Our Obsession With College Is Hurting Our Kids
A ‘Good’ College Shouldn’t Be the End Goal
One of the most common topics on which I’m asked to speak is College, and more specifically, “How can a student maximize their chances to get into a ‘good’ college?” Over the course of my career, be it in public or private schools, large or small schools, this outcome is the most common focus of conversations I’ve had with families. This is not at all surprising: for middle and high school families, college is seen as the ultimate outcome, as the prize at the end of, for some, 18 years of struggle and stress. If a student is able to get into the “right” school, everything else will certainly fall into place, right?
Unfortunately, what we are seeing right now is that this focus on a single moment and this single decision is not only not bearing the fruit many hope it will, but in fact, this focus is actually hurting students in their lives and careers after college.
The Problem with “Modern Meritocracy”
In the Atlantic Monthly, released November 14, 2024, author David Brooks identifies this problem in his cover piece entitled How The Ivy League Broke America. It’s a wonderful read and one you should absolutely dedicate some time to. In it, he highlights the overall problems created by the Ivy League admissions process. More importantly, though, he points out how this process actually makes students less successful long-term.
The system, which Brooks refers to as the “modern meritocracy,” is hurting students. He writes, “The meritocracy as currently constituted seems to want you to be self-centered and manipulative. We put students in competitive classrooms, where the guiding questions are ‘How am I measuring up?’ and ‘Where am I on the curve?’” Students entering the workforce today are more likely to pay “insufficient attention to interpersonal relationships,” and in some instances to be “less friendly,” “more prone to conflict,” and “less likely to identify with their team.” This has a massive effect on their success as they move into the workforce:
“The organizational-leadership expert Mark Murphy discovered something similar when he studied why people get fired. In Hiring for Attitude, he reports that only 11 percent of the people who failed at their jobs—that is, were fired or got a bad performance review—did so because of insufficient technical competence. For the other 89 percent, the failures were due to social or moral traits that affected their job performance—sour temperament, uncoachability, low motivation, selfishness. They failed because they lacked the right noncognitive skills. Murphy’s study tracked 20,000 new hires and found that 46 percent of them failed within 18 months. Given how painful and expensive it is for an organization to replace people, this is a cataclysmic result.“
How Traditional Education Fails Students
Essentially, the rank-and-sort style of education that most schools offer effectively makes students more likely to struggle in the workplace and more likely to flame out because they are unable to participate in the modern world. High schools and middle schools at large are not only creating undue and unnecessary stress, overpacking student schedules, and contributing to a mental health crisis for kids around the country, but the payoff that was promised – the one that makes all of this “worth it” – is no longer happening. In fact, students who master the system of school, the one that ranks, sorts, and pushes for individualized achievement over learning, is actually hampering students when they become adults, making them less successful in the workplace.
Why Noncognitive Skills Are Essential
At Bennett, we’re constantly looking at this information and using it to inform our program. Our focus on competencies allows for us to develop the traditional “cognitive skills” that are required, but more importantly, the focus on collaboration, team participation, creativity, and accountability through public presentation gives students the opportunity to develop the “noncognitive skills” that are essential to success in life beyond college. In fact, Brooks writes:
“The importance of noncognitive traits shows up everywhere. Chetty, the Harvard economist, wanted to understand the effect that good teachers have on their pupils. He and his colleagues discovered that what may most differentiate good teachers is not necessarily their ability to produce higher math and reading scores. Rather, what the good teachers seem to impart most effectively are “soft skills”—how to get along with others, how to stay on task. In fact, the researchers found that these soft skills, when measured in the fourth grade, are 2.4 times more important than math and reading scores in predicting a student’s future income.”
Redefining Rigor and Promoting Future Success
Ultimately, in society’s pursuit of a single moment of success (i.e., college admission), we have sacrificed not only the health and welfare of our adolescents but also actively hurt their chances of succeeding in life beyond college. Hopefully, if you’ve gotten a chance to visit Bennett, attend a Demo Day or Demo Night, or participate in a Student-Led Conference as a Bennett parent, you have had the opportunity to see the manner in which we’re actively and consciously working to make a lifetime of success, health, and well-being our priority.
The skills we’re teaching here have been proven to lead to successful careers and successful lives. What you’ve seen is rigor redefined–a rigor that emphasizes all the skills that are necessary for success in life, without a myopic focus on a single moment of decision at the age of eighteen. When we talk about the Whole Student, we think of them not only at 11 or 16 or 18, but at 30 or 45. We want our students to have all the necessary skills to be successful for the rest of their lives, and in every moment of our school day, we will continue our devotion to this one true goal.
This article was originally published as a letter to the Bennett Day community from Martin Moran, the Lead Designer of the Upper and Middle Schools. Each month, we share insight with families about the “why” behind Bennett Day programs to reinforce our values and highlight how these philosophies manifest themselves in the lives of our learners.