> Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees
So clearly things have been changing in recent decades. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this as a factor.
From a quick search:
Between 2011 and 2021, the percentage of people age 25 and older who had completed a bachelor's degree or higher increased by 7.5 percentage points from 30.4% to 37.9%[1].
It would be helpful to get an attainment by age by year breakdown.
And this still doesn't address the OP's hypothesis that part of the increase in mental health issues is due to increasing admissions pressure over the years, which many people have brought up anecdotally. Whether or not the majority of high schoolers experience that pressure doesn't imply that it still couldn't be part of the problem (which also, incidentally, isn't experienced by a majority of high schoolers).
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educatio...
There is a bitch slap of boomers and beleaguered birth rate around the corner.
The meager birth rate and dying boomers are real world paychecks and tax revenue drying up. Society is going to change drastically, and it will seem all at once.
All the corps are going to have to pull back when those boomers stop spending and there aren't enough feeders to replace them.
Seems like a strong assumption that it necessarily does splash damage beyond a certain cohort. I went to a public HS of 4K in the 00s only AP Juniors/Seniors were concerned with this kind of thing and AP kids were only friends with other AP kids (for obvious reasons); I'd doubt that've changed by 2012.
I only know this cohort well enough because I was on the debate team which most've them used as an extra-curricular for their college application CV but weren't serious about winning.
The worst stress of someone's life is the worst stress of their life. It's unproductive and petty to bicker about who has it worse.
If life is stressful for anyone, regardless of status, title, age, etc. there's a good chance it's undeserved.
The takeaway is to treat people better, not dismiss their stressors as less significant.
An equivalent high stress environment can occur whether working in an executive office, working in a call center or selling bracelets on the street.
Learning to overcome high stress experiences is a transferrable skill regardless of the context in which it was learned.
This doesn't necessarily mean an equivalent high-stress life. The call center employee has fewer or worse options for dealing with stressors outside their job which they share with the executive.
> I need to eat.
> I need to travel.
> I need somewhere to live.
By and large these things cost money and the person who doesn't have to worry about having enough money for such things is going to have less stress in their life.
Your luxury car repair drama is fleeting. Being wracked with stress about your entire life 24/7 only lets up when your mind finds a way to squirm out of it for a minute by watching a show or powering through a package of cookies on your couch.
Stress is not equivalent across all.
Mr BMW has no idea how much his energy bill was last month, smiles every time he pays his mortgage. Single mom carries a past due balance of $800 and barely makes rent each month. Two different, not equivalent, worlds.
In general, management level decisions can affect entire teams of workers and have downstream impacts on products used by millions of people. That is a form of pressure. So is the way pro athletes can be put on the spot, and it's not like their output has huge "real world" impact.
Yeah, obviously we'd all rather have pro athlete stress than single working mom stress. But there's 0 reason to strawman what that stress is.
How so?
Working people haven't had a raise since 1971.
We spend twice as much on health care as any other nation, but only Peru, Brazil, and several nations in Eastern Europe had worse results from covid. All of Africa cared for covid cases better than we did.
I'm sure you can think of other issues.
What's the worst stress the person you're replying to has ever experienced?
I'm very curious about how you know so much about the parent commenter's life compared to your own.
Some people just need to harden the f*** up and quit catastrophizing every little thing.
Perhaps it's not scars and just the ability to make lemonade when given lemons?
I really don't want to wade into this tarpit but it was most certainly financial stability for those that I know.
Rather than being in a cube farm with the A/C recycling the air over and over.
You assume that this is simply a matter a making a decision and acting on it -- which for you may be true.
There are others that will find this difficult-to-impossible to achieve regardless of their intellectual desire to change. Their experience of anxiety may not be a result of "catastrophizing" or "being soft."
I guess whose fault is it but their own? We can all blame our upbringing and it definitely does affect us, but how else can you change the cycle without telling someone to snap out of it ?
Or keep online 24 hours or spend the night mentally trying to solve an abstract issue. At 5pm they are done.
Different stresses / pressures. How many are learning a new language in their freetime just to keep employed. How many people create side projects to land employment at a coffee shop?
To compare employment how many coffee shops test if an employee can make a cup during the interview? How many people are excluded from an interview because they only made starbucks coffee at a previous position.. no way they can figure out McDonalds coffee machines.. How many are asked to go through a take home coffee making task? None..
