Columbia Gripped by Wave of Student Suicides
“student deaths include three in January alone”
Very sad news. Sometimes young people don’t realize how much their lives will change if they just ride out the bad times.
The New York Post reported:
Suicide wave grips Columbia
A disturbing wave of seven suicides and likely drug overdoses has swept through Columbia University so far this school year — and students say fiercely competitive academics and inadequate campus counseling programs are in large part to blame.
The student deaths include three in January alone — two of whom police suspect OD’d, plus an exchange student from Japan who killed herself by leaping from the seventh-floor window of her Broadway dorm.
The four other student suicides came once a month, from September through December, The Post has learned.
They include a promising 21-year-old journalist, a 29-year-old Navy veteran, a Moroccan student and an 18-year-old freshman from Brookfield, Missouri, named Taylor Gilpin Wallace.
“You don’t know how badly I want to jump out that window right now,” Wallace, who would be Columbia’s October suicide, said in a Facetime call from his John Jay Hall dorm room to his mother in Missouri — days before quitting school, moving back home and hanging himself in his basement.
“The only time Taylor did anything, he always did it well,” his mother, Angie, told The Post of her son, who grew up in a town with just 4,400 people and who was valedictorian of his high school class of just 73 students.
“He had competition at Brookfield High School, but nothing like Columbia,” his mom said.
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Comments
For some reason I think liberal intolerance may be playing a role…
It’s a bit odd that they’re mixing suicides and drug abuse.
Different problems with different causes.
College isn’t for everyone. Those barely qualified entering a highly competitive university may find it too much to bear. Better a lesser school, or trade school. Was the school filling a diversity quota, a regional quota, a racial quota? Perhaps they can study the outcomes of such students and advise them they are not a good fit.
could it be that people prone to instability resulting in suicide self-select into a culture that does nothing to discourage their proclivities.?
Now if only we could spread this to Berkely…