PART 1
Sheep
One
The Students
âSuper People,â the writer James Atlas has called themâthe stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: they have mastered them all, and with an apparent effortlessness, a serene self-assurance, that leaves adults and peers alike in awe. Todayâs elite students, says David Brooks, project a remarkable level of âcomfort, confidence, and competence.â In Jonathan Franzenâs novel Freedom, the kids at a prestigious liberal arts college âseemed cheerfully competent at everything.â
Such is our image of these enviable youngsters, who appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the realityâas I have witnessed it among my former students, heard about it from the hundreds of young people who have written to me over the last few years or whom I have met on campuses across the country, and read about it in places where these kids confide their feelingsâis something very different. Look beneath the façade of affable confidence and seamless well-adjustment that todayâs elite students have learned to project, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. We all know about the stressed-out, overpressured high school student; why do we assume that things get better once she gets to college?
The evidence says they do not. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the twenty-five-year history of the study. In another recent surveyâsummarized by the American Psychological Association under the headline âThe Crisis on Campusâânearly half of college students reported feelings of hopelessness, while almost a third spoke of feeling âso depressed that it was difficult to function during the past 12 months.â College counseling services are being overwhelmed. Utilization rates have been climbing since the mid-1990s, and among the students who show up, the portion with severe psychological problems has nearly tripled, to almost half. Convening a task force on student mental health in 2006, Stanfordâs provost wrote that âincreasingly, we are seeing students struggling with mental health concerns ranging from self-esteem issues and developmental disorders to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-mutilation behaviors, schizophrenia and suicidal behavior.â As a college president wrote me, âwe appear to have an epidemic of depression among younger people.â
If anything, the already dire situation in high school deteriorates further in college, as students suddenly find themselves on their own, trying to negotiate an overwhelming new environment and responsible for making decisions about their future that their childhood has left them unequipped to handle. An increasing number cope by going on antidepressants or antianxietals (not to mention relying on stimulants like Adderall to help them handle the pressure); others by taking leaves of absenceâor at least, by dreaming about it. âIf the wheels are going to come off,â a Pomona student has put it, âitâs going to be in college.â
I have heard about this kind of misery again and again. From a graduate instructor at Princeton: âI just had an undergrad thesis-student faint in my office the other day because she was feeling so much pressure from her academic life.â From someone who was in the process of transferring out of Stanford: âFor many students, rising to the absolute top means being consumed by the system. Iâve seen my peers sacrifice health, relationships, exploration, activities that canât be quantified and are essential for developing souls and hearts, for grades and resume building.â From a student at Yale: âA friend of mine said it nicely: âI might be miserable, but were I not miserable, I wouldnât be at Yale.â â
Isolation is a major factor. âPeople at Yale,â a former student said, âdo not have time for real relationships.â Another told me that she didnât have friends in college until she learned to slow down a little senior year, that going out to a movie was a novel experience at that point. A recent article in Harvard Magazine described students passing their suitemates like ships in the night as they raced from one activity to another. Kids know how to network and are often good at âpeople skills,â but those are very different things from actual friendship. Romantic life is conducted in an equally utilitarian spirit: hookups or friends with benefits to scratch the sexual itch, âpragmanticâ âcollege marriages,â as Ross Douthat puts it, that provide stability and enable partners to place career first. âI positioned myself in college in such a way,â said a University of Pennsylvania student who was recently quoted in the New York Times, âthat I canât have a meaningful romantic relationship, because Iâm always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too.â
But the compulsive overachievement of todayâs elite college studentsâthe sense that they need to keep running as fast as they canâis not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isnât capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that theyâre the only one whoâs suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everyone thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are.
Students at Stanford talk about âStanford Duck Syndromeâ: serene on the surface, paddling madly underneath. In a recent post titled âMeltdownâ on an MIT student website, a sophomore confessed her feelings of shame and worthlessness and often âoverwhelming loneliness.â The post went viral, eliciting recognition and gratitude from students at at least a dozen other schools. âThank you for sharing,â said one comment. âWe all feel this way more often than we would care to admit. Thank you for being brave enough to put this into words.â Students at Pomona, which prides itself on being ranked the âfourth-happiestâ college in America (whatever that means), have told me of the burden that comes with that very self-image, as well as from the regimen of group activities with which the college seeks to reinforce it: the pressure that they feel to satisfy the happiness police by projecting an appearance of perfect well-being.