I made minimum wage at my first job. Didn't cross the poverty line until my 3rd or 4th job years later. Things might be different now, I started after the .com crash.
Anxiety is an internal response that can be expected to be different for different individuals under the same circumstances.
Trying to judge whether or not another individual "ought to" experience anxiety in a given situation is a matter of opinion and it has no bearing on what the other person is experiencing.
My life as a radioshack wage slave began and ended when I clocked in and out. If something was fucked when we left the previous night that was tomorrows problem. It's retail, no one is being paid enough to truly care.
Doing contract work for engineers who are willfully ignorant of fire code causes me lasting stress in my soul.
Either way the biggest stress is still financial and I'll stop stressing about that when I'm dead.
Compare/contrast: "living in exurban Detroit is depressing" (= has many environmental depressors) vs "poets are usually depressives" (= depressive disorders being common among people who choose to become poets.)
We use different words (most of the time) for these two things when speaking of depression, but often aren't so careful with anxiety.
Between Ada, Scheme, C, and C++, class sizes shrunk fast.
IMHO this is more fair than making the department hard to get into. Let everyone have a go at it.
Sounds legitimately fun. I wish more CS depts kept a tasteful blend of Haskell/C/Lisp instead of forcefeeding you a vile mix of "using std; C++03" and overly-OOP Java.
Related: Implementing networking stuff using raw sockets is fun!
I ended up with C, Ada, C++, Scheme, Java, C#, and PHP on my resume by the time I graduated.
Started my career on a compiler team! (see https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested... for more info on my first job out of college!)
He honestly did a disservice to my learning of FP and probably set me back a good 4 or 5 years. He did a great job of filtering out students from the department though!
So after I got a horrible grade in his class I retook with the other professor, who taught the class (which was labeled as discrete math / logic class) as an extension of the textbook, and accordingly I did pretty good, but I didn't really learn anything about functional programming!
As an aside, that series of 2 classes had some amazing proofs. Proving addition on integers was an absolutely wonderful experience.
The data structures class was hard, we had a ton of material thrown at us really rapidly. I was taking the other fail out class mentioned above at the same time. When the quarter ended the department advisor asked me why I did that (because no one advised me not to...)
The C programming course, I think that hurt a lot of students. I had a good time with it, but we had to implement a shell and for many students, I think that would've been their 5th programming class ever.
Oh also that is when we had to start using source control.
One cool thing about Western is that quite a few of the professors came in from industry, so practices like "source control is part of your grade" were around really early on (again, this was 2004 or so I think).
Also tiny class sizes, and regular office hours. Professors would regularly be online chatting with students late at night the day before assignments were due. When I was at Western, only the first 2 intro courses had TAs doing any teaching, everything after that was a class of 20-30 and a professor up front.
2. College admission and graduation rates are important and watched.
Getting into a highly selective school mostly just means the student fit one of a handful of profiles at age 18 which the admissions process looked for, most of which have little to do with the students actual abilities or aptitudes. But thanks to nepotism, network effects and the cultural belief in those schools representing "the elite", there is a significant self-fulfilling prophecy.
Overall, society would probably be better if we all admitted it's a farce, and focused more on what people accomplish in college and after, rather than giving such power to the admissions staff at a handful of universities.
Plenty of students who failed out of CS moved over to Management Information Science, the building was right next door so it was a short walk.
But seriously, everyone should be allowed to try. Western giving me a chance dramatically changed my life for the better, and based on emails I've gotten from customers for products I've worked on, its helped me change other people's lives for the better as well.
That’s quite typical in other places of the world as well. In Italy is just like that for most stem programs; admission is granted to everybody, but the 1st year is just brutal and boring. A lot of people drop.
The upside is that you don’t have that stress on admission. The downside is that some good people lacking grit just drop after 1-2 years (or just take ages to get their degrees) because such classes look pointless but very hard to them - and they’re mostly right.
Note: we don’t usually grade on a curve in Italy. But 80% of the class failing the first time is not unheard of (you don’t get your failing grades recorded or re-pay for retaking a class, either).
yeah, but you'd expect STEM types to know how to analyze data and realize they aren't the majority and that these studies are not representative of them. I am disappoint.
yes, I agree, that's what I was advocating: HNers with a personal anecdotal axe to grind frequently throw away the value of good posts because they have just have to grind their axe axe again. Whether social media is harming children's development is an interesting and importat question and if of a scientific nature, so people here should cut the researchers some slack and at least read the evidence at face value
1. There may be more than one important explanation.
2. Your data doesn't provide any information relevant to the evaluation of the hypothesis.
3. Many of the students at non-elite universities, however you define that term, are the ones that were not successful in their quest to go to an elite university. That's why the acceptance rate is so low. Those students would be the most likely to be affected by changes in the competitiveness of college admissions in the wake of the Great Recession, not the ones that were successful.
