Open access peer-reviewed chapter
Abstract
This chapter explores the struggles that high school and university students in Denmark experience and try to cope with, through the perspectives of study counselors. Scholars have lately described a relation between students’ felt pressures and an increase in diagnoses such as stress, anxiety, and depression as well as increases in the non-medical use of prescription pharmaceuticals for enhancement purposes. While counselors have a unique position in the educational system as someone who is there to support the students, they are also witnesses to the changes that student populations experience over time. The chapter is based on in-depth interviews with 36 counselors at different universities and high schools in Denmark and examines how counselors cope with new developments in the educational system as well as new kinds of student challenges and struggles that go beyond issues with performance and perfection.
Keywords
- study counselors
- students
- educational structures
- pressure
- coping strategies
- performance enhancement
1. Introduction
This chapter is based on in-depth interviews with 36 counselors at universities and high schools in Denmark. As the quote alludes to, counselors note that students often long for a ‘normal’ day with no pressures to perform or obligations to present themselves in specific ways. While students’ experiences are well-documented in research, experiences and perspectives from the point of view of educational counselors have been less explored even though these experiences would make an important contribution to understanding the pressures and struggles students face in current educational contexts. Counselors have a unique position in the educational system as they are there to help while at the same time not being part of the teaching system. Furthermore, counselors not only see struggles existing within student populations but also witness how these struggles might change over time, as well as how recent developments in the policies and practices that govern educational programs, also might influence students’ struggles. The chapter shows that counselors struggle with their role and possibilities to help students, and while the chapter mainly focuses on counselors’ experiences and views of students’ struggles with pressure and performance, we also describe how they deal with the fact that some students seek other solutions to their problems than asking counselors for help. As such, this chapter builds on the growing research interest concerning young adults and their overall well-being in the European and North American educational systems [1, 2]. It has been documented that as a result of an increasing focus on competition and achievement in Western Societies, many students feel highly pressured [3, 4] and several researchers have highlighted the relationship between the pressures experienced by students and an increase in diagnoses such as stress, anxiety, and depression [5, 6], and the increase in non-medical use of prescription pharmaceuticals for enhancement purposes among healthy college-students [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. This is also the case in Denmark, where several reports bear witness to increases in anxiety, stress, and a general lack of well-being among young people [2, 3, 15, 16, 17]. A tendency for young people to use and misuse prescription medicines as a way of keeping up and performing in the Danish educational system has also been noted [18, 19, 20, 21, 22].
2. Theoretical background
An important theoretical point of departure for this chapter is that achievement seems to have become the ideal for a ‘good life’ and that the ideal self is an achieving self [2]. Even though modernity theorists [23, 24, 25] decades ago noted a growing space for individual self-construction and that the individual is less bounded than before, it seems that the poststructuralist self is not quite as ‘unbounded’ as these theorists have suggested [26]. On the contrary, a new kind of individual responsibility to construct self-hood seems to have developed. This kind of self has been linked to neoliberal societal values [27], that favor the predominantly active, efficient, and goal-oriented individual [15, 26, 28] and include an obligation to perform well.
In line with these more general sociological points, recent educational research also reports on an increasing focus on efficiency, performance, and accountability in educational policies in many Western societies. Devine et al. [29] suggest that this development places new demands on students, which again require a focus on competencies such as efficiency and goal orientation. According to recent Danish surveys, young people report decreases in well-being compared to a few years ago [17]. While young people’s mental well-being is affected by various factors, external as well as internal, and the causes for a lack of well-being are manifold, we suggest that the overall social focus on performance may be one of the major factors relevant to this development. A similar point is made by Sørensen & Nielsen [30] who analyze the self-construction of young Danes. The young people they have interviewed seem to experience no self-evident right to subjectivity, and to regard subjectivity as something they are obliged to earn and create themselves (Ibid: 44). This means, the authors suggest, that the obligation to perform a specific kind of self is strong and that young people, out of fear of becoming ‘abjected’, and thus ‘nobody’ (Ibid: 36), seem to be inclined to act close to the ideals. In line with, for example, Willig [31], Sørensen & Nielsen argue that this obligation seems to be hard for young people to avoid or eliminate (see also [16]), and they see this new demand to be a flexible, responsible, and self-realizing individual (see also Refs. [27, 32]) as different from the demands of modern societies. They argue that ‘the self’ used to be ‘closed’, in the sense that there were relatively constant rules to follow, while in contemporary Western societies, the self is ‘open’, and that it is the obligation of young people to ‘close’ it by choosing the right ways to present themselves. The educational system, the authors argue, is a central arena of this self-construction.
