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Lecture by Alexandra Robbins Wednesday, January 31, 2007, 7:00pm St. Josephs Prep Kelly Fieldhouse |
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About Alexandra Robbins
Alexandra Robbins, a literary phenom who has been called the spokesperson for her generation, has landed on the New York Times bestseller lists with multiple books.
Hailed by the press as “an excellent stylist and a first-rate mind,” “a media celebrity,” and “a bold new voice,” Robbins has developed a riveting signature style of investigative journalism that reads like a fast-paced work of fiction. Her five books include The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids; Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, a gripping account of sorority life that propelled her to household-name status at universities nationwide; Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power, the definitive book on the super-elite secret society to which both George W. Bush and John Kerry belong; and Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis, the go-to guide for young adults in their late teens through late 30s, the follow-up to Quarterlife Crisis.
Robbins regularly appears on national television, including shows such as 60 Minutes, The Today Show, Oprah, and The View. Since graduating from college in 1998, she has written for several publications, such as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, Cosmopolitan, and The Washington Post.
An award-winning speaker who lectures frequently at universities and conferences, Robbins also does consumer brand consulting, particularly about the adolescent and twentysomething age groups. In her spare time, she plays on several soccer teams, watches NFL games, bakes pies, and re-watches the original Star Wars trilogy and early Steve Martin movies.
A Conversation with Alexandra Robbins
Why did you write this book? And why Walt Whitman High School as the setting?
The inspiration for writing this book was two-pronged. First, I kept hearing stories about the shocking lengths parents and students would go to get into a name-brand school, a mania that I wanted to investigate because of the devastating effect I assumed it had on children. Thousands if not millions of high school students and/or their parents are utterly convinced that if they can’t look perfect on paper, they will be doomed to a second-rate school whose lack of top-tier prestige will, they believe, inevitably destine them to a life of mediocrity and constant catch-up. Second, I realized that the relentless pressure to succeed was the cause of all of my own identity and work-balance issues as a young adult.
I chose Whitman because it was the scene of the crime: My alma mater, Whitman was where I became an overachiever, and by following students ten years later, I could observe firsthand whether high school had changed. And it did. Overachiever culture was just a blip when I was in high school. Now, in the 21st century, it’s out of control.
(I visited many other schools across the country and found that students everywhere are struggling with these issues.) Overachiever culture is self-destructive, and it’s seeping into children at increasingly younger ages.
In a nutshell, what is overachiever culture and what is it doing to our children?
Overachiever culture is a hypercompetitive culture that ruthlessly prioritizes prestige and a narrow definition of success. Its effects on the American educational system are destroying children and teens. They are hyperventilating over the pressure, which is contributing to depression and suicide rates. They are forcing themselves (and being forced by adults) to play competitive sports even while seriously injured because of the hope of a scholarship or an admissions edge. They are working so hard and piling on so many extracurricular activities that they have become the most sleep-deprived age group in the country. Parents and students are sacrificing health, happiness, and character, all for the sake of a name-brand college.
I firmly believe, from this investigation and from my personal experience, that overachieverism – and the perfectionist workaholism that accompanies it – is an addiction, and a dangerous one.
What are some of the more shocking effects of overachiever culture?
The Overachievers reveals many. Here are some examples:
• There is a rising black market in schools for Adderall and Ritalin, in which non-ADD teens pay top dollar for their friends’ pills as study aids to help them through final exams and SATs. Even more disturbing is that parents are persuading doctors to misdiagnose their children with ADD in order to get their children on Adderall. Parents are essentially so desperate for impressive test scores that they are drugging their kids. I compare non-ADD students’ use of these “study drugs” to doping in professional sports.
• The focus on college admissions and the high-stakes testing culture are causing teachers and administrators to cheat. Not only has there been a rash of cases of teachers and administrators doctoring their students’ standardized test scores, but also, some teachers told me that they are specifically instructed to cater to their schools’ top students (bumping up their grades, for example) so that the students have a better shot at the Ivy League, and the school, therefore, looks better.