4. "Certainly the high pressure scholastic environment of certain high schools is not common." This is conjecture. It does not seem plausible that it is "not common".
[1] Not really, but I'm supposed to say that.
Sure, but this is very skewed by older Americans having low rates of degrees. A lot more than 33% of current American 24 year-olds have Bachelors degrees. And that more accurately reflects the expectations on teenagers than low rates of degrees among Boomers.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cpb/college-enrol...
By that logic around 35% of 24-year-old Americans have bachelor degrees. More than a third, but not by much.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/coi/high-school-g... [2] https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics [3] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
It is also possible that some people competed for selective programs but failed to get in.
Finally, it's possible that even people who didn't realistically need or want to get into a selective program still feel a social expectation that they keep up with those who do.
I found this source that may or many not be authoritative that says 57% of Gen-Z is attending college, furthermore I have heard from the grapevine that Gen Z has been pushed more into STEM than any other generation.
[1]:https://timely.md/blog/generation-z-college-students/#:~:tex....
[2]:https://thejournal.com/articles/2022/06/21/stem-fields-are-t...
Personally as a developer that is overseeing hiring, I see more and more Gen-Z people coming into the pipeline in greater numbers. Looking at my alma mater(public state level engineering college) the CS dept is exploding. When I attended in 06, it was more of a snoozefest.
But this is one datapoint and probably biased. It just seems like every Gen-Z I encounter(im a millenial) seems very pragmatic and cynical in their choices and that may be leading to more practical career choices like STEM.
GROUP A - growing population, roughly same number of "top" universities, resulting in ridiculous competition and pressure to succeed. Getting into Harvard 2012 <> Getting into Harvard 1972.
GROUP B - working class. super hard. income barely grows but rents and costs grow faster. You're squeezed between two walls and it gets tighter each year. You work more only to stay afloat. Eventually you can only work 24hrs a day. Feels like my parents' life in 1980.
GROUP C - already doing well because dad is a CEO. But because of income earning potential inequality, the top 0.01% makes 20x as much as 0.1%, hence brutal pressure to make it into upper-upper-echelon. Cry me a river, i get it.
GROUP D - Immigrant. immigration is harder. lines are longer. there is nationalism and racism. You work hard, but feel trapped by the system, even if you're doing OK income-wise.
GROUP E...F...G...
I don't really see how this services the argument very well. Adult Americans seems like a set of people that wouldn't be relevant for measuring anything.
It's only recent that the left is pushing for jobs that don't require college degrees.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educatio...
I also haven’t heard of a change in the narrative where jobs that don’t require degrees are pushed by the left. If anything I see people calling for higher washes for low end jobs but that’s a separate issue entirely.
Reason I think this now, is that I have volunteered at large local high schools for college admission help. There just aren’t that many students who get pushed or push themselves like this. The majority in the US don’t go to college, and the vast majority don’t put in a stressful amount of effort into college/career prep and extra-curricular activities.
I don’t know what theory to replace it with, but I don’t think the majority of the students in the US are overworked like this.
We (American here) need to take a step back and let everyone enjoy life. That means providing healthcare, food, and shelter to every single person so that they can live their life and work in a non-anxiety-inducing way. Every therapist I've talked to in the past few years has told me that they think the number one thing that would reduce their workload is if people weren't so stressed about paying for the most basic things for their family. Most of the people they see would still have issues they need to deal with, but wouldn't be on the precipice of suicide and taking loads of pills. That's an anecdote, but to me it's clear that the "hustle culture" and lack of social support have combined in the USA to make things very hard for the average American. This applies to kids directly, too, because that hustle has to start pre-college!
My daughter (just turned 16), picked up the slack as I become pretty much bed ridden.
I can attest that this had a very destermental effect on her health. Not only having to manage the house, school, etc but also without any support from anyone. At the same time watching me go from someone who use to be able to squat 500lbs to someone who couldn't be trusted to wash dishes without breaking a few because I had lost all feeling, balance, and depth perception.
