Teach Your Children Well: Ambiguity, Uncertainty and College Success

I spent 20 years in the corporate world, and during that time, serving as a project manager, COO and CEO, I had an opportunity to work with some really fantastic leaders, and some pretty marginal ones as well. Throughout that time, I was careful to observe various aspects of people’s leadership approaches.?For many years, I have said “The best leaders that I have met seemed to have an innate ability to work well in the gray, accept uncertainty and even embrace it and use it to their advantage”; as it turns out, the same sort of factors can govern positive academic choices in college. In 2021, Urvi Paralkar, MA, and Douglas Knutson, PhD conducted an important, yet not widely known study that really hit-the-mark for me, and confirmed a number of things I had previously hypothesized surrounding factors that form the basis for college success.?Perhaps the next question is, now that we know about these things, what can we do about it??When I say “we” I mean parents, as well as colleges.

Parakar and Knutson’s Study

In Parakar and Knutson’s study, the researchers looked closely at the effects of a student’s ability to deal with ambiguity (i.e. lack of clarity about a present situation) and uncertainty (i.e. lack of clarity about how present circumstances will affect the future) on the choices they make when faced with academic-related stress.?I sure hope I am not boring you yet, but I have to say, in my opinion, every parent should know about the findings of this study, and they should know about it long before their child considers attending college.

Three Ways Students Deal with Academic Stress

For the purposes of the study, the researchers referenced the work of Sullivan (2010) in describing three ways that students tend to cope with academic-related stress:

• Approach strategies – essentially making a personal, solo effort to think through, and address the present academic issue
• Avoidance strategies – escaping or denying that the stressor exists
• Social support strategies – relying upon others for support or discussion about resolving the stressor

Ambiguity, Uncertainty and Coping Strategies

If you’ve read any of my articles in the past, you know which strategy I wish students would use.?After all, they are paying tuition, and that tuition is essentially a subscription to use any and all of the resources on their campus, or as I always say “there is no pride in doing this alone, when you are paying not to do it alone.”?Before I reveal the study findings, I need to make a very important distinction between college offices supporting students and social structures that do things for students.?Whether it is tutoring, success coaching, career coaching, counseling or seeking disability services, these offices are filled with experts who coach and counsel students, and help them think through stressors or problems, and take action to solve them.?None of these professionals will actually do things for the student.?That said, here are some findings from the study:

• The more intolerant a person is of ambiguous situations, the less likely they are to use approach coping strategies.
• The more intolerant a person is of ambiguous situations, the more likely they are to use avoidance coping strategies.
• The more intolerant a person is of future uncertainty, the more likely they are to use avoidance coping strategies.
• While ambiguity of a situation did not seem to significantly affect a student’s tendency to turn to social supports for help, higher levels of intolerance for future uncertainty did.?For example, if a person does poorly on an exam, that creates somewhat of an ambiguous present circumstance, but it is actually more the fear of the final grade (i.e. future uncertainty) that likely prompts a student to seek social support (from tutoring, for example).
• There was a significant gender difference in terms of using social support strategies, with identified females being considerably more likely to use social support coping than identified males.

From Structured and Predictable to Ambiguous and Uncertain

This study was especially helpful to me in explaining so many of the phenomena that I see in my job; for example, students who wait until the 3rd or 4th C or D before they do something about it, or they choose to do nothing about it at all, and often leave college with debt and no degree.?I also reference the rising demand on college counseling centers. For many new college students, this is the first time in their lives where they are mostly on their own, and also in an environment that is both ambiguous (socially and academically), and uncertain (i.e. far less structured and predictable as compared with high school).?The choices they make (i.e. the early habits they form) will play heavily upon their ultimate college success; poor choices, and an inability to manage the ambiguous and the uncertain – as the study, and referenced studies suggest – can lead to stress, anxiety and even depression.

What We Can Do About It?

