can predict something about their attitudes but that increase is nothing compared to what has happened to our polarization by party and most of this as you see is just since around 2004 so polarization has been rising since the 1980s but it is really rising in the last 10 or 15 years something is happening that is very very bad for our democracy for our ability to work together trust each other compromise so uh why is this happening I wrote an article uh with a political scientist Sam Abrams I won't go into these reasons my point is there are a lot of historical trends that the late 20th century was an anomaly in a sense we had a lot of things going for us we took it for granted we thought democracy was easy we thought now that the Soviet Union has collapsed clearly this is the end of History all societies as they develop will become like the United States or like Sweden or some sort of Western democracy we thought it was easy we took it for granted we were wrong um most of these were Trends cannot be reversed um it doesn't mean that things are hopeless it just means it's going to be really really hard to turn this thing around um things passions really Rose especially in 2016 2017 and this is now where we come back to campus there was a huge rise in uh u in shout downs and disinvitation all sorts of things happening in the 2016 2017 uh Academic Year and the inauguration of the president was actually a Spur that that sort of raised the temperature on campus especially and so while there's been thank God very little violence on campus most of the real violence occurred in the few months after the inauguration when passions were very high so the bloodiest event was at UC Berkeley a lot of people were injured it's incredible no one was killed and we tell the story in the book in the cuddling the American mind I mean it's amazing how many people were injured without being killed um um so that was Berkeley at Middlebury was another of the spectacular cases where Professor uh was assaulted she was accompanying Charles Murray they there Charles Murray on the front they wouldn't let him speak and when they he and the other Professor tried to leave the building U they were attacked she has a concussion and possibly permanent neck damage as well um there's been a wave of activism of students who um especially in the last couple years think that they can go into classes and and shout and protest to shut things down um if they object to what is happening so there was a lot of that in 2015 to 2017 it declined quite a lot in 2018 so the at least those shout downs and the violence is is weigh down thankfully in the last year um but it's left in its wake a new moral and political culture on many campuses and that's what our book is about that's what I mostly want to talk to you about so what has happened is just since 2014 we've seen the emergence on many campuses it it's not very much here but it's at most liberal art schools in the Northeast and the West Coast it's a it's scattered around the whole country um but what is a new culture that we call a culture of safetyism it's an idea that students the idea is that students think of themselves and they think of people as very very fragile and they see the world as and the campus as very very dangerous and therefore they need protection from words are violence and they need protection from certain kinds of words books speakers and ideas so if you see on many campuses in America you do see the if you see a bunch of these terms together they always travel together if people are talking about safe spaces trigger warnings microaggressions bias response teams America's a matrix of Oppression you get a call out culture and it's often focused on single words there's a real reactivity to a single word this is these are the features of this new moral culture so what I'd like to do uh is analyze that for you that's what our our book is about with Greg lukanov um why it happened suddenly why it came out of nowhere in 2017 again I won't go through all the reasons I guess I'd like to make lists of reasons I'm a social scientist everything's complicated everything has multiple causal threads um so uh itical polarization and Rising anxiety those are the two that I'm talking to you about but a lot is because of the way we changed our child rearing in the 1990s and I'll come back to that in a moment the student body is changing times are changing all sorts of things are changing and a lot of us don't know what to do and so we end up being caught like deer in the headlights and implementing policies that are not based on research um I hope that the things here and the things in the book will help ground empirically grounded reforms and policies [Music]

Channel: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy

Views: 47,408

Keywords: education, universities, higher education

Id: O1qz0keCwmo

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2024