Go one night, hearing your daughter sob in her room because she doesn't want you to see she's hurting and scared from what YOU are going through and then come back and comment because right now you are a very ignorant human to think it doesn't. Especially since see already lost one parent.
a better fit for reddit
Funny you should say that, since Reddit is packed with teens and the front page subs are pretty full of anxiety over healthcare and the environment.
Teens today are absolutely flooded with horror stories that they have zero authority or meaningful ability to change.
The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
> During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), authorities narrowed the content down to mostly texts on Neo-Confucian orthodoxy; the highest degree, the jinshi (Chinese: 進士), became essential for the highest offices. On the other hand, holders of the basic degree, the shengyuan (生員), became vastly oversupplied, resulting in holders who could not hope for office. Wealthy families, especially from the merchant class, could opt into the system by educating their sons or by purchasing degrees. During the late 19th century, some critics within Qing China blamed the examination system for stifling scientific and technical knowledge, and urged for some reforms. At the time, China had about one civil licentiate per 1000 people. Due to the stringent requirements, there was only a 1% passing rate among the two or three million annual applicants who took the exams.[3]
In the US there is a perception that the vocational or trades route mean failure. We tend to think of trades as an expense, dangerous or someone that works on an assembly line. Some people just get bored sitting in a classroom.
The trades have never been busier, and all the different trades I see at different job sites have the 30 whatever being the young person.
Not only are they in demand, but can pay pretty decently as well, plus have directly applicable individual life uses, causing most of us tradesmen to spend very little $ maintaining our own things (cars, houses, etc).
Go to college, awesome. Or learn to use your hands and do something well, awesome.
The stuck in retail / service middle ground seems to be the hardest path in life, and obviously so very subjective, but I'd find that long term path not very internally rewarding, either.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/yellen-you-dont-have-rece...
A recent survey showed that most college students seriously overestimate their earnings potential. So, there is a mismatch in expectations. Students graduating with low-value degrees need to take whatever job they can get and work their way up.
https://www.realestatewitch.com/college-graduate-salary-2022...
Yes, the job market has roared back in the last couple of years, but before that it was cooler. But, I should have mentioned other things besides jobs. The world is a pretty bleak place, in a lot of ways. Yeah, the cold war was always hovering about, but it was not really something that my peers really worried about.
The world still has a lot of problems but let's be objective about the data instead of succumbing to defeatist narratives.
Yes, 2009-2010 was cooler, the rest has been average to significantly better than average.
I have absolutely no data to back this up but a difficult college admission process isn't novel to 2012+. This is also ignores the plenty of kids/young adults that never went to college and still suffer from whatever this epidemic is.
We'd need to review data for people who didn't go to undergrad/grad to see if your idea still holds truth.
If stress from college prep is an issue, it’s only people that weren’t going through that who you’d want in the other bucket.
So I would not be surprised if smartphones are part of the reason for a poor state of mental heath.
I am 100% behind this, and a lot of my professional career has been spent in higher education, specifically working with college access programs for pre-college students.
The amount of pressure kids are under today is just astounding. When I was looking at colleges, the pressure started slightly in 10th or 11th grade. Now, it's in the grade schools. Colleges are trying to get into 6th grade classes to "offer services" (read: recruit those kids under the pretense of supplementing underfunded school classrooms).
This may come off as a "things were better in my day" but hear me out:
I played baseball starting in kindergarten. There were summer YMCA leagues, and a couple of kids played baseball on travel teams in junior high and high school. The really good ones got scouted in college, but 99% of us were in it because we liked the game and liked playing. No matter what our parents may have dreamed, we knew it was a fun way to be part of something we liked.
My oldest plays baseball, he started in kindergarten, and has played all the way to high school now. He loves the game, but we also made sure it was a game, not a job. All kids in his class who could afford it were on travel teams, starting in first grade. All but three have private coaches for whatever position they specialize in. . . starting in first grade. The parents sponsored tournaments. The parents made sure their travel team attended tournaments that college scouts or colleges sponsored. Starting in first grade. The kids on his school team (town population of around 1000, school k-12 enrollment is around 400) have literally played or practiced baseball every weekend, barring some holiday weekends, since they were 5 years old. That is not an exaggeration, it is a statement of fact.
I actually got cornered by other parents asking why out child (left handed) wasn't going to be on the travel team when they were little, because he'd be a great pitcher. In first grade. They were absolutely astounded that I said I just couldn't get behind putting that much pressure on a child.