Furthermore, one domain that seems to be increasingly important in the lives of young people is the increasing influence of social media. While researchers increasingly associate the focus on performance and perfection in young people’s everyday lives, and especially in educational contexts, with their stress and dissatisfaction, several studies have recently focused on how social media might play a role in young people’s images of achievement and perfection [33].
Considering the described general discursive and structural conditions and developments, we investigate how counselors understand students’ conditions, struggles, and coping strategies, as well as how they contemplate their role in relation to the students in contemporary Denmark. Our analysis of the counselor’s narratives is thus inspired by a poststructuralist perspective [34, 35], suggesting that counselors’ (as well as the students’) narratives are conditioned by and embedded in social and cultural notions and norms.
3. Methods
The chapter is the result of the analysis and comparison of interviews with educational counselors. The interviews formed part of three different datasets from related but separate research projects which included interviews with 36 counselors and 100 students. All three projects were concerned with the overall topic of performance enhancement and student struggles, primarily with a focus on the perspectives of the students themselves [12, 18, 21, 22]. In this chapter though, student struggles are analyzed through the lens of the educational counselors, and it outlines how counselors experience students’ challenges and solutions, also in the cases where students handle their problems in other ways than asking them for help.
3.1 Sample
The interviews for the first two projects took place at Danish universities and high schools between 2014 and 2016, and the last interviews took place at Danish high schools in 2018 and 2019. All three projects have sought to construct a diverse sample of both high schools and universities, to include as many different experiences and perspectives as possible. This includes both urban and rural high schools, various universities as well and different study programs that attract different student populations, including both competitive and less competitive settings. That being said, we also relied on schools and universities’ willingness to participate, and we recognize that the more resourceful institutions may have been more inclined to participate and that we relied on willing doorkeepers [36]. While our sample may not be representative, it nevertheless still covers a variety of perspectives.
The narrative data in this chapter come from in-depth qualitative face-to-face interviews with 36 study counselors from five different universities (U) and seven high schools in Denmark (H), conducted by the authors. The interviewees have worked as counselors between two and 25 years, there is a majority of women in the sample, and more than half have worked as counselors for over 10 years. We did not notice any differences between the experiences of male and female counselors, the main differences had more to do with the amount of time they had worked as counselors. While the interviews have belonged to different research projects, their focus and content are similar, addressing the themes also paramount in recent literature regarding student pressure and performance [2, 30].
We were particularly interested in exploring how counselors’ views on students’ struggles could contribute to the overall understanding of what students face in educational contexts in contemporary Denmark. The interviews focused on their individual experiences as counselors, both regarding recent political and structural developments in the educational system, the public discussions of performance pressure in media accounts, the kinds of problems students presented to them, and their knowledge of students’ coping strategies including performance-enhancing substance use. The interview schedules were open-ended and participants were able to raise themes and issues that were not necessarily included in the interview schedule [37]. For example, the perceived changing role of parents and importance of social media were themes introduced by the counselors. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim.
3.2 Analysis
The empirical material was coded with Nvivo, using elaborate code trees with main codes and subcodes. We used thematic analysis [38] and discussed the material across the codes to identify patterns. In the analysis of the data, we were attentive to the ways in which the attitudes of the counselors reproduced or diverged from themes in public discourse or the media about education, performance, and perfection, which may affect the work life and attitudes of counselors. Furthermore, we paid attention to how themes raised by counselors resonated with and differed from the themes raised by students [12, 18, 21, 22]. Across all our data, our analysis suggests that many developments and considerations are emphasized by both counselors and students and between the different universities and schools, regardless of socio-cultural contexts and geographical locations.
The projects have been reported to the Danish Data Protection Agency. Our data collection is GDPR compliant and the research projects to which the data belongs have been followed by research groups of competent peers at Aarhus University.
4. Results
Overall, our analysis suggests that there are an increasing number of students who seek counseling. Counselors find that students seem to experience new demands concerning their study life, as well as regarding themselves as individuals, requiring new coping strategies. The analysis illuminates the ways in which counselors conceptualize and manage this development and illustrates that student everyday life, as well as counselors’ role in the students’ lives, have changed radically. Many of the counselors try to explain these new developments by pointing to not only increased pressures in the education system but also by alluding to changes in leisure time and family life, including parental roles [30]. Furthermore, counselors are concerned about the increase in diagnoses among young people in general, as well as about indications that more students than before use performance-enhancing drugs. Finally, they are concerned about the pressure that is born of the requirement to present oneself as a successful being on social media [39]. The counselors reflect on how recent structural developments also cause new requirements for their daily work with the students. Among other things, they assume a more caregiving role than they used to and thus find themselves involved in tasks that they think ideally should be taken care of by the parents.
