Also went to a tech school with similar problems. Depression is an infection of the student's motivation and reason; it's a fixation with the thesis that one i

Also went to a tech school with similar problems. Depression is an infection of the student's motivation and reason; it's a fixation with the thesis that one is destined to doom. I think the main problem here is that school admins often want to yank problem students for everybody's safety rather than effect policy change that improves livelihood. The latter requires being good at politics, and the leaders who are good at politics usually spend most their time raising money and opening opportunities for the students who aren't struggling. When the chancellor gets involved like this, the admins have failed horribly. My senior year I took fewer classes and exercised 5x more than ever. I was the happiest I had ever been and had my only straight-A year. I'd advocate tech school admins adopt at least two changes: 1. Professors rarely share stories of their own failures as well as stories of students who failed. The classes should cover not only the consequences of doing well (i.e the key ideas and contributors to the topic) but also the consequences of doing poorly. Evidence and analysis of failure helps debunk convictions to hopelessness 2. "Work-life" balance can be very difficult to achieve in college for a variety of reasons. MIT requires students to pass a swim test, but this is hardly a mandate that students maintain a reliably supportive extracurricular (e.g. sports, art, community involvement etc). Pass-fail should be replaced and/or complimented with a requirement to commit weekly hours to an alternate activity so that students diversify themselves. Pass-fail can help, but there's a ton of value in having brutally rigorous courses (even if they inspire inordinate competition). It's not useful to make the programs softer but rather make students aware of the realistic (and certainly non-gloomy) consequences of not getting As.