Every time I hear a frenzied freshman freaking out because they’re going to get a B in Honors Geometry or listen to a stressed-out student who joined one club or committee too many, I cannot help but cringe. High schoolers today are prioritizing quantity over quality, prioritizing survival over emotional growth, and prioritizing academic success over mental health, all for the sake of getting ahead in high school, which in turn will lead to admission to a better college and a better job in the future, and on and on and on. Many high-school students follow this path, taking impossible numbers of AP classes, powering through sleep deprivation and even depression. They earn straight A’s, play three varsity sports, and appear to be the typical overachieving honors student destined for success. Then, they head to college and inevitably burn out, ending up in the campus counseling center instead of the classroom. Where is it all going wrong?
The daily and weekly routines of a typical high-school student suggest that they derail by prioritizing quantity over quality, success over mental health, and survival over emotional growth. Each problem has its own unique causes and effects, but they all share one characteristic: they are detrimental to one’s physical and mental health and undermine the learning process.
In today’s high-stress high-school environment, students are pressured by admissions officers, guidance counselors, and even parents to “take the most difficult course load you can handle,” take an active role in the community, show leadership, and commit to multiple extracurricular activities, including varsity sports. This is under the assumption that the best colleges and universities want more than just a good student; they want their applicants to be well-rounded, showing not just an interest, but a commitment to multiple different pursuits. It may seem like an admirable goal to seek only the very best and brightest, but when that goal makes a high-school student juggle five AP classes, soccer practice, trumpet lessons, club meetings, and community service, it has gone too far. There is no time to do quality work or develop a true interest in any one pursuit. We are creating a world full of people content to skim the surface of every course or activity, rather than actually diving deep to learn more. This is all for the ultimate prize: admission to the top-tier Ivy League schools.
Of course, merely signing up for a boatload of obligations is not enough—if you truly want the best outlook for your future, you have to be the best. Students stay up all hours of the night studying for tests and completing homework assignments, sometimes sleeping as little as four hours per night in a futile attempt to squeeze everything into their day while still never scoring below a 90 on any quiz, test, or progress report.
We are paying the price. College mental health centers across the country are reporting increasingly high rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking among incoming freshmen, and it is widely accepted that pressure on high-school students to get into “elite” universities is behind this problem. Palo Alto, California, home to Stanford University, recently had a cluster of suicides at Palo Alto High School, an alarming indictment of the college admissions mania. Students are driven to extremes of sleep deprivation, stimulant addiction, and cheating just in order to get ahead of their peers.
Something is going terribly wrong when high-school kids just like us are concluding that life is meaningless and throwing themselves in front of oncoming trains.
Finally, the pressure-packed high-school environment encourages students to adopt the mindset of “just getting it done.” The most important things about high school—becoming a better learner, developing real-world skills, and developing your views about who you really want to be—these things all get swept under the rug. How are we supposed to become better learners if the workload makes us stay up all hours of the night wading through the day’s problem sets? How are we supposed to develop real-world skills when our jam-packed schedules leave us no time to eat, let alone breathe, as our parents shuttle us from activity to activity to activity? Most importantly, how are we supposed to know what we really want to be, if we keep getting the message that our best is never good enough?
High school has the potential to be a meaningful experience for everyone, but it has deteriorated into one unending final exam: a competition to see who can do the best in the hardest AP classes, who can make the biggest impact in the most clubs, and who can get into the topmost pinnacle of the elite schools. When we focus only on results like college placement, the learning process gets swallowed up in the constant anxiety about whether we should try to boost our SAT scores another notch by taking it just one more time. The value of what we are learning is lost when we let end results with very little meaning determine our future.
High school has lost something important in the race to get to college: it has become more of a means to an end rather than a true journey of exploration and intrigue. We won’t get this back until we can find a way to stop this college pressure from causing emotional and mental damage. Only then can we experience the intellectual and personal growth that high school is supposed to be all about.
High-school students should push themselves in the classroom and find a pursuit that sincerely interests them outside of school. They should not be trying to balance four AP classes with varsity sports, music lessons, and school clubs just in order to get ahead in the line for Harvard or Princeton.
Let’s all set down our college applications for a moment and ask ourselves where we’re really going. Can we stop making high school nothing more than a frantic competition to get into the best college? Can we stop trying to outdo each other with our 4.3 GPAs and our 4.3 hours of sleep per night? Can we start paying attention to what we are really learning, instead of racing around the hamster wheel of extracurricular activities to fatten up our college portfolios?
Until we can do this, we are effectively getting all dressed up with nowhere to go.