By Sydney Selman
High schoolers are subjected to pressure from schools and colleges setting ridiculously high standards and working students to death.
I am a first year at Tallahassee Community College. This is my third semester at TCC and academically, things have been going great. Despite juggling six classes and a part-time (they make it feel like full-time) job, I have been able to keep my head above water. Of course, when exams roll around, the water starts to get rocky, but I manage to push through.
In my sophomore year of high school, my honors English teacher would make continuous references to our years to come and what would happen “on the collegiate-level.” I don’t know how I let him scare me about college so much. Being here is not so bad.
What was most concerning to me was the strain and stress of high school in preparation for college.
“In highschool, we just tried to please everyone else, and the colleges,” said Samantha Fream, a member of the Honors Program and freshman at TCC. “In college, I’m just doing what I want to do.”
When do we begin to feel as if we’re good enough? As some recent studies and statistics suggest, the answer seems dismal at best.
According to an article published by the New York Times, the drive for success is actually making students sick. As described in the article, Stuart Slavin, a pediatrician and professor at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, conducted a study in cooperation with Irvington High School in Fremont, Calif.
In the spring of 2015, Slavin anonymously surveyed two-thirds of Irvington’s nearly 2100 student population. Slavin utilized two measures for his study: the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. His findings revealed that 54 percent of students exhibited moderate to severe depression. On the same note, 80 percent exhibited moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.
“I was the perfect student,” Fream said. “I had everything but test scores.”
I don’t think I have ever struggled to maintain the status quo and complete tasks the way I did my final years in high school. It seemed like, in spite of our accomplishments and hard work, the schools always asked for more. No matter how hard students keep pushing themselves, the weight of the attaining success remains constant.
“Everyone was trying to get Valedictorian, the highest GPA and trying to find scholarships,” Fream said. “They’re setting us up for failure.”
The drive for success and the pressure from schools is not only undermining their potential, but eroding students health.
Teens reported their stress to be on average a 5.8. According to the APA, 23 percent of teens report skipping a meal in the past month due to stress. Further, 39 percent report to do this on a weekly basis or more.
In addition, research by the Journal of Adolescent Health shows that the more nightly homework students are forced to endure, the less they sleep.
These statistics are more than alarming. Schools are putting far too much pressure on students to maintain a standard of excellence within academia. With the drive for success being as high as it, it’s no wonder that students are forgoing sleep and food, incurring numerous amounts of stress, anxiety and even depression.
If this aim for success continues, clearly students may literally die from the pressure. Is that the price of success?
