An Opinion on Problems with the University System: Hard Science and Mental Health

At the university I attend, there has recently been a huge push push to increase counselling services for people who are having problems with coping with stress, depression, etc. While I think that this is good, I feel as though it's the bureaucratic solution to a problem that needs and engineering solution: root cause analysis. Rather than funding a retroactive fix to the problem, which has questionable 

efficacy, I think that this university and others are fail to address the problem itself: in many if not most cases, THEY are the causes of the stress. I remember as a freshman referring to the weed out engineering classes as hazing. The accuracy of calling them hazing is almost disturbing. They required students to stay up to unreasonable times of night regularly, forced students to do excessive amounts of work that had no real point, attempt to solve mathematically impossible problems, and more. This workload caused me to develop a caffeine addiction for which I went through noticeable withdrawal symptoms during school break. I had friends for whom this work led to use of and/or dependence on more serious drugs. 

Is this really justified? I don't see how it possibly could be. Sure, it's not good to graduate under qualified students, but there must be a better way of weeding out. But under the current system, students transfer out of challenging programs with low average GPAs into easier programs with higher average GPAs. Once there, they have existing grades which were already bad in relation to the low GPA of the challenging program, make them unable to be as competitive in the easier program as people who didn't want to or weren't willing to pursue a more challenging degree. So the university system will now be graduating competent students who won't be able to compete in the job market as well as confirming the decision of people who shy away from a harder major. While this isn't so much the topic of this post, this is a major contributing factor to America's lack of engineers and scientists.

So how can we fix this? Here are some of my ideas

1. Standardize GPAs across all majors. People will be able to freely move between majors without having to worry about being competitive. If the university still wants to weed people out, create a benchmark for students to reach in order to continue rather than forcing them to drop out through failure. This also will allow students to pursue classes based on value of material rather than how easy or challenging it is to do well. 

2. Standardize GPAs across all universities. The same argument for the harder vs. easier majors applies for harder vs. easier universities. This is especially true when companies use cutoff GPAs to evaluate students from schools of diverse difficulties.

3. Reduce busy work. It occupies time that could be spent doing better things, ranging from more valuable work to socializing to sleeping. I think that many professors forget the importance of college beyond the classroom.

4. Make professors more accountable. When a professor assigns a bad problem, provides faulty lab materials, or anything of this nature, it's frequently because they didn't properly check over the assignment etc. For a mistake that a professor could have fixed with ten minutes more effort, hundreds of hours of students combined time may be wasted.

If universities can make the investment to fix the way the system works, they can graduate more people where they belong, the students will be happier, and schools will probably even be able to save money that they're putting towards metal health budgets to compensate for their bureaucratic decisions.