COMBO III: Princeton Will Drive You Crazy. Literally.

If you noticed more focus on mental health initiatives in the run-up to this year's USG elections, there's a good reason, according to results from the third USG Committee on Background and Opportunity (COMBO).35.3% of students surveyed report having mental health challenges that they did not experience before coming to Princeton, and certain groups are more at risk than others. Women were significantly more likely to feel depressed, overwhelmed, out of place, or experience new mental health challenges, as were LGBT students, who are also more likely to take a year off from school than the average student. Black students were only 70% as likely as white students to rate their emotional health as “higher than average.”Life does seem to be better if you’re an athlete. They’re less likely to report stress due to difficulties with friends or relationships and report feeling social anxiety much less frequently, and they rate their emotional health, social self-confidence, and leadership ability above the average Princeton student more often than non-athletes.

Athletes and Mental Health

Still, that’s only better by comparison. Over ¼ of us – athlete or not – are often overwhelmed and sometimes depressed.Yes, we’re Princeton students. We’re competitive overachievers who thrive on stress and little sleep. Or so we tell ourselves. While COMBO doesn’t compare us to students at similar universities and it's not exactly clear how students interpreted "new mental health challenges," the fact that more than 1/3 of us checked "yes" can't be good.There is a wealth of other information (often surprising) on how students’ backgrounds affect how they experience Princeton in the USG report. Where COMBO I & II focused almost exclusively on race, family income, and dining and residential options, COMBO III aimed to look at even more ways students’ backgrounds affect how they experience Princeton.As before, most of the stereotypes are true. COMBO committee members said income and ethnicity still strongly impact students’ dining and social choices, with wealthier and white students significantly more likely to join eating clubs. But committee members left these numbers out of their report, focusing on new findings from this year’s expanded survey.Background also affects how comfortable students are using taking advantage of university resources. Some highlights:

• Athletes are more comfortable using networks to pursue job opportunities, and they're more comfortable seeking advice from Career Services, the Writing Center, McGraw Center and Peer Tutoring.
• Men and religious students were less comfortable using academic and career resources. More religious students said they "tried to avoid" office hours, academic advisors, the Writing Center, and others.
• Students whose parents did not go to college are 91% more likely to feel they were less academically prepared for Princeton than the average student. For students from rural backgrounds, it's 51%.
• Athletes are significantly more likely want to pursue a business degree than non-athletes - 23.29% vs. 13.94% - but they're significantly less likely to want to pursue a Master's (29.5% vs. 42.96%) or a Ph.D. (20.19% vs. 36.21%).

We’ll add a link to the full results as soon as the USG posts them online.