I don't think that people over the age of about 32 understand just how unbelievable the pressure is on kids these days. They're expected to be ON all the time, and their future is at risk if they're not. Parents see it as just trying to set their kids up for the best future possible. But it's so much pressure.
It's astounding. I live in a poor, rural area. I have to imagine it's much worse in urban/affluent areas.
And that's not even touching on the fact that social media and technology means the students literally cannot get away from social issues and bullying. That's a whole other thing.
This is one thing I've noticed about kids' sports, too, now that I have (youngish) kids and I'm trying to find sports for them. What used to be the low-end leagues—which were a bit serious, but not too much—seem to mostly be gone, with a new ultra-casual tier that didn't exist before replacing it, and then... nothing, until you're looking at really serious leagues with lots of travel and a huge time-commitment ([EDIT] yes, even for like 1st-graders).
All I can figure is parents' preferences changed—more of the half-serious players are pushed into the very-serious leagues now, for whatever reason, and the kinds of kids/parents who were always kinda unreliable and didn't seem to really have their hearts in it in the old-style somewhat-serious leagues are happier with the more-casual, even-lower-time-commitment replacement, leaving insufficient demand for what used to be just standard youth sports leagues.
However, as someone who was in high school right when Facebook/Instagram became ubiquitous amongst teens, I can’t emphasize enough how horrible the pressure of appealing to your peers was. There is a constant, deeply unsettling fear of being publicly shamed/embarrassed online at any time & for any reason. I am confident that this is still present & stronger than ever.
It's no wonder stress levels are peaking. We demand they carry immense burdens the second they're able to hold a full conversation, but without any of the freedoms associated with responsibility. Can't move out, can't afford help, so what do we really expect to happen when people are placed into such conditions?
We place them under constant pressure, and act surprised that this pressure hurts. Why can't you be more like your sister who's doing good in school? Look at your cousin he got a job already and he's only 16. When you turn 18 you need to have your act together because I'm kicking you out. Endless pressure because we are unable to process our own feelings of insignificance, we just project it on kids all without the help of social media.
The rising wealth inquality amplifies these problems more in every way.
Social media gets a lot of negative attention but there's also a huge positive here. You can connect with others who get you and can maybe help you get through those unbearable days - they make it feel tolerable. And so for people to pin the blame entirely on social media, we're just going to cause so much more harm when we realize how many teens are out there that are only avoiding suicide marginally because of social media.
https://reason.com/2023/01/30/dunkin-donuts-parents-arrested...
Around where I live (suburban though not as remote as the place in the article) I see groups of kids by themselves all the time. Older than age 9, but still.
... which adds up to a lot of people that could have stopped this if they wanted to. NONE of them did.
“Today's society demands so much from adolescents for so little in return. “
I would simply generalize to
“Today's society demands so much from anyone for so little in return.”
There, perfect
We have been actively indoctrinating our kids with the idea that college is not the be-all-end-all, that they should NOT apply for Ivy schools, 3rd tier schools are very good and if they want to go abroad or even eschew college altogether, we will support them. I've seen the effects that college admissions have on kids, especially in schools like Gunn and Palo Alto high in the Bay Area. Children committing suicide because they screw up a test is disgusting.
There is NO WAY I'm letting my kids go through that mental hell. And from some of the TikTok videos I've seen, you can dedicate your entire life to having a top application (sports, grades, extra curricular activities) and still get completely rejected by all Tier 1 schools. I won't allow my children to go through that just to be subjected to the whims of a racist, capricious admissions board.
Might be more fruitful to argue about a stack-rank of the things.
But, as the father of a son who is a freshman in college at a Research 1 university, I'll say that his college experience so closely mirrors my enterprise organization work bullshit experience it's shocking. And he doesn't have a social media account or a mobile phone.
So, my humble counter is: it's all of it. We've entered a peak bullshit culture moment in time. We throw a million negative and spurious cultural and professional expectations at young people and then couple that with the death of a reasonable middle class end-game, and then are shocked that so many of them, and the rest of us, are angry and unhealthy and impoverished in various "whole person" ways.
(Not to mention climate change...)
I would think it is at least needed for all the logins requiring SMS 2FA.
They gave him an iPad, but none of their systems use SSO of any kind.
He doesn't really care for the iPad, doesn't have a mobile phone, and doesn't do social.
