Students Need the Education System to Change

By Hailey Lotz

April 12, 2022

We’ve all heard the names: Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, etc. The “dream schools,”the ones students would do anything for, the ones parents have lied and cheated to weasel their child into through a “side door.” We have come to worship these schools, yes as a pathway to a great education, but also as a status symbol. As a result, more value is now placed on what a teenager accomplishes than what they like, more on what they must do than on what they feel.

One of the largest motivators for being a “perfect” college applicant is the value society places on prestigious universities. If you make the cut into these 5% acceptance rate schools, you’ll be seen as better than everyone else. All your classmates will be awed and that bumper sticker on your mom’s minivan will certainly impress everyone on the road. I don’t mean to diminish the amazing opportunities offered by some institutions - after all, who wouldn’t want to be taught by award-winning professors in some of the best research facilities in the world? But there has been an increasingly common trend of striving for prestigious schools just to say that you’re going to a prestigious school, even though there are lesser-known colleges with programs that may be more beneficial to you.

To get into these top universities, you need near-perfect grades. The GPAs of students are compared across the country, fostering competition among teenagers to achieve a higher number than their peers. Yet, it’s almost as if everyone is playing a different game. Some teachers are harder graders, some offer extra credit, some grade homework for completion while others just include assessment grades. Two Algebra 2 classes from opposite coasts can be taught at completely different difficulty levels, but their grade factors into students’ GPAs just the same. A whole year’s worth of learning is summed up onto a single number or letter on a piece of paper, and since that value is the only thing colleges can compare across students, not the amount that the students actually learned, students are more focused on achieving a high grade than gaining knowledge from the class. Even if students acknowledge the failures of these false measures of intellect, they’re still trapped by the system; they must continue obsessing over grades or else risk being seen as less than their peers.

Don’t forget, you can’t just have a perfect 4.0. You need to play sports, and instruments, and volunteer, and intern, and on and on. After going to school for seven hours, students have activity after activity, so homework isn’t be started until late at night and the recommended eight hours of sleep becomes impossible.

The absurd price of attending college is another reason why students push themselves to their limits. Students need scholarships so badly that they will overwork and overstress themselves. Shouldn’t students' health be the most important thing? Of course it should be, but it seems as though universities are more concerned with lining their own pockets than making college as accessible and least stressful as possible for students. Now, students need to balance all of their schoolwork and extracurriculars with a job.

How have we spiraled into a system where students will obsess over grades, run themselves ragged with desirable extracurriculars, and neglect their own health to maintain their expectations, just to have a breakdown after getting rejected from a top ten school?

Many students value academic achievements not as just a measure of their hard work, but as a basis for self-worth. The “academic validation” mindset encourages people to continuously strive for more things to add to their to-do list, leading to instances of burn-out. It also equates struggle with success - the more I struggle, and the more I add to my workload, the more I’ll accomplish.

As a student who sees those around me struggling daily, who is in a school where seemingly everyone is exhausted and phrases such as “I can’t do this anymore,” and“I really hate high school,” are commonplace in classrooms, I believe that the students need help.

I would love to say that this can be fixed with a change in mindset and a firm self-care routine. While those methods may be beneficial, they’re not realistic enough to completely solve the issue. Everyone already knows what they should do, but academic burnout still runs high. Because of this, it is evident that this issue stems from a larger force. Nothing will truly get better until the grading and university systems change - a request that will likely not occur for decades, if ever.