Hopefully by now, my reader can sense where I am going with this.?For the first 18 years of American students’ lives, more and more, society has driven us to create increasingly predictable, structured, and future-certain environments around our kids (e.g. teaching to standardized tests, four 9-week periods and summers off, football practice at this time, drama practice at that time, do this now, and do this later, and let me wake you up for school so that you can do it all over again).?Moreover, some would speculate that today, many – but not all - families increasingly work to make their child’s future more certain by going to bat for them, solving their problems, calling the school, breaking down obstacles (hence the nickname “bulldozer parents”), or petitioning the coach for more playing time.?For those who have exercised these behaviors surrounding their children’s lives, this study suggests that they have essentially created a fertile ground for both intolerance of ambiguity and intolerance of uncertainty, and potentially set the stage for avoidance coping behaviors in college.?

The solution is probably obvious; increasingly throughout a child’s first 18 years of life, parents and guardians should be moving from a doing approach to a coaching approach, encouraging students to solve more problems on their own, and encouraging them into more ambiguous situations like club and organizational leadership, public speaking situations, challenging competitions that stretch their academic or athletic abilities well beyond the typical or in areas where they are not necessarily the 'best', multiple job shadowing and informational interviewing with people whose occupations match their interests, study away or study abroad, travel, summers away as a camp counselor, take them to a big city and teach them to use the subway, encourage them to work in retail jobs, manage a checkbook and maybe even begin to do some investing.?All of these examples are filled with potential ambiguity and uncertainty, and a future college student will be better for it.

Colleges are already stretched in terms of personnel time, so how could we actually do more to address this issue??I am not suggesting that we do more, but instead that we do differently. We know that nationwide, only about half of new four-year college students will finish their degree within four or five years, so obviously, we have our work cut out for us. We need to inventory how we recruit, orient, move-in and on-board, educate, socialize and build practical skills within our students.?We need to look closely at how we portray college as we are admitting students.?Are we sharing the realities of the ambiguity that is college life, but also sharing the social support that comes along with that ambiguity??During orientation, are we carefully taking note of the student orientation experience and asking the question “Is everything we are teaching students designed, in part, to help students manage ambiguity and uncertainty in positive ways?”?In the residence halls, are we allowing students to change rooms easily when they cannot get along with a roommate in the first week??Maybe they need to be coached in resolving these issues since someday, they are not going to have the choice as to who sits next to them at work.?Here is a question:?Why are internships and related experiences – let’s just collectively call these work integrated learning – always reserved for senior year, or junior year at the earliest??We need to help students build practical skills in the highly ambiguous and uncertain world of professional work, much sooner in their college career. Are our first-year seminar and university seminar courses, and first-year experience programs carefully designed to immediately and quickly develop students’ competencies around managing ambiguity and uncertainty, and choosing social coping strategies??Do we allow students to muddle along as "undecided" for more than a year, or do make being "exploratory" compulsory? The study referenced in this article also suggests that for practical application, we should be frank with students, and talk about ambiguity and the fact that many of them may not have the skills to immediately manage that stressor, and that we do this with the purpose of building coping skills, and some quick go-to solutions that students can use instinctually.?Well, those are a few places to start.

There are many other factors that play into the realm of college success: habits, study skills, strong cheerleaders/coaches at home, a growth-oriented mindset, a values set that places learning and education toward the top (i.e. above social media and video games), a bias to act upon those values, a written set of goals, and social abilities to develop new relationships.?Students are in class 30 to 35 hours a week in high school, but only about 15 hours, on average, each week in college.?How they spend the 20-hour difference will ultimately determine their success, yet those 20 hours are going to be filled with the ambiguous and the uncertain. Collectively, we need to ‘teach our children well’. Call it tough love, but in the face of such a ponderous life change, students will be all the better for it.

Thanks for reading!

Paralkar, U. & Knutson, D. (2021): Coping with academic stress: Ambiguity and uncertainty tolerance in college students, Journal of American College Health, DOI: 10.1080/07448481.2021.1965148

Sullivan, JR. (2010): Preliminary psycometric data for the academic coping strategies scale. Assessment and Effective Interventions. 35(2):114-127