another site
Update: This is what drove it we suspect:
*WEXTON WINS VIRGINIA HOUSE RACE, FIRST PICKUP FOR DEMOCRATS
Only 23 more to go…
* * *
While it is hard to discern exactly what drove this sudden shift towards a ‘blue wave’-themed derisking in markets, Dow futures are down 100 points…
10Y yields are down 3bps…
and the dollar tumbled…
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Authored by Jon Street via Campus Reform,
Socialist students in Illinois are petitioning to make college tuition “free” because they say doing so would stimulate the local economy.
The Democratic Socialists of America chapter at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale launched a Change.org petition titled “Make SIUC Tuition Free.” The petition currently has more than 70 signatures of its 100 signature goal.
“The high of [sic] cost of tuition is directly causing lower enrollment at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale,” the petition states.
“This hurts SIUC students, university employees, and the Carbondale community.”
“SIUC Young Democratic Socialists of America asks the SIUC Administration to create a vision of growth including free tuition for all Illinois residents. Let’s end student debt and help Carbondale prosper,” the petition adds.
SIUC student Layne Ellingsworth told KFVS-TV that making tuition free would stimulate the economy.
“More jobs and more students means more money circulating in the local economy,” Ellingsworth said.
The SIUC YDSA chapter held a press conference on Friday to promote their petition.
“The need for comprehensive tuition reduction is critical now as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Eastern Illinois University both announced tuition-free plans aimed at students with family incomes below $61,000. SIUC competes directly with both universities especially Eastern Illinois University for these students at admissions time,” the Facebook event description for the press conference reads.
According to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign website, the school will offer “free” tuition to some students beginning in 2019. Qualifications include the following, according to the university’s website:
You’re an Illinois resident (parents listed on the FAFSA are also Illinois residents)
Your family income is $61,000 or less
Your family’s assets are less than $50,000
You’re admitted as a new freshman or transfer student
You’re under the age of 24
The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and Eastern Illinois University are both public schools that receive taxpayer funding. Earlier this year, bond credit rating service Moody’s Investors assigned Illinois a credit rating one notch above “junk” status, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
SIUC chief communications officer Rae Goldsmith told KFVS-TV that making tuition “free” would not be sustainable “unless there’s an alternative source of revenue.”
“I don’t know how we could move forward with a free tuition economically,” Goldsmith said.
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Those hoping to get a break from politics after Tuesday’s midterm elections are completely out of luck. The 2020 presidential candidates are already here. While there are many Democratic senators, representatives, and governors who will potentially challenge President Trump in two years, several ghosts from presidential elections past are already teetering towards the White House.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) previously threw his hat in the crowded 2016 Republican presidential primary. While terrible on things like privacy, drug prohibition, and foreign policy, Kasich slowly became a favorite among Democrats for being not that kind of Republican. The moderate Kasich didn’t let his national election loss go to waste. Kasich has since made several appearances on talk shows to opine about the current state of politics, particularly bemoaning the rise of Trump Republicans. If it seemed like Kasich was setting himself up for another slog, he confirmed as much during a Monday appearance on The View, where he said another run was on the table.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has also left room for speculation about his intentions. Biden announced in 2015 that he would not seek the presidency in the 2016 election, and instead took some personal time out of the spotlight following the tragic death of his son, Beau. Just a year later, Biden expressed regret over not throwing his hat in the ring. He spent the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterms stumping for Democratic candidates and after casting his vote on Tuesday, Biden told MSNBC reporters that he would make a formal decision about a presidential bid in early 2019.
To no one’s surprise, Hillary Clinton also appears to be making her case for a future run. The former first lady and secretary of state has dreamt of being the next President of the United States for years. She came the closest to her goal in the 2016 election after beating Sen. Bernie Sanders (I—Vt.) in the Democratic primary. Despite her best efforts, however, she lost (again). Though Clinton avoided the media for a bit, she came back with a vengeance to blame everything and everyone except herself for her loss. Responding to some of the election frustrations shared in her book, What Happened, several Democrats have criticized Clinton’s inability to accept at least partial blame for her failed campaign. In fact, Clinton’s constant musings have given Republicans room to accuse her of spending too much time reliving 2016. Even the late John McCain, who similarly lost an election to former President Barack Obama, could not convince Clinton to drop her sentiments.