He does do Minecraft, KSP, and Davinci Resolve.
Or has a cheap prepaid plan and smart phone the parents will never know about.
He has to be at school at 7:45am so gets up around 6am, goes to bed around 11am usually, so much for the 8 hrs of sleep per night!
And he hasn’t even started the college death March yet.
presumably 11pm.
School, homework, and sports. But what is he missing? Are you saying there is zero time for - hanging out with friends - going on outings with the family (skiing or to the movies) - self-directed activities - walking, photography, church groups, getting a job
?
If you're saying there's ZERO time for those things, I find it hard to believe. Weekends there is no school. The days are not consumed with training and homework, I guess.
When I was in HS, my mother strongly encouraged me to engage in competitive sports to keep me away from the neighborhood crew. Most days that meant a 530am alarm clock, 615am in the pool, and after-school workouts too. So more like 3.5 hrs daily. Then a nap before dinner, then homework. Keeping busy with structured activities kept me out of trouble. The control group, my brother, got in lots more trouble than I did.
I had time for friends and self-directed activities, especially off season.
why does he _have_ to do anything you say he _has_ to do?
1. Why does he have to fence competitively? Is it not merely a choice/preference?
2. Same question but for any sports.
As for college, what is he/you aspiring to? Is it some average university like Oklahoma State University or something like UCLA?
I've yet to see evidence that it is hard/competitive to get into the former. And while people who go to highly ranked schools do have a minor advantage, it is fairly slight. I've been to both types of schools, so I have an idea.
Waterloo: 8.1% (2010) vs 38.0% (2020)
Western: 4.8% (2010) vs 25.0% (2020)
[1]: https://uwaterloo.ca/performance-indicators/students/enterin...
I got into Waterloo CS in 2012 with a 92% high school average. Pretty lucky.
If this was true, you'd expect there to be a similar trend between Major Depression and college admissions. The data doesn't seem to show that[1][2]
[1] https://educationdata.org/wp-content/uploads/74/Historical-C...
[2] http://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a6...
Most teenagers don't stress over college admissions in my experience. The top like 30% academically successful teens probably do, but I believe this effect is seen across teenagers of all groups
Be with the right friends, get good enough grades, express myself my personality in the right way, every single thing I did affected my "future life". Every single adult was telling me this every moment of my life.
Get the grade or become a ditch digger. Pursue the right interests or be poor all of your life.
There is NO CHILL. College is, for most people, a ONE TIME opportunity - the default track is you go to college after high school, and there are ways to do it after but most people don't end up doing it. Degree programs mostly assume you're coming out of high school. Getting a degree while paying for living expenses is practically impossible without going into massive debt, which you may or may not be tolerant of the risk to take on. You can't work min wage and make rent in most places, let alone go to a community college. Young people's economics already is horrific.
I say this as someone who didn't have the opportunity to get a degree and who managed to scrape my way into a software engineering career - something that I don't recommend anyone do as its nearly impossible without connections and mentorship. Structurally we are making kids make decisions that will effect their entire lives and giving almost no recourse to anyone who can't make it happen right at 18. If you have a shitty home life, you're fucked. If you have health problems, you're fucked. There's very few second chances for college in this society.
* yes, I know very very very few service members ever get shot at
I don't think you're quite right, as that might not account for those that are missing out on an admission.
Not everyone is stressed ONLY about admissions to college or University, many kids are stressed because of the pressure to be something. You might find higher rates of depression in those that don't get an admission because of the pressure to make something of themselves.
When I was in my final year (2011) I remember feeling like I was under so much pressure to know what I wanted to do and have something lined up. Each decision felt like it had significant consequences.
Obviously this is anecdotal, and there can be multiple causes, but teaching gives you a lot of anecdotes and they don't seem to fit this narrative.
-- One flatly refused to leave home despite a lot of pushing from their parents. They are working at the local theater and taking community college courses here and there with no real future plans or goals
-- One also decided to go to CC, with her parent's support this time. She's 21, just got married, and has decided to be a vet tech with the anticipation of being a SAH wife and mother.[0]
-- One went to a top university and had a mental breakdown earlier this year - going back home and almost refusing to get out of bed or eat. Fortunately(?) this happened over a 4 week winter break, and with support from her parents and a prescription for anti-depressants she is back in school.
Not very inspiring outcomes. I personally think that the pressure from high school really ended up convincing them that they never wanted to work that hard again.
