College life can be quite stressful because it requires adapting to a dramatic life change. College life involves assuming greater responsibility for one's life, managing finances, making new friends, studying a great deal, and learning about a new environment.
Specific stressors experienced by college students include striving for good grades, coping with a greater amount of schoolwork, making friends, managing pressure to be sexually active, preventing date rape, being shy, becoming jealous, and breaking up with a dating partner.
The typical college student today is older than the college student of past years. Many college students are over twenty-five years of age.
Older college students experience stressors unique to their situations. They must juggle career, school, and family responsibilities.
Older college students often doubt their abilities to return to school, to achieve academically, and to interact well with classmates who may be much younger.
Colleges and high schools need to offer stress management educational experiences to their students to help them manage the degree of change that occurs upon graduating from high school and entering college.
To manage jealousy-related stress, determine what makes you jealous, put your jealous feelings in proper perspective, or negotiate a contract with the other person.
Minority college students can face unique stressors. Among these are racism, language barriers, classrooms conducted in ways that are at odds with cultural values, pressure to succeed in school, minority status in school for the first time, and the lack of role models from whom to seek guidance and encouragement.
