It is almost impossible to predict the possibility of academic achievements of community-college students, as they spend some hours learning in school and others at their home/community. This places too many demands on the life of the students necessitating them to put efforts in pulling the available resources together towards achieving the set academic goals. Inability to meet the set goals results in stress amongst the students, which has proved to be inevitable in a student’s life. This paper has identified social/relationship problems, college-related problems, and family/financial problems as the probable causes of student stress. Henceforth, this paper critically scrutinizes what emanates to the specified causes and the consequent effects of college student stress.
Arguably, college students experience social stress in establishing ample college as well as community social networks/relationship. This results from poor interpersonal relationships with faculty personnel, fellow students, college tutors, and their peers back in the community. Community-college students originate from different cultural backgrounds with different cultures and beliefs, which make it difficult to establish and relate with college personnel, as well as the other students. However, students from common cultural backgrounds can easily establish social networks with themselves. For example, community college students spend most of their daytime in school hence cannot get time to relate with their peers back at the community. Moreover, dealing with young college adult relationships, as well as schoolwork, can be difficult leading to significant stress. Inability to establish stable social relationships affects the students negatively since it results in loss of self-esteem, which might cause adverse effects on the performance of the student. Community college students with low self-esteem are reported to resort in maladaptive behaviors including drug and alcohol abuse. Furthermore, some may opt to commit suicide.
Family and financial issues also causes stress amongst community-college students. College education itself is expensive thus creating financial-related stress as some students have difficulties in making their fee payments. For example, students from poor family backgrounds face difficulties in paying fees. This affects them negatively as they are forced to withdraw unwillingly from of school. For instance, some community college students have children thus face difficulties in establishing close bonds with them, since they spent most of the time carrying out schoolwork. Supporting them financially is also a problem, since most income caters for college education. This results in psychological consequences involving depression, which may lead to drop in academic performance of the student.
Deductively, efforts should be imparted to enable the community-college student’s mange stress. Community collages should empower students on the various skills to enable them manage stress that they face in their daily encounters while in college and back at the community.
