Though your four years in college are commonly considered to be the best years of your life, a study administered by the Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Assessment at Boston College this past April showed that female college seniors graduated with lower self-confidence levels than when they enrolled as freshmen. Despite having on average, lower GPAs than their female counterparts, male college seniors, in contrast, tended to gain self-confidence during their college years.
Some of Boston College’s Senior Faculty joined to form an ad hoc committee, which brought in members of the administration, and held focus groups for female students in order to evaluate the underlying issues causing this trend.
The main issues that female students cited as being detrimental to their self esteem had to do with self-image, friendships, and most notably, campus hookup culture. Robin Fleming, who has worked at BC since 1989, compared her experience in her first years of teaching to the environment today, calling hook up culture one of the most detrimental elements of contemporary college culture. She said, “I used to see people holding hands on campus…my students used to get married—to each other. And that’s totally disappeared.” As far as body image issues, Fleming adds, “ten years ago the women weren’t as groomed as they are now, and you just notice how much more time women are putting in.” Making an important distinction between these two issues, Vice Provost for Faculty, Patricia DeLeeuw explained, “You can say that the hookup culture maybe, arguably, favors guys, and so that’s male-dominated.” she continues, “The body image stuff is women doing it to women. Guys don’t care what you’re wearing, by and large. And 10 pounds this way or that way, that’s a girl thing.”
Regardless of the source of such issues, these problems are clearly not exclusive to Boston College, and suggest the deteriorating self-confidence of female college students is experienced at colleges across the country. Similar studies on female self-esteem have been conducted at Duke and Princeton Universities, concur that this is a national issue.
Though female empowerment programs, such as the Boston College Chapter of I AM THAT GIRL, have served as support systems for females struggling with self-esteem on a local scale, its important for female collegiettes to recognize unhealthy and unrealistic values and aspects of campus culture in order to reverse this negative trend on a larger scale.