[0] I don't want to look down on women who wish to become SAHMs, but I think it's terribly short-sighted to make that decision at 21 and give up on pursuing a "real" career.
Certainly it requires a lot of trust and commitment, but I wouldn't call it short-sighted. It's risky, but if you do find a good spouse, it's not like you're missing out on anything (my wife is a SAHM and has never had nor wanted a career).
To me people that go to grad school and take on tons of debt, only to be in a position to try to start having kids in their late 30s/early 40s seem a lot more short-sighted. I watched some consumer interviews while I was at my last employer. The market segment we were interviewing were very high achieving people, but some of them were 38+ and saying they're thinking about having kids soon; there's like a 25% chance that ship has already sailed, even ignoring the reality of being almost 60 when they graduate from high school.
I suppose it comes down to knowing what you want out of life and what will bring you satisfaction with the time you've got.
I'm old enough to have seen a lot of young happy couples turn into divorced bitter singles and I can't speak to the average experience but in my circle, the women end up screwed. They've got the kids, ( the ex wanted nothing to do with the kids ) they've got no income ( the ex either has no money or is fighting tooth and nail to avoid sending any money ) and they are living off of parents, friends, and social services trying to find some job they can do part time ( no daycare ) that has a hope of supporting them.
Some of these women stayed in bad circumstances for a long time because they knew how hard it would be to manage without their spouse. Some women are still in terrible circumstances because they can't afford to leave.
> some of them were 38+ and saying they're thinking about having kids soon; there's like a 25% chance that ship has already sailed,
25% is nonsense.
> 25% is nonsense.
Yes, I think it's worse than that.
"A woman in her early to mid-20s has a 25–30% chance of getting pregnant every month. Fertility generally starts to reduce when a woman is in her early 30s, and more so after the age of 35. By age 40, the chance of getting pregnant in any monthly cycle is around 5%." (https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...)
Are they better or worse than the lonely 40+ women who have careers and money but no hope of a partner or family?
Fertility stats are easy enough to look up, and like actuarial stats, they're always unfortunate to look at. IVF can help, but it's expensive and also not a very high success rate by late 30s.
And that's for the students that go at all.
[EDIT] Incidentally, from tales told by my various teacher friends, the students who genuinely have crazy-busy schedules are almost always the ones who are extremely into playing two or more sports. Even half-serious participation (so, maaaaybe gunning to play college ball, plus the mostly-delusional but fairly-common parental aspirations of having a pro-league kid) means being in a league that makes you travel a lot, and lots and lots of practice, for each sport, plus extra training camps and shit like that. I believe tales of some schools where the students are stressed over academics and non-sports extracurriculars (plus the single requisite sport to keep Harvard from binning your application) but out in the vast reaches of non-elite America, only a few students have very-high schedule pressure, and most (not all, but most) of those are because of a strong focus on sports.
Yeah that seems evident from the breadth of replies I've gotten. Perhaps it's just one factor among many.
the CC didn’t even acknowledge the school I went to exists so i just took some placement tests that landed me at Calc 1 etc
most americans dont know how good they have it, sure things could be better but you’re literally better off than most of the world no matter what class you’re born in here
I hope the admissions process and the rest of it was still relatively painless, despite their not recognizing your school. I'm sure immigration itself was pretty unpleasant—sorry about that :-/
It's easy to say years later "You're in a bubble", but that doesnt make the situation any better.
I'll likely look back on my life when I'm retired and say "I was in a bubble" worrying about housing prices and the cost of living, but that doesn't diminish its importance to me right now.
I'm curious, would you mind sharing how a therapist helped you? I'm in a similar (but not the same) space mentally, and put everything down to environmental issues (high pressure job, etc) and disregard the thought that a therapist could help with this (unless they had a time machine, etc).
I'm 26 (almost 27, so let's say 27) and I think this echoes my experience fairly well. I felt like a failure because I didn't get into the top schools for undergrad even though I struggled so hard and objectively had good stats that I (at the time) thought would've made me a compelling/competitive applicant. Varsity athlete, played instrument, loads of APs and top of my class, yadayadayadayadayada.
I think the evolution of the college application process and the perpetual rising bar has definitely affected teens mental health. Anecdotal but I experienced pressure to do well from peers, the school, and my own family.
