Education Under Pressure

Less than 50% of those who enter graduate school complete their advanced degree. While that figure will hardly be surprising to anyone who has experienced the pressures of graduate education, this is a population that deserves closer study. After a thorough review of the literature relevant to the topic, this book documents a study designed to examine the effectiveness of group counseling and exercise programs in alleviating symptoms of stress, anxiety, and loneliness in graduate counseling students. The study utilized a quasi-experimental nonrandomized pretest/posttest design. The results indicate that both exercise and group counseling are effective ways to alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression in graduate counseling students' lives, and that group counseling is effective in alleviating feelings of loneliness. Important future research possibilities following from this study are identified.