• The stress of overachiever culture is phenomenal. Students are attempting to kill themselves over Bs and top-college rejections, and falling into depression when they don’t achieve 4.0s. Smart, perfect-on-paper kids are turning to eating disorders as coping mechanisms. One of the main characters in my book was even violently hit by his mother because he didn’t place in the top 15 of an eighth-grade math competition.
• Parents are hiring doctors to come up with ridiculous diagnoses for their healthy children (like “difficulty with Gestalt thinking”: the inability to see the big picture) just so that their kids can take the SAT untimed to get a better score. Many parents are so frantic about getting their toddlers into the “right” preschool that they hire coaches who teach the children how to be interviewed and how to take tests. Some parents spend thousands of dollars on psychologists (who are the only ones who can order the ERB – the test that 3- and 4-year-olds take to get into private kindergarten) so that their children can have secret practice rounds. This sends a horrendous message to kids, who then believe that they can’t accomplish things on their own merits.
• The frenzy over competing against peers has led to a cheating epidemic in schools. NINETY PERCENT of students cheat. 90%! And we’re not just talking about struggling students hoping to pass. This is a staggering problem among top students hoping for an A+. Surveys show that students see this cutthroat competition as necessary both in school and in the “real world.”
• Why the need to cheat and the inescapable atmosphere of cutthroat competition? Consider this: Nearly 50% of college students report they had an A average in high school.
How has overachiever culture changed the school experience?
The high school experience – and education as a whole – has become a race, a competition. Kids aren’t taught to love learning; they’re taught to strategize about how to game the system. They are choosing classes not by their appeal but by how they look on their college application – or, worse, how they can boost their class rank. Because families often place a high importance on class rank in their quest to land at a top-tier college, there have been a number of cases recently in which families have sued school districts to get their child the valedictorian title. Some privately hired college counselors have made it their mission not to find a school that best matches a student, but to re-tool a student to best fit a certain college.
Furthermore, students are losing their childhoods because they’re pushed to invest in and make decisions about their future while they’re kids. Eight-year-olds are running around with day-planners, six-year-olds say they’re “stressed,” and middle school and high school kids find that all of their waking hours are scheduled and structured.
Why is it such a problem now?
There are many factors converging to intensify overachiever culture, including the win-at-all-costs emphasis on success and prestige and the keep-up mentality of families (if a few sets of parents provide their children with an opportunity, other parents follow because they don’t want their own children to lose out on that edge). Statistically, overachiever culture also comes down to a numbers game: There are more students applying to college and to private schools, but the number of available spots at selective schools has remained the same. In only five years, the number of students enrolling in college rose by 1.2 million.
It doesn’t seem to be a problem affecting only the nerds and bookworms, it seems to be affecting all kids. Please elaborate.
Overachiever culture affects all students, not just the overachievers. Many families view their schools as a two-tiered system – you’re either an AP student or seen as remedial. There’s no middle ground anymore. One bright, talented, athletic, funny girl I followed took two APs per semester, pulled mostly As, ran on a state-runner-up relay team, had a job, and was well liked at school. But she was thoroughly convinced that she was Whitman’s “black sheep that got dropped on her head as a baby,” because she thought she was way below average when compared to her classmates.
This perfectionist atmosphere carries over into the world after school in that young adults believe that they must either become a great success or they’re nothing. Self-satisfaction is not enough.
You have a very clear opinion of how Bush’s NCLB policy has damaged our education system. Please explain.
No Child Left Behind has altered the classroom so that the experience is about teaching to a test. The focus on high scores and accountability is so stressful that some schools report that on standardized testing days, up to two dozen children vomit on their test booklets. Subjects not covered by NCLB tests – such as art, music, gym, foreign languages, and even social studies and science – are often eliminated entirely. Forty percent of elementary schools have terminated recess, many because they say they need the time to prepare students for tests. There is no time to address students’ interests, questions, or observations that deviate from standardized test material; no time for creativity, alternate perspectives, or independent thought.