Effectively shutting everyone else out, Clinton not only continues to mention the past, but has dropped a few hints about the future. In an interview with Recode‘s Kara Swisher a week before the midterms, Clinton said that she didn’t want to run again, but that she’d “like to be president.” If that wasn’t enough, Clinton added a typical ‘we’ll see what happens after the midterms’ line to her answer. But the real icing on the cake? Clinton is going on a speaking tour.
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While today’s stellar 10Y auction coupled with the spike in 10Y yields to 3.23%, or just shy of fresh 7 year highs, dominated the attention of rates traders today, a potentially bigger development crossed largely under the radar late in the day when the US Treasury reported a whopping $12.227 billion increase in STRIPs outstanding in October, which was the largest monthly increase on record.
The level of outstanding STRIPs increased surged to $301.528 billion in October from $280.300 billion in September.
As Oxford Eco notes, the October net increase in STRIPS outstanding doesn’t take into account the approximately $0.291 billion in STRIPS outstanding that matured during the month. As a result, the change in STRIPS outstanding is not solely indicative of net stripping and recon activity, and adjusted to account for the maturing issues the change in STRIPS outstanding net of maturing issues was an even greater increase of approximately $12.518 billion.
While net stripping activity in notes and TIPS is generally minor, the same can not be said for bonds. Indeed, net stripping activity in October was led by an enormous net stripping of $4.171 billion of the 3% of 2/15/47 off the run bond, but there was also more than $1 billion net stripped of seven other issues – the 2 7/8% of 11/15/46, the 3 1/8% of 5/15/48, the 3 3/8% of 5/15/44, the 3% of 5/15/47, the 3% of 2/15/48, the 3 3/4% of 11/15/43, and the 3% of 8/15/48. The combined net activity in bonds amounted to a $12.431 billion net increase of stripped issues to $292.034 billion, or 13.63% of the outstanding.
What prompted October’s record stripping activity?
While it is difficult to discern the cause of the month-to-month changes in net stripping activity, it is notable that the the immense net stripping in October occurred as equity markets plunged. That most likely caused some investors with specific duration liabilities – such as pension funds or insurance companies who are the usual suspects behind Treasury stripping – to scramble out of falling riskier assets and into the security of STRIPS issues that match their liabilities.
In other words, rumors of pensions funds no longer buying Treasurys have been greatly exaggerated. So much so, in fact, that pension funds appears to have bought a record amount of Treasurys last month as risk assets plunged.
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Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
Did former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just take a page out of the playbook of Sen. Ed Muskie from half a century ago?
In his first off-year election in 1970, President Richard Nixon ran a tough attack campaign to hold the 52 House seats the GOP had added in ’66 and ’68, and to pick up a few more seats in the Senate.
The issue: law and order. The targets: the “radical liberals.”
In that campaign’s final hours, Muskie delivered a statesmanlike address from Cape Elizabeth, Maine, excoriating the “unprecedented volume” of “name-calling” and “deceptions” from the “highest offices in the land.”
Nixon picked up a pair of Senate seats, but Democrats gained a dozen House seats, and the press scored it as a victory for Muskie, who was vaulted into the lead position for the 1972 Democratic nomination.
In the final days of this election, Bloomberg just invested $5 million to air, twice nationally, a two-minute ad for the Democratic Party that features Bloomberg himself denouncing the “fear-mongering,” and “shouting and hysterics” coming out of Washington.
“Americans are neither naive nor heartless,” says the mayor. “We can be a nation of immigrants while also securing our borders.”
That $5 million ad buy was only Bloomberg’s latest contribution to the Democratic Party during an election campaign into which he had already plunged $110 million of his own money.
Contributions of this magnitude support the idea that Bloomberg will seek the presidential nomination as a Democrat. With resources like this at his disposal, and a willingness to spend into the hundreds of millions, he could last in the primaries as long as he wants.
Yet, Bloomberg is no Ed Muskie, who had been Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and was widely regarded a top contender for 1972.
The mayor has been a Republican and independent as well as a Democrat. And as The Washington Post’s Robert Costa relates, Bloomberg has drawbacks:
“He speaks flatly with the faded Boston accent from his youth, devoid of partisan passion and with a technocratic emphasis.”
With the energy of the Democratic Party coming from militants, minorities and millennials, would these true believers rally to a 76-year-old Manhattan media magnate who wants to make their party more centrist and problem-solving, and to start beavering away at cutting the deficit?
