William Zinsser College Pressures

College Pressures

In College Pressures, William Zinsser talks about the college pressures that most college students face. At the time, William Zinsser was the Master of Branford College at Yale University. He says that he sees four kinds of pressure that most college students go through such as economic, parental, peer and self-induced pressure. As I read his essay, I analyzed the effectiveness of Zinsser’s observation about what pressures most college students face.

Most students face economic pressure as they live in a brutal economy. Zinsser says that he knows why students are under that pressure. He explains that at most private colleges, tuition, room and board cost at least $7,000 per year at the time this essay was written. Today,

To relate Zinsser’s argument, I remember watching a documentary called “Student Loan Sinkhole?” which was about a single mother who was struggling with paying off her $70,000 student loan debt. She owed about a thousand dollars a month in payment, which was more than a third of her gross salary, which makes the payments hard. Things took for the worse when she lost her job and now couldn’t figure out on how she was going to pay off her loan. By the end of the documentary, she and her daughter were forced to move out of her house due to the fact that her student loan debt has cost her the house. This showed me that as a college student, loans can have an effect on us in the future. This proves Zinsser’s argument that most graduate students get behind instead of getting ahead. After watching that documentary, I feel that I’m under economic pressure as I might not know how much money I owe if I have to take out a

William Zinsser says that his “students think that every other student is working harder and doing better, so the only solution is to study harder still”. In other words, Zinsser says that students think that their peers are doing better than themselves. I can’t say that I haven’t felt the same way before. There are times when I feel pressured by others. For instance, My roommate who is in the same economics class as me, studies and reads more than me, which would make me feel that I should work harder than he does. But Zinsser said that students shouldn’t worry about their peers working harder than themselves, instead they should all just relax and do something fun and relaxing. I would have to agree with Zinsser with his statement because if students are not relaxed and is more focused on what their peers do, then students are going to be more stressed out on their peers and won’t have any