In the first section, we focus on how counselors describe the students they meet in the light of new demands for self-realization through perfection and achievement. In the second section, we take a closer look at how counselors view the background and implications of the students’ challenges. Finally, in the last section, we present and discuss the counselors’ experience with different coping strategies that students employ to meet their described changes and challenges.
4.1 Perfection and achievement
When we ask the counselors to describe the young people they meet in their counseling practice, they all (across our data sets) tend to describe contemporary students as concerned with perfection and grades.
The university counselor in the following quote, sees a tendency among the students to focus more on performance and results and he relates this to the new demands placed on students:
Striving for perfection is not only a concern connected to grades and academic performance. Rather, it seems to reflect a more
Some counselors also relate the focus on perfection and grades to another important change: they note that the ‘kinds’ of students that seek help have changed and that the students they meet now are in many ways more resourceful than the ones they met earlier:
But even if the students, who seek counseling, seem more resourceful than before, often, the students themselves cannot explain what is wrong, other than feeling stressed or unhappy. As one high school counselor notes:
As the previous quote illustrates, and this is especially so for young women (see also [18]), the range of different expectations the students have for themselves often somehow “gets in the way” of well-being. One high school counselor talks about several young women who collapse in a high-school gym class, and he relates this incident to the pressure to have perfect looks:
Besides performing at school, the counselors experience that it is also important for young people, especially in high school, to perform in the peer group, and to be seen as popular, fun, or good-looking. Students who seek counseling often say that they are afraid of being excluded from the group and of being seen by peers as stupid or inadequate. This tendency to feel inadequate and insufficient is underscored by the following quote from a high school counselor:
When asked, the counselor expands on the concept of a gray Monday, explaining that the students need “ordinary and predictable days, where they know what to do”. He thinks that many of the students find that the expectations are too high and that they meet (too) high demands for levels of reflexivity and independence.
Many of the counselors note that the demand to work independently and the pressure to be reflective is growing, and there is great pressure to constantly start new projects and meet multiple deadlines. They find that the pressure experienced by the students is very ‘real’, and they note the same tendency in their own work lives: “In our own schedule as study counselors - many more assignments come in” (H9).
Related to this, and regardless of where in the educational system they are working, almost all the counselors notice that one of the challenges that students face is the ability to structure their time. Having to navigate many different projects and subjects as well as social and extracurricular activities is in itself a difficult task, and with the added pressure to perform well it becomes even more difficult:
Many counselors note that strongly related to the anxiety of wasting time is a growing goal-orientation among the students. A university counselor explains that the students who are in the phase of applying to schools or universities are very concerned about making the right choices:
Some of the high school counselors see it as their task to explain to the students that more than grades, it is important to focus on well-being and a curiosity to learn. But then, as one counselor explains:
This seeming lack of confidence among students in their own ability to influence the general circumstances is something many counselors experience, and while it is more pronounced in the high school domain, several traits of it also exist within the universities. Furthermore, while there are some differences in how striving for perfection and focusing on achievement is challenging for young people, who seek counseling in high schools and universities, overall, they seem to experience many of the same kinds of problems in their everyday lives. This points to a more general problem that may be less connected to the specific level of education or type of situation a young person is in and more to a general societal and cultural phenomenon.
4.2 Recent reforms and changes in the study counselor role
Overall, study counselors are quite concerned with recent reforms of the educational system which is also described in research [39, 41]. They find that recent changes in Denmark, for example, the implementation of the ‘progress reform’ in 2005, has had a large influence not only on the educational pressure that students must deal with but also on their own role and ability to help students, who face difficulties. One high school counselor, who is also a teacher with nearly 20 years of work experience, reflects on this:
The counselors attribute the experience of teachers and counselors having less time with the students to the continual pressure from the government to change procedures. Especially the older, more experienced counselors underline the increased time pressure and the fact that more students demand their assistance only adds to the time pressure.
These changes have increased pressures both on counselors’ time and their performance. Some counselors also note that this development may relate to what has been described in recent literature, that academic education has become more of an ideal in the overall discourse on youth [2, 3, 6]. Many counselors believe that this development may lead young people to believe that performing academically is the only way to perform a successful youth identity:
The counselors are concerned with the ways in which recent developments; reforms and an increase in the presence of students with diagnoses such as anxiety, depression, and stress, influence both the students’ lives and their own daily work as counselors. The more experienced counselors find that the students they meet often have other and more serious problems than the students who approached them before the reforms. In fact, sometimes, counselors find that helping students is beyond their ability as study counselors. The counselors reflect on these changes, and in the following, we describe the four main developments that counselors see as “game-changers” in their own work life: increases in students with diagnoses; parents’ changing roles; increasing loneliness among students; and the presence of social media in students’ lives.
