Rivalry for Top Colleges Equals Stress for Students

The livin’ promises to be anything but easy this summertime for Lindsay Rosenthal, 17.

With senior year and college application season looming, the aspiring doctor from Burlingame, Calif., plans to shadow two Bay Area rheumatologists on their rounds. She will volunteer to buy groceries for AIDS patients, spend hours being tutored for the SATs and, if there’s any time left over, look for a paying gig.

After a frenzied junior year filled with Advanced Placement courses, standardized exams and varsity tennis matches, what’s wrong with whiling away the summer at the beach with a good novel? It just wouldn’t wow admissions directors.

‘I really want to go to a school on the East Coast, and they’re really competitive,’ Lindsay said.

Getting into Ivy League and other elite schools has long been tough, but the bar keeps rising as competition intensifies. For stressed-out teenagers in the final throes of high school, that means more testing, more AP classes, more community service--in short, more resume-building.

Having had the drumbeat of college pounded into them, students worsen the problem by zeroing in on the same few top-ranked campuses, where they must compete with the best students the nation has to offer. The result? An environment that grows more stressful year by year. Mounting tension over academics has yielded more cases of clinical depression, eating disorders and mononucleosis among teenagers, say counselors across the nation.

‘Kids perceive that more is better,’ said Joanne Domenici, head counselor at Arcadia High School. For counselors, she added, ‘It’s a very fine line between trying to get them to do their best and putting so much pressure on them that they collapse underneath it.’

To make the grade, many students begin taking the SAT in middle school. Come high school, they spend so much time prepping for the SAT and filling out college applications that their regular course work slides, counselors say.

It is no longer enough for students to have strong grades and solid SAT scores. In addition to coping with pimples and hormones, teenagers must pile on activities to show commitment and leadership and even demonstrate experience in their chosen field, long before they officially begin a career.

Dreading Senior Year

A.J. Secrist, 16, of Palos Verdes Estates has barely finished 11th grade and is already dreading next year. His load at Palos Verdes Peninsula High will be ‘really intense,’ with AP calculus, AP English, AP government/economics, honors physics and baseball. He had planned to take AP Spanish as well but decided that was ‘just too much.’

With such a lineup, A.J. said, ‘it’s just rough waking up every day and going to school.’ But scaling back to a less punishing schedule, he said, would ‘make [me] less attractive to colleges.’

A.J. has known since childhood that his parents want him to follow in their footsteps by attending Stanford. But he despairs of getting in, given that his older brother, Michael, was just rejected by Stanford (and Princeton) despite a 4.0-plus grade point average and high scores on the SAT and the ACT, or American College Test.

Instead, Michael, 18, will attend Brigham Young University on a full academic scholarship -- not at all shabby but not his first choice.

The combination of homework, sports, volunteer work and the stress of keeping up with high-performing classmates was emotionally and physically taxing, Michael said.

‘I didn’t get much sleep,’ he said. ‘It was like a constant cycle. I was always getting sick or getting over something.’

Seeking a leg up on the Joneses, many families hire an ‘independent educational consultant’ to walk their anxious offspring through the minefield of AP and honors courses, extracurricular activities, test preparation and college applications.

Barbara Menta, one such counselor, said her Silicon Valley business is flourishing, particularly among public school students. She charges $135 an hour or $2,500 for a package that takes students from junior year through college acceptance.

When students get dead-set on Stanford or Harvard, she offers a dose of reality: the staggering numbers of applicants for those and other top schools. For next fall’s freshman class, Stanford, for example, had more than 18,000 applicants for 1,600 freshman slots. UCLA got 37,700 applications for 4,200 seats; Berkeley received more than 33,000 for 3,710 seats. The story is much the same for Boston College, New York University, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, MIT.

‘We’ve got an almost impossible goal,’ said Robert Kinnally, Stanford’s dean of admission and financial aid. ‘A student would have to be an athlete and this and that and maybe found a club while . . . taking six AP classes.’