Yet Bloomberg’s opening move may force the pace of the politics of 2020. Should he announce, and start spending on ads, he could force the hand of Vice President Joe Biden, who appears the Democrats’ strongest candidate in taking back Pennsylvania, and the states of the industrial Midwest, from Trump.
On the left wing of the Democratic Party, which seems certain to have a finalist in the run for the 2020 nomination, the competition is stiff and the pressure to move early equally great.
If Socialist Bernie Sanders is not to lock up this wing of the party as he did in 2016, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts may have to move soon.
But even before attention can turn to the presidential race, the U.S. House of Representatives seems certain to witness a leadership battle.
Nancy Pelosi is determined to become speaker again if Democrats take the House today, while the Congressional Black Caucus has entered a demand for one of the two top positions in the House.
Millennials also want new leadership. And to many centrist Democrats in swing districts, Pelosi as the visible voice and face of the national party remains a perpetual problem.
If the Democrats fail to recapture the House, the recriminations will be sweeping and the demand for new leadership overwhelming.
But even if they do capture the House, the rewards may be fleeting.
A Democratic House will be a natural foil for President Trump, an institution with responsibility but without real power.
And should the economy, which has been running splendidly under a Republican Congress and president start to sputter under a divided Congress, there is no doubt that the Democratic House majority, with its anti-capitalist left and socialist ideology, would emerge as the primary suspect.
Also, if Democrats win the House, Maxine Waters could be the new chair of the House Committee on Financial Services, Adam Schiff the chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Jerrold Nadler of New York the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the repository for resolutions of impeachment. Does that look like a winning lineup?
2019 is thus shaping up to be a year of gridlock on Capitol Hill, with the Senate attempting to expeditiously move through Trump’s nominated judges, and a Democratic House potentially hassling the White House and Trump administration with a snowstorm of subpoenas.
This could be the kind of battleground Donald Trump relishes.
A victorious Democratic Party today could be set up to take the fall, both for gridlock and any major reversal in the progress of the economy.
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There was a time when the merest mention of gold manipulation in “reputable” media was enough to have one branded a perpetual conspiracy theorist with a tinfoil farm out back. That was roughly coincident with a time when Libor, FX, mortgage, and bond market manipulation was also considered unthinkable, when High Frequency Traders were believed to “provide liquidity”, or when the stock market was said to not be manipulated by the Fed, and when the ever-confused media, always eager to take “complicated” financial concepts at the face value set by a self-serving establishment, never dared to question anything.
That has now changed…
In what may be the first major bullion-bank trader coming clean, a former JPMorgan precious-metals trader admitted he engaged in a six-year spoofing scheme that defrauded investors in gold, silver, platinum, and palladium futures contracts.
John Edmonds, 36, of Brooklyn, New York, pleaded guilty under seal on Oct. 9 in the District of Connecticut to commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, commodities price manipulation, and spoofing. As Justice notes in a statement:
“From approximately 2009 through 2015 John Edmonds engaged in a sophisticated scheme to manipulate the market for precious metals futures contracts for his own gain by placing orders that were never intended to be executed,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski.
“The Criminal Division is committed to prosecuting those who undermine the investing public’s trust in the integrity of our commodities markets through spoofing or any other illegal conduct.”
As we noted previously, inquiring minds are not only asking how is the gold market being manipulated, but are actually providing answers.
FBI Assistant Director in Charge Sweeney. explained that “with his guilty plea, Edmonds admitted he intended to introduce materially false and misleading information into the commodities markets.”
“By conspiring with his trading partners to place spoof orders, he blatantly attempted to profit off of an unfair market that he helped create. The FBI will continue to work with our partners to insure financial markets remain a level playing field for all investors.”
Edmonds and his fellow precious metals traders at the Bank routinely placed orders for precious metals futures contracts with the intent to cancel those orders before execution (the Spoof Orders), he admitted.
This trading strategy was admittedly intended to inject materially false and misleading liquidity and price information into the precious metals futures contracts markets by placing the Spoof Orders in order to deceive other market participants about the existence of supply and demand.
The Spoof Orders were designed to artificially move the price of precious metals futures contracts in a direction that was favorable to Edmonds and his co-conspirators at the Bank, to the detriment of other market participants.
In pleading guilty, Edmonds admitted that he learned this deceptive trading strategy from more senior traders at the Bank, and he personally deployed this strategy hundreds of times with the knowledge and consent of his immediate supervisors.
