One day at lunch I asked a friend why he wasn’t coming to swim practice. He immediately said, “Tomorrow I have a biology test, a math test, thirty pages of English reading and twenty pages of history reading.” Another friend struggled to keep his eyes open in the middle of a history lecture. When I questioned him he told me he had slept only two hours after finishing his biology reading guides at 4:00 a.m. At a swim meet one of the fastest swimmers on our team added forty seconds to his 500 yard freestyle. When I asked what happened he said he had studied until 2:00 a.m. for an AP World History DBQ and slept for four hours.

For high schoolers scenes like these feel normal now, but they shouldn’t. A major reason why is college. During the 1960s and 1970s colleges across the United States began shifting toward holistic admissions, an approach in which applicants are considered as a whole, in an effort to increase diversity and include students from underrepresented backgrounds. This shift moved colleges away from looking only at grades and test scores and toward considering students’ backgrounds, life experiences and potential contributions to a campus community.

Today high school has become less about learning and more about performing for admissions officers. Students often load their schedules with AP classes not because they are interested in the subjects but because they believe taking more AP classes increases their chances of being admitted into a selective college.

This mindset extends beyond the classroom. Volunteering becomes less about serving others and more about checking a box on an application. The other day I spoke with Upper School civic engagement coordinator Sarah Horne. She said she has seen more students eager to start nonprofits, although many of these organizations are unsustainable or duplicate missions of more established groups. Many dissolve once the founder graduates. Even clubs become less about passion and more about writing founder or president on the Common App.

Social media intensifies the already stressful atmosphere. My feeds are filled with videos such as “Do THESE 10 Things to Get Into the Ivy League,” often created by college students who claim they have discovered a secret formula. These videos convince students that they must follow a prescribed set of activities to improve their chances of admission, which can cause them to lose their authenticity.

By constantly trying to do more through taking harder classes, joining more clubs and starting new organizations, we feed the stress we are trying to overcome. It is important to remember that achievement means little when it comes at the expense of our physical and emotional health. Stress should not be something we flex. Our values should not be measured by how overwhelmed we pretend to be. At the end of the day colleges do not dictate our lives. We do.

                                                                                                                          Edited by Ethan Zhou