News release: “First-year college students’ self-ratings of their emotional health dropped to record low levels in 2010, according to the CIRP Freshman Survey, UCLA’s annual survey of the nation’s entering students at four-year colleges and universities. The survey, part of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), is administered nationally by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Only 51.9 percent of students reported that their emotional health was in the “highest 10 percent” or “above average,” a drop of 3.4 percentage points from 2009 and a significant decline from the 63.6 percent who placed themselves in those categories when self-ratings of emotional health were first measured in 1985. Female students were far less likely to report high levels of emotional health than male students (45.9 percent versus 59.1 percent), a 13.2 percentage-point difference. Women were also more than twice as likely as men to feel frequently “overwhelmed by all I had to do” as high-school seniors.”