Justice describes one such ‘spoof’ that occurred on October 12, 2012
“Edmonds knowingly executed the scheme and artifice by transmitting and causing to be transmitted to a CME Group server an offer to sell approximately 402 silver futures contracts (“Spoof Order”), with the intent, at the time the offer was entered, to cancel the offer before it could be executed, which fraudulently represented the state of the market, so that Edmonds could purchase approximately 6 silver futures contracts at a below-market price.
Edmond’s ‘Spoof Order’ caused other market participants to react and trade at prices, quantities, and times at which they otherwise would not have traded, but for EDMONDS’s Spoof Order.”
It’s not like ‘manipulation’ ever stopped however – one glance at the ‘odd’ price action almost every day around the time of the London Fix makes it clear, it is anything but a ‘normal’ market…
We’ll give U.S. Attorney Durham the last word (bearing the chart above in mind):
“The investigation of deceptive trading practices by others involved in this scheme is ongoing.”
The DoJ ends its statement with the following: “Individuals who believe that they may be a victim in these cases should visit the Fraud Section’s Victim Witness website for more information. “
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Authored by Jeff Deist via The Mises Institute,
The Most Important Election of our Lifetime™ may be a referendum on Trump, Kavanaugh, #metoo, migrant caravans, or any number of manufactured outrages since the 2016 presidential election.
It will not be a referendum on foreign policy, the Federal Reserve, debt, spending entitlements, spying, civil liberties, or anything important with regard to state power.
By any objective measure, the ideological and policy disagreements between the national Democratic and Republican parties are not significant. Both accept the central tenets of domestic and foreign interventionism, both accept the federal government as the chief organizing principle for American society, and both view politics simply as a fight for control of state apparatus.
Similarly, differences between policies actually enacted by Mr. Trump and the existing Congress and those likely to have been enacted by Mrs. Clinton and the same Congress are fairly small. While Mr. Trump alarms the Left with his tone and tenor, his actual views on taxes, spending, debt, trade, guns, immigration (the “Muslim ban” was neither) and war (unfortunately his good campaign rhetoric is largely abandoned) plainly comport with the general thrust of Clinton’s neo-liberalism.
Today’s ugly midterm elections are about style rather than substance, party rather than principle, and power rather than ideas. Americans do not much argue about whether we are governed by DC, and only slightly over how we are governed by DC. But we argue viciously about who governs us from DC.
Voting is a tribal exercise, and how could it be otherwise in a country of 320 million people?
It is important to understand the 2016 presidential election, which sent roughly 40% of Americans into a state of gloating or despair, was decided by a very small percentage of the US population.
Donald Trump prevailed in six swing states won by Mr. Obama in 2012: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Trump’s swing votes were cast overwhelmingly by older Americans, many of whom had voted for Obama at least once. The vaunted “alt-Right,” a barely-extant tiny group with a noisy social media presence, had little to do with Trump’s election: he won because of economic insecurity among Rust Belt voters and Florida retirees, and because the ferocious culture wars being pushed by the Left alarmed more moderate and affluent voters.
Still, he didn’t win by much. Here are the margin numbers for those six states:
Fewer than 1 million voters, in a country of 320 million people, changed the narrative from: “It’s Hillary’s time, the progressive arc was inevitable, Americans were too smart to fall for a real estate huckster” to “Dangerous rightwing populism is on the rise, Trump and his Supreme Court are illegitimate, the Russians hacked the election.” This is absurd.
In fact a mere 77,744 votes, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, were enough to swing the difference to Trump. Why are so many Americans having collective mental breakdowns over such insignificant numbers of voters?
Today’s midterm election likewise will be decided by small margins. Assuming this Cook Political Report analysis is accurate, only about 75 “most competitive” US House races are truly in play to switch parties (the Senate appears likely to remain majority Republican).
Although US congressional districts (on average) are home to 711,000 people, even in somewhat contested or hotly contested general elections–rare due to gerrymandering– fewer than 300,000 votes usually are cast. Assuming the competitive House races in the Cook Report end up with 2% margins between the winner and loser, only 6,000 votes will make the difference in each (assuming high turnouts with fully 300,000 people voting).
6,000 difference-making votes, multiplied across 75 (predicted) close US House elections, yields only 450,000 votes. So again, fewer than 1 million people in a country of 320 million will cause one of two breathless (and false) narratives to prevail.