In addition to poring over a student’s academic records, Stanford evaluates nonacademic activities, in part to pinpoint candidates with a particular expertise.

‘The talented bassoon player is somebody we would . . . take note of if our top woodwind players were graduating,’ Kinnally said.

Blame for all the pressure on students gets passed around. ‘It’s coming from their parents, it’s coming from them, and it’s coming from the colleges,’ said Domenici of Arcadia.

At her school this past year, she said, one junior stressed out by academics attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills; two sophomores were counseled after they talked about killing themselves.

‘We literally have kids tell us: ‘If I don’t get into UCLA, my life is over,’ ‘ Domenici said.

Students often say parents can be the initial source of stress but that young people pile it on themselves as well.

Tiffany Parker, 15, who will be a junior next year at Monrovia High School, said, ‘Most of [the pressure] comes from my parents, who say: ‘You need to go to UCLA or Stanford.’ I say, ‘I want to go there too, but you don’t know what it takes.’ ‘

Having pushed her daughter to excel throughout middle school, Inez Parker said she now frets that Tiffany takes on too much. Tiffany tells her she can handle it, though she acknowledged that her grades have slipped this year because of basketball and Key Club, a community service organization. She had to get a tutor for chemistry.

‘I thought high school was your funnest days,’ Tiffany said. ‘It’s not. It’s about getting your work done. If I do go to the beach, it’s probably to clean it up for community service.’

Lindsay Rosenthal said that her older sister cried for a week after she failed to win admittance to Northwestern University but that she is now happy at UC San Diego.

Their mother, Lisa Rosenthal, said she believes that her children have generally taken on what they can do.

‘I always push them to do the most,’ she said, adding: ‘I feel very bad for all the kids. It has gotten so outrageously competitive.’

Indeed, counselors agreed, the pressure mounts year by year as the offspring of the baby boomers -- or the ‘baby boomerang’ -- flood onto campuses.

A few schools buck the trend of offering more AP courses and requiring ever higher SAT scores.

Mount Holyoke College, the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning for women, decided earlier this month to stop requiring applicants to submit SAT scores.

Meanwhile, Fieldston, a New York private school that sends graduates to the nation’s most selective colleges, recently abolished AP courses. Fieldston joined Brearley and Phillips Exeter, two other highly rated schools, in doing so.

Advanced Placement classes are set up to offer a bigger challenge to high-achieving students and possibly get them college credit. Students must show sufficient grasp of the material by passing a year-end test offered by the College Board.

In addition, the University of California gives added weight to AP courses, as well as honors courses. So a student who receives an A grade in an AP class would get 5 points on a 4.0 scale. That’s the reason many GPAs now exceed a ‘perfect’ 4.0.

Settling Jangled Nerves

Counselor Nancy Edmundson at San Marino High School saw this year’s juniors panic when even seniors with stellar records did not get into their chosen schools. Counselors there are attempting to settle jangled nerves.

‘We’re trying to work really hard with our parents to get them to understand how increased pressure on their part isn’t doing their child any good at all,’ Edmundson said. ‘We’ve made some headway.’

Fran Operchuck, a counselor at Whitney High School, a magnet school in Cerritos, said counselors there encourage students to have a life. Whitney, the state’s top-scoring high school based on the new Academic Performance Index, sends 98% of its seniors on to college. This year, more will be starting at community colleges than in the past because ‘even some of our very good students didn’t make UCLA or Berkeley.’

To be sure, some students thrive on the pressure that causes others to buckle.

Connie Chen, a student at the private Vivian Webb School for girls in Claremont, got the highest GPA in her junior class this year and hopes to be valedictorian next year. Chen balances heavy course loads while editing the school paper, competing in science contests and playing three varsity sports. But she has an SAT score of 1510 (out of a possible 1600) in the bank and feels that she has a good shot at being accepted by Stanford.

‘I think I’ve done enough to put on my application,’ she said. ‘This summer I want a normal job. I just want to go to the beach and hang around. I’ve given my brain enough hard work.’