Meanwhile, students aren’t able to learn subjects in-depth; instead, they are taught to be good test-takers who superficially memorize material and then forget it after the test. They are taught that their test scores are the most important part of their school experience. No wonder there is such a cheating epidemic, among both students and teachers, all of whom are under the pressure of test accountability.
So are you anti-test?
As a primary measure of students’ and schools’ merit and accomplishments, yes. Tests only measure how good a student was at taking a test at that particular time, on that particular day. Take the SAT: Julie, one of the students I followed, took the test one day and got a 1410, and the next time got a 1520. She wasn’t a different person, didn’t get extra tutoring, and yet that second test suddenly boosted her into a different stratosphere in terms of her college possibilities. Standardized tests have been proven to be flawed: They are biased against minorities; reward superficial, temporary memorization rather than deep learning; and are designed to be cheap, quickly administered, and quickly scored. There have been heaps of cases in which mistakes on the tests have wrongly dropped student’ scores. Look at what happened just this year – thousands of students’ SATs were scored incorrectly, and by the time the mistakes were discovered, the deadline for college applications had passed. It was a disaster.
What can we be doing to help the problem? What should parents know?
In the final chapter of The Overachievers, I list several steps that parents, students, schools, and counselors can take to combat overachiever culture. But the most important message to parents is that they shouldn’t feel guilty about letting their children develop their own drive to succeed, shouldn’t worry from conception about their child’s place in the world and the college admissions process. It’s been shown that so-called helicopter parents’ anxiety over this process and subsequent attempts to hover over their children, make decisions for them, and pile on every opportunity and activity available actually backfires. That approach can lead to children’s anxiety, burnout, and worse.
The focus on name-brand schools, from preschools to college, is based on inequities of a past era; today, a name-brand education doesn’t necessarily mean a top-quality education. I hope that after reading this book, parents and students will feel better about adopting a more laid-back attitude toward admissions, school, and childhood in general. If this country doesn’t change its attitude toward colleges, top students, testing, and the educational system as a whole, then the cycle is only going to get worse.
About The Overachievers
School is a place for children to grow, learn, and have fun. Yet many of today’s schools are filled with clinically depressed, overstressed, and burned-out students. They are consuming massive amounts of caffeine to stay awake, buying drugs such as Ritalin on the black market, and cheating, lying, and manipulating the system to gain a competitive edge. They’re suffering verbal abuse from parents and coaches when they don’t perform perfectly in their athletics and some have even contemplated or committed suicide over B grades.
So what’s driving this manic behavior? The quest for admission to a top college. These are the Overachievers—students driven by a relentless pursuit of perfection, who are sacrificing their health and happiness in order to be accepted to a name-brand university. At a time when a record number of students are competing for admission to top-tier colleges, the overachiever culture has become a serious—yet little examined—national crisis.
In THE OVERACHIEVERS: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids (Hyperion; August 8, 2006; $24.95; Hardcover), Alexandra Robbins, the New York Times bestselling author of Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League and the Hidden Paths of Power and Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, presents a riveting and poignant account of how today’s overachiever culture is destroying children, teenagers, and the American educational system. She traces the problem from its roots and reveals how the competitive frenzy for admission to top colleges has turned our schools into hubs of cheating, sports rage, and drug abuse. Through a compelling mix of real-life stories and investigative journalism, Robbins uncovers the damaging effects of overachieverism, how the education system has spun out of control, and the myths of the college application process that have transformed what it means to be a student today.