Isolated from their peers, these kids are also cut off from themselves. The endless hoop-jumping, starting as far back as grade school, that got them into an elite college in the first placeâthe clubs, bands, projects, teams, APs, SATs, evenings, weekends, summers, coaches, tutors, âleadership,â âserviceââleft them no time, and no tools, to figure out what they want out of life, or even out of college. Questions of purpose and passion were not on the syllabus. Once theyâve reached the shining destination toward which their entire childhood and adolescence had been pointed, once theyâre through the gates at Amherst or Dartmouth, many kids find out that they have no idea why theyâre there, or what they want to do next.
As Lara Galinsky, the author of Work on Purpose, expressed it to me, young people are not trained to pay attention to the things they feel connected to. âYou cannot say to a Yalie âfind your passion,â â a former student wrote me. âMost of us do not know how and that is precisely how we arrived at Yale, by having a passion only for success.â According to Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, âToo many students, perhaps after a year or two spent using college as a treadmill to nowhere, wake up in crisis, not knowing why they have worked so hard.â One young woman at Cornell summed up her life to me like this: âI hate all my activities, I hate all my classes, I hated everything I did in high school, I expect to hate my job, and this is just how itâs going to be for the rest of my life.â
If adults are unaware of all this, thatâs partly because theyâre looking in the wrong direction. Getting Aâs no longer means that everythingâs okay, assuming that it ever did. âWe have students, who, no matter what else is going on in their lives, know how to get those grades,â Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, Stanfordâs university chaplain, has said. âItâs important for us to take away the blinders that keep us from seeing their distress.â
Mainly, though, these kids are very good at hiding their problems from us. I was largely unaware myself, during my years at Yale, of the depth of my studentsâ unhappiness. Only now that I am no longer in a position of authority do some of them feel comfortable enough to open up. The student who told me that she had no friends until her senior year had seemed, if anything, unusually healthy: funny, friendly, âreal,â not obnoxiously competitive or on the make, and a brilliant student, to boot. Another kid, equally great, equally well-adjusted for all that I could see, later confessed that sheâd been miserable in college, depressed or stressed-out all the time. By the time they finish high schoolâafter years of learning how to please their teachers and coaches, not to mention schmoozing with their parentsâ friendsâelite students have become accomplished adult-wranglers. Polite, pleasant, mild, and presentable; well-mannered, well-groomed, and well-spoken (not to mention, often enough, well-medicated), they have fashioned that façade of happy, healthy high achievement.
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It would be bad enough if all this misery were being inflicted for the sake of genuine learning, but that is quite the opposite of what the system now provides. Our most prestigious colleges and universities love to congratulate themselves on the caliber of their incoming students: their average SAT scores, the proportion that comes from the top 10 percent of their high school class, the narrowness of the admissions sieve that lets them in, all the numbers U.S. News & World Report has taught us to worship. And make no mistake; todayâs elite students are, in purely academic terms, phenomenally well prepared.
How could they not be, given how carefully theyâre bred, how strenuously sorted and groomed? They are the academic equivalent of all-American athletes, coached and drilled and dieted from the earliest years of life. Whatever you demand of them, theyâll do. Whatever bar you place in front of them, theyâll clear. A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize thirty lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Every single kid got every single line correct, down to the punctuation marks. Seeing them write out the exercise in class, she said, was a thing of wonder, like watching Thoroughbreds circle a track.
The problem is that students have been taught that that is all that education is: doing your homework, getting the answers, acing the test. Nothing in their training has endowed them with the sense that something larger is at stake. Theyâve learned to âbe a student,â not to use their minds. I was talking with someone who teaches at a branch campus of a state university. His students donât think for themselves, he complained. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy Leagueâbright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development, one that they directed by themselves and for themselves.
I am far from alone in this perception. A friend who taught at Amherst mentioned a student who came to her for extra help with his writingâbut only because he had already been admitted to medical school and now felt free to actually learn. If he were a freshman or sophomore, he said, he wouldnât have taken the time. Another friend teaches fine arts at a prestigious liberal arts college. His kids are eager to accept creative challenges, heâs told me, but only as long as it will help them get an A. âI cannot imagine a Yale undergraduate spending an entire weekend lying in bed reading poetry or glued to a keyboard writing a breakthrough iPhone app,â said a former colleague in the computer science department, who went to college in the late 1970s. âYet, when I was an undergraduate, people did things like that all the time; passionate weirdos were all over the place, and they were part of what made college interesting.â
Students simply donât have time for that kind of headlong immersion. The frenzy of extracurricular activities has expanded to fill the available space, displacing intellectual pursuits as the focus of student energy. David Brooks and other observers have spoken about the death of the late-night bull session, the scarcity of spontaneous intellectual discussion. Iâve heard similar complaints from students at Brown, Penn, Cornell, Pomona, and Columbia. âIâve never been able to justify to myself why I feel so much âsmarterââmore productive, more creative, more interesting (and more importantly, more interested)âduring the summers than I ever do during the school year,â a Princeton senior wrote me. A young woman from another school told me this about her boyfriend at Yale:
Before he started college, he spent most of his time reading and writing short stories. Three years later, heâs painfully insecure, worrying about things my public-educated friends donât give a second thought to, like the stigma of eating lunch alone and whether heâs ânetworkingâ enough. No one but me knows he fakes being well-read by thumbing through the first and last chapters of any book he hears about and obsessively devouring reviews in lieu of the real thing. He does this not because heâs incurious, but because thereâs a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them.