4.3 Student pressures and an increase in diagnoses
The counselors experience that the combination of the performance-based ‘measurement culture’ with the increased time pressure creates new requirements and a more stressful situation for many students [12, 18, 20].
Study counselors, especially at high schools, suggest that increasing demands, while simultaneously having less access to face-to-face contact with teachers, may contribute to the problems experienced by students:
The more experienced high school counselors recall that, some years ago, they helped more with, for example, choice of subject and absences from classes, while now they increasingly help with problems such as vulnerability related to anxiety and depression. Especially high school counselors have noticed that particularly the youngest students over the last decade or so, have started to seek help from counselors regarding new kinds of challenges in the educational system:
As this last quote illustrates, one common concern about the growing vulnerability of students is that they seem to lack responsible adults in their lives.
4.4 The role of parents
Both high school counselors and university counselors underscore the importance of family support for the well-being of students, but quite a few of them hear from students that they feel that their parents lack interest and that they do not feel supported by them. An experienced university counselor (U13) cites a student he met in counseling: “
Quite a few of the high school counselors describe that students often experience distance in relation to their parents and that they lack an adult with whom they have a confidential relationship. Sometimes, when high school counselors invite parents to meetings, the parents have no idea what their child is struggling with:
There is a general tendency that counselors are increasingly experiencing having to take care of tasks that they think of as parental tasks, such as care and recognition.
4.5 Loneliness
A growing problem that counselors struggle to help students with is the issue of loneliness and a sense of feeling different. In a recent study about Danish university students, one out of four participants described themselves as lonely in their study environment [42], and our interviews showed that this may manifest itself in many ways. One university counselor gives the following examples:
Although loneliness is a theme both among university and high school counselors, it is more upfront among high school counselors. Many of them are concerned with an increasing number of young people feeling alone and socially excluded:
Many counselors experience that loneliness may be one of the most difficult problems for high school students to handle because there seems to be a kind of taboo attached to it. In contemporary Denmark, where the main requirement is to be active, goal-oriented, socially visible, and popular [2, 26], it may be especially hard to talk about feeling lonely:
Many of the high school counselors we interviewed are concerned about the degree to which loneliness preoccupies students and about how common it is. And they find it hard to handle:
In general, the high school counselors note that the feeling of not being popular is an important concern of the students they meet in counseling. The feeling of inadequacy is described by, among others, Alain Ehrenberg [43], who is concerned exactly with the distance between what societies expect, and what individuals can live up to. Bjønness [18] for example describes how students experience a discrepancy between what is expected from them as students and friends, and what they can do or perform. This discrepancy, according to the counselors, is made even more present for the students as a result of the increasing role of social media.
4.6 Social media
Counselors both at high schools and universities generally agree that much of the academic and social imperative for success, and the related stress and loneliness, may relate to the emerging culture of documenting and presenting oneself through social media. They note that the way young people interact has changed a lot and that platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are used to receive positive feedback from friends [44]. This creates an environment of comparison and competition, which, for some young people, may be hard to live up to [33].
Many of the counselors argue that social media may contribute to the feeling of being alone:
Some counselors are concerned, that young people who feel that they are already marginalized may feel that social media amplifies their sense of marginality:
Counselors at both university and high schools are concerned with the felt requirement among students to be on social media all the time:
Besides providing a means to become included, social media is also about promoting oneself, showing that one is both having fun and doing well in work and studies. Some counselors talk about certain students as ‘overachievers’, who want to show their success in all aspects of their lives [3, 21], but that even among the students, who do not fit into this description, there is a kind of tacit requirement to engage in this self-promotion. Several counselors find this hard to resolve, and many relate this hardship to the fact that their own youth experience was so different from what the students experience today. They find it difficult to fully understand and live up to technological changes and the student’s perceived need to constantly engage with social media.
We have until now described recent changes from the perspective of educational counselors, but the tendencies described above are also central in our interviews with students as described elsewhere [12, 18, 39]. In the next section, we discuss how the counselors understand some of the different coping strategies used by students.