This is not a prescription for peace and flourishing.
America is barely a country at this point, defined only by its federal state. It is not a nation, lacking cohesion or commonality: we fight over history, the Constitution, the Electoral College and other constitutional mechanisms, immigration and birthright citizenship, not to mention sex, race, class, and sexuality. This utter politicization of American society– a Progressive triumph– is unsustainable over time.
In this environment, democratic voting and elections become an exercise of brute force– vanquishing the other side without resorting to outright violence and warfare. Voting doesn’t heal divisions or produce compromise, witness the 2016 election. Politically vanquished people don’t just go away; this is precisely why Progressives were blindsided by Brexit and Trump in the first place. There are more Deplorables than imagined, and they’re stubbornly hanging around longer than expected.
We should acknowledge this, sooner rather than later, to avoid a catastrophe. Federalism and subsidiarity, applied with increasing intensity, are the non-violent path forward. Insistence on universalism, decided by a slight majority and applied top-down from DC, will fail here at home in the same way– and for the same reason– nation-building fails abroad.
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It’s 6 p.m. and the first polls are now closing (in parts of Indiana and Kentucky). Many Americans will now begin the waiting and watching of election results to see if there’s a “blue wave” transferring control of the House of Representatives from the Republicans to the Democrats, whether some important ballot measures get passed, and to be told what this election “means” for the state of the government. Undoubtedly those who do not get the outcomes they want will be quick to declare America’s democracy to be at risk. It is, after all, the “most important election ever” until 2020, when that will most obviously be the most important election ever.
Or, if they’re not masochists, Americans might be binge watching the latest season of Daredevil on Netflix instead. We certainly would not judge or blame them. And if they’re libertarians, sitting through the endless blue vs. red narratives that spin out of midterm elections might not hold much appeal.
So if you’re one of those folks, welcome to Reason‘s election results liveblog. The two of us will be staying attuned to the outcomes so you can just check in as you please and otherwise live a happy, fulfilling evening doing as you choose. Various Reason writers will be weighing in at Hit & Run with deeper analysis of what election results mean. But this post is going to mostly revolve around simply reporting the outcomes of races and ballot initiatives that we think are significant, and that includes how high-profile libertarian candidates end up performing. We will be updating regularly. Remember the golden era of live-blogging? Consider this post to be a throwback.
Here’s some helpful pre-reading while you’re awaiting results:
Check in regularly for the latest.
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Long Island City was bracing for a serious development boom even before Amazon – allegedly – moves in. Earlier this year, much of the Long Island City neighborhood was already designated as an “opportunity zone”, or an area that will offer significant tax benefits for those “develop” there.
Such as Jeff Bezos.
As the NYT reported last night, Amazon is said to have selected Long Island City alongside Northern Virginia’s Crystal City, for its second US headquarters and will be getting generous tax breaks if it does so. The move is expected to bring thousands of brand new employees to Long Island City, which will help entice builders from all over. It will also led to unprecedented congestion and soaring real estate and renta prices.
Jessica Millett, co-chair of the tax department at Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, told Bloomberg: “We’ve been seeing so much activity in Long Island City. The opportunity-zone activity ramps it up a level. Amazon threw fuel on that fire – my phone started exploding.”
While Amazon has yet to confirm the NYT report, Governor Andrew Cuomo continues to beg for Bezos to pick the venue, even joking that he would change his name to “Amazon Cuomo” in order to win over the company. Cuomo is widely expected to grant numerous additional concessions to the company for opening there, in addition to already having granted the “opportunity zone” designation.
As a result, even before Amazon’s decision, real estate developers and investors have been trying to raise money to take advantage of the tax breaks that will come in Long Island City. Many of them do this by taking capital gains and putting it into funds that target development and opportunity zones, which will defer taxes until 2026. This will also potentially reduce liabilities by as much is 15%, according to Bloomberg .
Those who invest in the area and hold their investments for 10 years, can defer paying the entire capital gains on their appreciation (assuming there is one). Real estate developers seek out these types of high growth areas where they can get the most bang for their tax-adjusted buck. Rules are still being finalized by the federal government about what types of development are allowed to occur in these areas, but both towering residential towers and light commercial offices and retail space are expected to qualify.