You'd have to do it worldwide, though. Part of the reason my own teenage years were so (relatively) peaceful is because they took place in the late 80's, before globalization. I empathize with my own kids who've been on this treadmill since kindergarten, but it's there because they're competing with kids from countries that have never had childhoods.
I recovered and eventually got an excellent Master's degree in Bioinformatics but it is condescending to assume that everyone was dealt the same hand as you in life and that anything at all is fair.
Maybe schoolwork isn't so easy if you're being abused by a parent once a week?
Didn't stop me from getting bad grades for those weeks/months and making stupid mistakes like not completing assignments and the like.
It's very easy. It's just that in a depressed/anxious/... state people aren't capable of sustaining even the most basic levels of effort after a while. Frankly, I bet that if it was a lot harder, that would have helped me.
No further questions...
Spoiler: it won't get easier :)
I'm sure everyone has a different experience, but I find professional life to be much harder than being a student, even a student preparing for very selective admission process. You often work as hard as an adult (if not harder), plus have more responsibilities.
As other comments pointed out, a large portion of society doesn't go to college, let alone "stress out about extracurriculars to make sure my app looks extra good"
No citations or anything just my exp as a Dad.
They aren't being drafted to go fight in Vietnam. The Russians aren't bombing our cities. The main health problem is eating too much food, not too little. Teens aren't even expected to have jobs anymore. (In my day, teens got jobs at 16.)
My dad volunteered in WW2. He expected to die in combat, as his cohort had an 80% casualty rate. 4 out of 5. Every mission meant holes in the airplane, and you stayed on course and took it. He helplessly watched men die. His best friend had his face burned off. When he returned home, he thought the concerns on the home front were trivial. After all, they were going to live another day.
> what you want to be at age 17
In other words, America is full of opportunity.
We live in a golden age in America.
I thought there was so much academics in my life at every age from 7 till 17, but basically I got to play as soon as school was out, with no other responsibilities.
The same was true for all of my friends, and everyone surrounding me.
It doesn’t hit me until today what an enormous privilege this solid educational system was, that would allow everyone to get (nearly) free schooling up to whatever level they wanted, with a quality high enough to require no further out-of-school lessons. No entrance examinations for university (bar a few extremely in demand or difficult courses), and roughly equivalent universities all over the country.
This was in the Netherlands btw.
Or at least they're more stressed due to changes in the school system due to NCLB. The timing would be approximately correct for that also.
We need something like Rumspringa[1], a period in life when I young person is given a bit of slack, and is expected to eventually voluntarily take upon themselves the duties and responsibilities of an adult, or leave the community.
I can't find it now[2], but I remember either Joseph Campbell, or some other such person in a TV interview describing how in earlier societies, the children once of sufficient age would be set outside of society, and allowed to sleep in the ashes around the camp fires, until they resolved to join society as an adult, with all the privileges and responsibilities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa
[2] google really does suck these days, doesn't it?
I think schools and colleges may be correctly preparing students for "the real world", and this is unfortunate.
I've seen it again and again. Parents and communities pushing on their kid's academics and sports lives to no ends. I was lucky to have well grounded parents that mostly just let me be a kid and figure things out for myself. Unfortunately I don't see this strategy getting bigger any time soon.
All those things didn't affect me because I didn't care about any of it. I made barely enough grades to barely squeeze into university. I just didn't care, not too much.
I would think that college admissions is too narrow of a reason as to why. Only about 35% of high school graduates go on to university. I'm sure a significant number of university attendees don't have these issues to the extent that they have to go to a therapist. It's great that you went, wonderful that you did, but I am not convinced that anywhere near the majority of university students had that much pressure - to the extent of having their life break down.
I do agree that everyone needs a healthier lifestyle.
I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular). Most of the little extra time I had remaining would go to additional extracurricular activities that had the potential to enhance my college application. I only really got to socialize by talking to my teammates on our runs.
As a result, even when I had extra time I was so burnt out and stressed from everything else that I felt consumed by anxiety. I would sometimes start crying spontaneously after I got home in the evenings. Things only started getting better when I started seeing a therapist and worked on my issues over the second half of my high school experience. Not everyone is so lucky.
If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and give teenagers a chance to actually live life. Sure, less social media would help, but it won't solve the root of the problem. Today's society demands so much from adolescents for so little in return. It's very easy to think that you're a failure if you don't know exactly who you are and what you want to be at age 17, and that's not a fair expectation for any 17 year old. We shouldn't be surprised that many break under this kind of pressure.