The Overachievers
My latest obsession (besides the life of Thomas Jefferson) has been the book, “The Overachievers” by Alexandra Robbins. It’s a book about the secret arms race among high-schoolers to be active in every minute aspect in the great hopes that it will land them a coveted admission to Harvard, Yale, Princeton.
To recap what I’ve learned so far, here are the basic points:
- US News and World Reports rankings are complete bullshit. The colleges self-report some of the metrics used in the rankings and outright lie in many cases (by as many as 200 SAT points for some schools). Other schools purposely recruit students that they know will not be accepted — this improves their ‘selectivity’ score. Another way to improve this score is to waitlist students that you know you will be accepting. Officially those students were all rejected. Another one of the metrics is peer reputation, where faculty at other schools rate your school. Where do those faculty form their opinions of your school? You guessed it — the US News and World Report College Rankings. Wow … congratulations on winning an award based on the fact that … you won the same exact award last year.
- Some high school students sleep less than five hours a night. This is news to some of you. It’s not to me. I distinctly remember a conversation in high school where a friend was bragging that he was actually able to go to bed at 9 pm the night before. The sad part is that we were all jealous.
- Some daycares, and preschools have an admissions process. I have a hard time believing its true, but apparently a lot of parents really believe that putting their child in the wrong preschool with detriment them for life. I’m clearly in the wrong business. I should be scamming idiot parents out of their money.
- It doesn’t matter what college you go to. For those who want to get into a pissing war with me, this isn’t sour grapes on the part of someone who attended a state school. I was accepted to one of the top 25 schools in the country and actively *CHOSE* to go to a lowly state school buried at #41 in the country (note the sarcasm). Anyways, a 1999 Harvard study compared students who attended top colleges versus those who were accepted to those college but chose to attend other schools. The results were that there was no difference in future salary or other metrics of success.
The truth is that top schools accept people that they already know will be successful, and thus play no real role in the success of their alumni.
Anyways, I was talking to my dad today and the topic of this book came up (because the author happened to attend Walt Whitman high school, which she heavily profiled in her book; Whitman happens to be in the same county in which I grew up).
It was interesting because I wanted to hear what he had to say about the book. True — my personal story was nowhere near as horrible as what I’ve been reading, but at the same time, some of the stories I read hit *WAAAY* too close to home for me.
My dad was actually familiar with the book, as he’d seen Robbins on TV recently, promoting her book. He commented that it was amazing the number of kids who were suicidal, has serious psychological problems, drug abuse problems, etc., because of all this pressure. If he only knew the people I knew in high school, he wouldn’t have been particularly shocked.
A lot of people will read this and simple comment, “BS, the real world is full of pressure, so these kids should get used to it,” which I think is a completely rubbish argument. We don’t let 15 years old drink, vote, and drive cars, and people do all of those things in the real world. The reality is that teenagers are *NOT* adults, and that’s why we, based on millions of years of experience, choose to limits their rights and responsibilities. If you think your 15 year old is ready for 80 hour work weeks, then you should have no problem handing him/her a beer, or letting him get behind the wheel of your car, or getting blown up by iraqi insurgents because hey — that’s what we all deal with in the real world.
