We like to focus on resilience at the Clay Center - but what does that really mean?Ī colleague of mine has a particularly wise way of talking to families about the importance of undergraduate life: In fact, way back in 1998, Newsweek ran what was then a sort of shocking story, noting that for many high school students “the rat race begins at fourteen.” This of course does not excuse cheating, but it is worth noting that both cheating and academic and social pressures seem to have grown in concert with one another. A 2008 study found that the increased rate of academic dishonesty on high school campuses stemmed, at least according to some students, from the increasingly high achievement bar that the students themselves experienced. This this kind of systemic stress is not good for anyone. I’ve seen students get freaked out even before the first week of 11th grade. The common application increases the overall number of applications that students complete, schools look to college acceptance rates as a means of measuring their success and they therefore pass this pressure onto their students, and students themselves are more and more led to view the junior year of high school as something akin to academic and extracurricular boot camp. By 2011, this number dropped to around 65 percent. I could go on.

In 2001, the typical college admitted around 71 percent of its applicants.

One out of four teenagers submitted college applications in 2011, at an average of around $40 per application.

In 2011, there were about 20.4 million students enrolled in college, and that number is projected to reach about 23 million by 2020.

Although the number of students in high school continues to slowly decline, the number of students applying to college is steadily increasing.According to the Department of Education, there are around 2,675 nonprofit four-year undergraduate colleges in the United States.What is clear, is that this pressure is not good for our kids. But my friend was calling from Colorado, and this is therefore not a regional issue. I was raised in the Midwest, so of course things weren't quite so high-stress compared to here in Boston. I used to think that the pressure on high school teens was largely a regional issue.

Angelflickr