There are exceptions, of course: seekers, thinkers, âpassionate weirdos,â kids who approach the work of the mind with a pilgrim spirit, who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience in college tends to make them feel like freaks. âYale,â one of them said, âis not conducive to searchers.â Another said, about a friend of hers whoâd transferred out, âShe found Yale stifling to the parts of yourself that youâd call a soul.â Said a third, âItâs hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.â
My examples tend to come from Yale, since that is mainly where I taught, but I do not mean to single out that institution. If anything, I think it probably deserves its reputation as the best among elite universities (as distinct from liberal arts colleges) at nurturing creativity and intellectual independence. Notoriously pre-professional places like Penn, Duke, or Washington University, or notoriously anti-intellectual ones like Princeton or Dartmouth, are clearly far worse. But thatâs precisely whatâs so frightening. If Yale is the best, then the best is pretty bad.
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Yet if I have learned one thing in the last few years, it is that todayâs elite students do not arrive in college as a herd of sheep or army of robots, with a few rebel intellectuals off at the edges. Most of them are somewhere in the middle: idealistic and curious, like kids before them, hungry for purpose and meaning, like kids before them, but beset by psychological demands that are inevitable products of the process that propelled them into college in the first place.
âEvery educational system,â wrote Allan Bloom, âwants to produce a certain kind of human being.â Growing up elite means learning to value yourself in terms of the measures of success that mark your progress into and through the elite: the grades, the scores, the trophies. That is what youâre praised for; that is what you are rewarded for. Your parents brag; your teachers glow; your rivals grit their teeth. Finally, the biggest prize of all, the one that draws a line beneath your adolescence and sums you up for all the world to see: admission to the college of your dreams. Or rather, not finallyâbecause the game, of course, does not end there. College is naturally more of the same. Now the magic terms are GPA, Phi Beta Kappa, Fulbright, MCAT, Harvard Law, Goldman Sachs. They signify not just your fate, but your identity; not just your identity, but your value. They are who you are, and what youâre worth.
The result is what we might refer to as credentialism. The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars. Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end in itself, the inability to imagine doing something that you canât put on your resume. Hence the constant sense of competition. (If you want to increase participation in an activity, a Stanford professor told me, make entry to it competitive.) Hence the endemic academic corner-cutting that Douthat describes in Privilege, a memoir of his time at Harvard, where all that intellect is put to the service, not of learning as much as possible, but of getting away with doing as little as you can. Hence the vogue for double majors. It isnât enough anymore to take a bunch of electives in addition to your primary focus, to roam freely across the academic fields, making serendipitous connections and discoveries, the way that American higher education was designed (uniquely, among the worldâs systems) to allow you to do. You have to get that extra certification now, or what has it all been for? I even met a quadruple major once. He seemed to think it meant that he was very smart.
With credentialism comes a narrow practicality thatâs capable of understanding education only in terms of immediate utility, and that marches, at the most prestigious schools, beneath a single banner: economics. In 1995, economics was the most popular major at three of the top ten universities or top ten liberal arts colleges on the most recent lists in U.S. News. In 2013, it was the biggest at a minimum of eight and as many as fourteen. Among the universities, it was the biggest at Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth, and probably Columbia and the University of Chicago (determinations are sometimes difficult because of changes in reporting). It was the biggest at four of the top ten liberal arts colleges, places that are supposed to be about a different sort of educationâWilliams, Middlebury, Pomona, and Claremont McKennaâand probably also at Amherst, Swarthmore, Carleton, and Wellesley. It was almost as popular among the next ten schools on each list, the rest of the top twenty, representing the largest major at as many as six of the universities and six more of the colleges, for a grand total of 26 of the 40 schools on the two lists combined. Sixty-five percent, for just a single major: a stunning convergence.
Meanwhile, not coincidentally, finance and consulting have emerged as the most coveted careers. In 2007, about half of Harvard seniors who had full-time jobs lined up for after graduation were going into one of those two industries. The numbers softened a bit after the financial collapse, but not by much and not for long. By 2010, nearly half of Harvard graduates were still going into one of those fields, as well as mo...