The incentives were a little-known provision of the Republican tax overhaul that President Donald Trump signed into law late last year. Since then, they’ve captured the attention of developers and government officials because they have the potential to make projects in long-neglected areas more enticing. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has estimated that $100 billion may eventually flow to the roughly 8,700 struggling communities scattered around the country that were selected by state governors and officials in U.S. territories.
This rounds out billions of dollars of investments that Long Island City has seen over the last couple of years, mostly due to its proximity to Manhattan. Just last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he would dump another $180 million into the neighborhood’s infrastructure, including upgrades to its sewer system and a new school.
Long Island City is already betting big that it’ll be Amazon’s new home, optimistically building 4,500 new residential units with another 1,700 proposed. Until recently, developers and brokers had been growing concerned about the growing supply of residential units – a concern which, however, Amazon should be able to answer.
Sunder Jambunathan, co-founder of Certes Partners told Bloomberg:
“Our concern in Long Island City has always been that a lot of new supply is coming online. There’s always been a question of: Is there enough demand? This solves that in a pretty direct way. It brings in demand. People who need housing, who need hotels, who need retail.”
And all these “perks” will cost local residents is billions in foregone taxes.
The hope, naturally, is that the upside from the move offsets the lost revenue. Some are already scrambling to frontrun the move: Developers will want to act fast as the combination of tax breaks and a major new corporate campus could quickly drive up the cost of land and commercial real estate in the area, said Rob Wrzosek, a managing director at Berkadia, a mortgage lender backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and Jefferies.
“Once it’s officially announced, I think prices will go up,” Wrzosek said. “There was a lot of excitement about opportunity zones there already. The only holdback was the overall economic and real estate picture. But those concerns are gone.”
It’s still unclear as to where exactly Amazon will position itself in Long Island City, assuming of course that it does end up moving there. One thing is for certain, if it moves into the area – while it will help catalyze interest in Long Island City and kick the post-industrial area’s development pace into overdrive – the company will pay even less taxes for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, political opposition to Amazon’s potential move is already mounting, with calls to extract concessions from the tech giant and even levy a “gentrification” tax. Jimmy Van Bramer, a city council member who represents the area, said that not all his constituents are excited about the prospect.
“We need to know what Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have promised Amazon, and what Amazon has offered the city in return,” he said.
Someone should probably tell Jimmy that at the end of the day, whatever the world’s richest man wants, he gets.
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Reliance on campus mental health services increased dramatically over the past 10 years. In 2007, just 19 percent of students sought treatment for mental health problems; a decade later, that figure has increased to 34 percent.
The rate of students receiving treatment for lifetime diagnoses also jumped, from 22 percent to 36 percent, according to a new study by the American Psychiatric Association.
The study is impressively large: Authors surveyed 155,000 students at nearly 200 colleges.
“This study provides the most comprehensive evidence to date regarding upward trends in mental health service utilization on U.S. campuses over the past 10 years,” wrote the study’s authors. “Increasing prevalence of mental health problems and decreasing stigma help to explain this trend.”
The fact that more students are seeking treatment does not necessarily mean things are getting worse. More people talking openly about their mental health could mean more people are leading better lives. It also doesn’t have to mean more people need treatment now than than did a decade ago. As I’ve frequently observed regarding hate crime statistics, more comprehensive reporting should not be confused with an increase in the underlying thing being counted.
Of course, it could also be the case that young people really are more stressed out, anxious, and depressed than they used to be. Depression and suicide rates are on the rise, generally speaking, and not just for young people. Student loan debt is significantly larger than it was a decade ago, and thus the stakes for doing well in college are higher. Getting a degree is no longer an automatic ticket to a well-paying job, campuses are political and ideological powder kegs, social media has all of us on display all the time. These are all good reasons for students to be stressed.
My sense is that mental health issues have become dramatically destigmatized on college campuses. I have even seen campus personnel list their traumas and triggers in their online biographies (underneath their preferred pronouns). That’s broadly a good thing, because many people need help, and will seek if they feel it’s normal to both have problems and get help for them.
But colleges might also be inadvertently encouraging students to view their more mundane struggles or frustrations as symptomatic of underlying mental health issues. I’m thinking of all the student-activists who claim to be suffering from PTSD, possibly because it makes them seem more dedicated to their cause. Recall that trigger warnings could actually make some people more anxious and less resilient to trauma. I think it’s reasonable to be concerned that 1) young people are very stressed out, often legitimately, and 2) campuses occasionally fail to emotionally equip them to handle life beyond college. Both things can be true.
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