college students suicide rate

college students suicide rate In 2000, there were approximately 2,775 four-year colleges and 2,000 community
or junior colleges in the United States, enrolling approximately 15
million students (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). One fourth of all
persons aged 18–24 in the United States are either full- or part-time college
students—an age group with a high suicide rate. Plainly, the suicide problem
on campus is an important societal issue.
The Big Ten Student Suicide Study was undertaken from 1980 to 1990 to
determine the suicide rates on university campuses in the collegiate athletic
conference known as the Big Ten, centered in the upper Midwest (Silverman
et al., 1997). The most comprehensive attempt to report on the incidence of
suicides in undergraduate and graduate school populations by age, gender,
and race, it collected demographic and correlational data on 261 suicides of
registered students at 12 Midwestern campuses. It found that the overall college
student suicide rate of 7.5/100,000 was one half of the computed national
suicide rate (15.0/100,000) for a matched sample by age, gender, and race.
The study found that students’ suicide risk rises with age. Male and female
students least at risk were in the 17–19 range. The 20- to 24-year-olds had
suicide rates in proportion with their numbers. Finally, students 25 and over
(whether undergraduates or graduate students) had a signifi cantly higher risk
than younger students. In general, graduate students had higher rates of suicides
than undergraduates.
Women had rates roughly half those of men throughout their undergraduate
years, but graduate women had rates not signifi cantly different from their
male counterparts (9.1/100,000 vs. 11.6/100,000). According to this study, the
female student suicide rate is below the national rates during the fi rst 2 years
of college life, about equal during the junior and senior years, and above the
national rates during the graduate school years. In other words, there is a continuous
trend toward suicide as female students grow older. There is also an
increase in rates for older male students, but the increase is far less dramatic.