A survey entitled “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” found incoming college freshmen are experiencing a lower level of emotional health as compared to freshman classes of the past.

The survey, which involved more than 200,000 incoming full-time college freshmen, found that the percentage of students who rated themselves as “below average” in their emotional health increased. Similarly, the percentage who rated their emotional health as “above average” fell from 64 percent in 1985 to 52 percent in 2010. These figures represent the lowest level they have been since the data started to be collected in 1985. Each year the annual survey has been conducted, researchers found that the emotional health of women as they ranked themselves has been lower than men. According to this most recent survey, this gap has increased.

Campus counselors are not surprised by the results of the survey, as many say they see students every day in their offices who are under a great deal of stress and who are depressed. Many of these students are also on psychiatric medication, which was often prescribed before the student came to the school.

Many factors may be creating the low emotional health levels, but many feel the state of the economy is playing a significant role. Not only are students experiencing pressure from their parents, but they are also stressed out about their college debts as well as the lack of job prospects upon graduation.

“This fits with what we’re seeing,” said Brian Van Brunt, who is the director of counseling at Western Kentucky University as well as the president of the American College Counseling Association, in a recent New York Times article. “More students are arriving on campus with problems, needing support, and today’s economic factors are putting a lot of extra stress on college students, as they look at their loans and wonder if there will be a career waiting for them on the other side.”

According to some experts, there are also inherent problems in asking students to rate their own emotional health because this can be difficult to assess. This is particularly true when it comes to assessing emotional health as it compares to others.
“Most people probably think emotional health means, ‘Am I happy most of the time, and do I feel good about myself?’ so it probably correlates with mental health,” said Dr. Mark Reed, who is the director of the Dartmouth College counseling office. “I don’t think students have an accurate sense of other people’s mental health. There’s a lot of pressure to put on a perfect face, and people often think they’re the only ones having trouble.”

At the same time, the decline in emotional health may also be attributed to the pressures that students are putting on themselves. This seems to be supported by other parts of the survey, which found that the students’ rankings of their academic abilities and desire to achieve have gone up. In fact, about three-quarters of the respondents felt they were above average, which is the highest these numbers have been since the survey has been conducted.

“Students know their generation is likely to be less successful than their parents’, so they feel more pressure to succeed than in the past,” said Jason Ebbeling, who is the director of residential education at Southern Oregon University. “These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.”

The survey also seemed to find that the state of the economy is weighing heavily on today’s college students.

“Paternal unemployment is at the highest level since we started measuring,” said John Pryor, who is the director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program with U.C.L.A.’s Higher Education Research Institute. “More students are taking out loans. And we’re seeing the impact of not being able to get a summer job, and the importance of financial aid in choosing which college they’re going to attend. We don’t know exactly why students’ emotional health is declining. But it seems the economy could be a lot of it.”

The gender gap found in the survey as well as in real life applications is also undeniable. While the survey found that 18 percent of male students feel “frequently overwhelmed,” the same is true with 39 percent of women. Furthermore, 60 percent of students who seek out mental health services while in college are female.

“Boys are socialized not to talk about their feelings or express stress, while girls are more likely to say they’re having a tough time,” said Perry C. Francis, who is the coordinator for counseling services at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. “Guys might go out and do something destructive, or stupid, that might include property damage. Girls act out differently.”

According to Linda Sax, who is a professor of education at U.C.L.A., one of the reasons for the gender gap may also be in how the two sexes choose to spend their free time.

“One aspect of it is how women and men spent their leisure time,” said Sax. “Men tend to find more time for leisure and activities that relieve stress, like exercise and sports, while women tend to take on more responsibilities, like volunteer work and helping out with their family, that don’t relieve stress.”

The way college students interact with their professors also seems to play a role in their stress levels, with negative interactions having an even greater effect on women than on men.

“Women’s sense of emotional well-being was more closely tied to how they felt the faculty treated them,” said Sax. “It wasn’t so much the level of contact as whether they felt they were being taken seriously by the professor. If not, it was more detrimental to women than to men…And while men who challenged their professor’s ideas in class had a decline in stress, for women it was associated with a decline in well-being.”