4.7 The emergence of new coping strategies
Many students in both high school and university do not seek counseling [21, 39]. Such students often do not expect that counselors could be helpful in solving the struggles they deal with, and some students understand seeking help as admitting to not being in control of things. Students who do not seek counseling sometimes seek alternative strategies, outside the educational system [21]. However, counselors have noted that even though the students do not approach the counselor to talk through their problems, they sometimes ask the counselor’s advice about how to get a doctor’s note, a diagnosis, or a sick leave, to give space and time to deal with what they are going through:
While the counselors acknowledge that these can be necessary solutions, several of them suggest that these strategies are sometimes used to deal with a situation that perhaps could have been helped in other ways:
The counselors seem to acknowledge that these kinds of strategies may be used as ways of dealing with an educational system that often does not encompass enough time and flexibility. In some ways, this might be understood as related to processes of (bio)medicalization [45, 46]. This is not necessarily because students and counselors see their problems as pathological or belonging to the medical realm but because they have figured out that medical documents and explanations may constitute a more legitimate and productive way to achieve help. As this university counselor notes:
But while some students choose to cope with challenges such as concentration, time pressure, procrastination, motivation, and self-confidence via the official healthcare system, counselors note that others choose to acquire and consume pharmaceuticals non-medically [18, 20, 39, 47].
Using doctors as access to prescription stimulants for non-medical purposes corresponds with what previous studies have shown [48] and can be understood as yet another version of turning more general problems into medical ones [2, 15, 46]. Several scholars have pointed to the blurred boundaries between enhancement and treatment in the use of pharmaceutical enhancers [49, 50] and research has documented how the knowledge about such practices spreads fast in and beyond student populations through peers, as well as on social media [48, 51]. While there is not much survey research in a Danish context, a bi-annual survey focusing on student life and well-being shows that 7% of students use different substances to handle pressures, including caffeine pills, beta-blockers, prescription stimulants, and alcohol [19]. Many of the counselors are aware of the non-medical use of Ritalin and other ADHD medicines but, they have so far been more focused on cannabis use, particularly in high school settings, which seems to be somewhat normalized among Danish students. Most of the counselors do not seem to worry much about the use of cannabis, and they also meet students who thrive despite using cannabis. Jens (H19) says that some students may experience pressure, but in his view, that is not because they use cannabis. On the contrary, Jens says: “Rather smoke cannabis and be a part of a group, than be lonely”. Counselors may also experience cannabis use as a problem though, for example when it is used because the young student cannot afford to buy medicine for their conditions:
At universities, the use of pharmaceutical enhancers like Ritalin is a topic of concern, but most counselors think that there are more cases than reported, because they expect that students would not come to them and talk about such use:
Previous research confirms that, in a Danish context, students tend to keep their non-medical use of prescription stimulants a secret, also from counselors, because it is not normalized and accepted to the extent that it is in a North American context but also because most of the students do not conceptualize their use of such drugs as problematic [52]. While counselors recognize that using substances to manage student pressures occurs without them knowing much about it, they do not isolate this ‘misuse’ from other coping strategies, such as doctor’s notes, sick leaves, or, as this high school counselor points out, self-hurting behavior:
Many counselors make a link between study reforms and the indications that more students use performance-enhancing substances, suggesting that the system pressures young people into ‘boosting’ themselves with substances:
But some counselors recall that substances were also used years ago when they were students themselves:
While what this counselor suggests implies that functional drug use [50] is not a new phenomenon, the particularities of the drug use may well be very different nowadays. None of the more experienced counselors recall such discourses on ‘mental well-being’ or ‘being the best version of oneself’ that currently dominates the focus among many young people.
5. Conclusion
In this chapter, we have illustrated some of the common challenges that exist among Danish high school and university students from the perspective of educational counselors. While students often ask counselors for help with problems that relate to overall struggles with pressure and perfection, our study also reveals how recent changes in discourses about performance in Danish society, reforms of educational structures, as well as technological changes affect not only students’ lives, circumstances, and struggles but also how counselors are (and are not) able to live up to new demands and roles.
This illustrates, as some theorists argue, that individuals are less bounded than earlier [24, 25], but also that rather than unboundedness, it may be a matter of new kinds of boundedness. It seems that both students’ and counselors’ narratives confirm that rather than fewer boundaries for individuals, new ones are emerging. Both student’s and counselor’s narratives indicate that the main obligation is to perform well and to present, build, and promote oneself (also on social media) as an efficient, goal-oriented, and socially competent individual [10, 26, 28, 53]. These new requirements seem to create new challenges both for young people, especially the youngest students, in the Danish educational system, as well as for the counselors’ ability to understand and help. There is a concern among the counselors about the growing number of diagnoses and loneliness among students, and how this development relates to recent reforms in the educational system, and to the more general development towards ‘the performance society’.
Given the quite unison concerns in much research, as well as among counselors and students in our Danish context, we find that more attention should be paid to not only the consequences of the increasing pressures to perform which seems to influence the well-being of young people, but also to the political and cultural structures in which these pressures exist.
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