THE OVERACHIEVERS is not only an important work of investigative reporting, but also a fun and gripping narrative filled with examples of the often dramatic, drastic, and downright crazy lengths parents and students will go to achieve perfection. Drawn from her extensive research and interviews with students, administrators, and parents around the country, Robbins also returned to her alma mater, Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, MD, where for 18 months she followed a cross-section of high school students struggling under the pressure to get top grades, excel at sports, and meet the expectations of their parents. She introduces readers to students such as Julie, a track and academic star whose unnaturally thinning hair belied her success; Taylor, a popular varsity captain who hid her academic ambitions from her friends; Sam, the teacher’s pet who obsessed over getting into an elite university; “AP” Frank, who suffered for his perfect grades at the hands of his domineering mother; Ryland, a so-called slacker who suffered from anxiety attacks; Audrey, a perfectionist who strove to be the best at everything; and the Stealth Overachiever, a mystery junior who flew under the radar. “The high school environment is no longer about a student’s pre-adult exploration with the goal of narrowing down likes and dislikes,” Robbins writes. “Instead, it has become a hotbed for Machiavellian strategy in which students (and parents) pile on AP after AP, activity after activity, acclaim after acclaim, with the goal of tailoring high school resumes for what they often feel will be the defining moment of their lives: the college admissions process.”
As Robbins explains, overachiever culture pursues prestige while narrowing the definition of success—and its devastating effects reach beyond the halls of our nation’s schools. The problem is not so much that overachiever culture exists, Robbins attests, but that it has become a way of life. For the sake of prestige, students routinely deprive themselves of sleep, leisure time, good health, and personal happiness to fit in a jam-packed schedule of sports, classes, and extracurricular activities that leaves them stressed and out of touch with their own development. She discusses how overtesting, unfairly influential SAT scores, and the No Child Left Behind Act have encouraged some students to hire private counselors and tutors and how school boards opt for classes that will boost test scores rather than enhance the individual learning experience. As Robbins argues, the chaotic race to get ahead has put parents and students on a misguided and dangerous course. “The intensifying pressures to succeed and the drive of the overachiever culture have consequences that reach far beyond the damaged psyches of teenaged college applicants,” Robbins writes. “Overachiever culture affects not only overachievers, but also the U.S. education system as a whole, non-overachieving students, the booming college counseling and test prep industries, the way parents raise children, the tendency to cheat and use cutthroat tactics to get ahead, and campus drug culture. It contributes directly to young adults’ paralyzing fear of failure.”
THE OVERACHIEVERS also reveals how overachiever culture can hit even before children are born, with parents clamoring to get kids into exclusive nursery schools while still in the womb, and into organized activities and sports before the age of five. Robbins gained unprecedented access to a prestigious, New York private school’s kindergarten admissions office and offers a behind-the-scenes look at how four-year-olds are interviewed and evaluated. Robbins also interviewed numerous admissions officials from colleges and universities, and she reveals the surprising truths behind the admissions process and why much of what students and parents believe is necessary to land a spot in a top school is often very wrong.
Robbins also includes her recommendations for educators, parents, and students to help turn the destructive tide of overachievement. She recommends that high schools de-emphasize testing, eliminate class rank, limit AP courses, and scrap the SAT. Colleges should boycott rankings lists and eliminate early decision. Parents should limit young children’s activities so they can schedule more family time, and also emphasize character over performance, while students need to carve their own paths, adjust their “superstar mentality,” and realize that name schools don’t automatically reflect a person’s ability, drive, or intellect.
THE OVERACHIEVERS is a touching, engaging, and often funny look at today’s college admissions frenzy and how it is changing our children and our culture. With fast-paced stories and a wealth of statistics and information, it is an essential guide for both parents and students to understanding what’s wrong with our education system and the steps everyone can take to ensure a happier, healthier childhood and adolescence. “Ultimately, all of these are smaller, prescriptive actions that can begin to add up to the broader measure that is necessary to save young people from the twisted values of an education system gone wrong: a massive shift in societal attitude,” Robbins writes. “By now, the message should be clear: Ease up, calm down, and back off. If students are free to follow paths toward their personal joys and interests, then it is worth trusting that everything will be all right in the end.”