Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
In the summer of 2006, a nonfiction book called The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids cast an uncanny light on my late teenage years. The work, by journalist Alexandra Robbins, followed a dozen students around a pressure-cooker high school during the college admissions process. These students fought—mostly verbally, sometimes physically—with overbearing mothers. Their hair thinned in latent stress reactions. They fished for compliments on (pour one out) AOL Instant Messenger, leaving away statuses like, “:( Every year admissions people make mistakes. I just happened to be one of them.”
The Overachievers struck two important chords for me. First, I was a rising high school senior when it came out. Second, it took place at my own school, Walt Whitman, a large public high in Bethesda, Maryland. The profiled students were a few years above me. I shared the halls with them, and probably saw their hair accumulating in the rust-stained sinks. It’s difficult to comprehend now, but the midaughts were a time when the college admissions process—particularly for kids applying to elite schools—felt as if it were coming to a head, and teenage mental health along with it. No Child Left Behind continued to overhaul the country’s standardized testing apparatus. The College Board had just introduced an additional 800-point writing portion to the SAT test (since discontinued, along with SAT II subject tests). “The obsession over name-brand schools,” Robbins wrote, “is the most frenzied it has ever been.” She cited a 2004 Mediamark survey in which “more than half of American teenagers reported they were ‘stressed out all of the time or sometimes.’ ”
At Whitman, in an affluent D.C. suburb famous for having one of the highest Ph.D.-per-capita rates in America, the pressure was both ubiquitous and a point of pride. “We live in an achievement-oriented, workaholic culture,” wrote Robbins, herself a Whitman graduate, “that can no longer distinguish between striving for excellence and demanding perfection.”
Some 20 years after The Overachievers, this characterization of 2000s teenage stress seems, if not misguided, then at least overwrought. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that suicide rates for people aged 10–24, stable from 2000 to 2007, leapt 60 percent between 2007 and 2018. Then we suffered a pandemic, driving an additional two-year, 51 percent increase in suicide-related ER visits for adolescent girls from 2019 to 2021. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy wrote that youth are “bombarded with messages through the media and popular culture that erode their sense of self-worth.” More specifically: “There is a clear need to better understand the impact of technologies such as social media on different kinds of users, and to address the harms to users most at risk.”
Unless you count Instant Messenger or Xanga blogs, the nervy Overachievers didn’t have social media or smartphones (or in some cases, even cellphones). It’s therefore surprising that the crux of Robbins’ 2006 argument should read: “We live in the Age of Comparison. Too often, we deem our own achievements worthless if they fall short of others’ standards. Our best isn’t good enough if it’s not as good as someone else’s best.”
The Age of Comparison, before contemporary social media? As a junior named C.J. told Robbins, “You can’t just be the smartest. You have to be the most athletic, you have to be able to have the most fun, you have to be the prettiest, the best-dressed, the nicest, the most wanted.”
Reading The Overachievers now, with the benefit of hindsight, is like looking into an eerie funhouse mirror. Was the high school environment of 2006 a pool of gasoline waiting for social media’s match, or was it already on fire? I wanted to find out, so I got in touch with Robbins. And then, God help me, I went back.
Two decades on, the brick facade of Walt Whitman High looks just as it does in the stress dreams that hound me to this day. (A test? I haven’t been to that class all semester!) There’s a glassy new addition out back, novel security measures around the entrance, and increased signage in the parking lot—a notorious hotbed for fender benders—but public schools are a special breed of time capsule, and Whitman is no exception.
I’ve arrived at the end of February, after early action decisions but during rolling admissions windows. Upperclassmen are predictably chewing their nails. Last year, U.S. News ranked Whitman first among Montgomery County high schools, fourth in the D.C. Metro area. Most of these students will graduate from superlative four-year colleges—a fact that guidance counselors stress throughout the process. But the lure of top options inflames competition. As senior Sonia Weliwitigoda tells me, “Everyone here is applying to top 20s and Ivies. During early admissions, people were freaking out.”
“I was a total mess,” agrees her classmate Rebecca Waldman. “I was in the back of sixth and seventh period thinking I’d throw up.”
Senior Nikhita Dass, online editor in chief of the school newspaper, applied to 29 schools this year. Colette Yehl, her print counterpart, applied to 23. There’s a consensus among students that the process represents, per Yehl, “a game with so many steps.” And there’s additional awareness that this place is an outlier—Dass says it’s “much more competitive” than her previous school in Scottsdale, Arizona. In these ways, little has changed since Whitman set the county record for public school SAT scores during my heyday (a mean of 1256; it’s now up to 1312). But while the school is physically about the same, daily American life—not to mention downtown Bethesda—is barely recognizable. I wanted to know if the levers of pressure had shifted during my time away.
Take the internet-age example of “Viking Destinations,” an Instagram page operated each of the past few years by Whitman’s Student Government Association. The Viking is Whitman’s mascot, their “destination” not Newfoundland but college. This Instagram account, followed by, per Dass, “everyone,” provides a constantly updated register of matriculations, complete with a hand-selected student photograph, college logo, and (predicted) major. By the end of the year, most Whitman students—not all, and please do imagine being in this minority—will have received a full-page IG salute. And they’ll have spent the preceding months looking at everyone else’s, following and unfollowing the account as their stress fluctuates. “I’ve been imagining what my page will look like for so long,” says Weliwitigoda.
Her classmate Charlie Martin puts it more bluntly: “Viking Destinations gives you a value. People see it and think a certain thing.” Fellow senior Aya Chami says, “It can be toxic, but it’s a nice way of celebrating people.”
This “toxicity” takes alternate form on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube—collectively, the Wild West of college scouting. Much of this content falls into the category of lifestyle videos. Search any college followed by “day in the life,” and you’ll find the influencers hard at work. Do Harvard students really light candles and drink wine each evening? I’m guessing not. Whitman seniors grew up on the internet; they know not to give these people their implicit trust. Yehl calls it “silly, because social media is fake.” At the same time, most students tuned in to some degree. “It can seem real,” adds Yehl as an afterthought.
Less trustworthy is a TikTok trend called “College Acceptance Predictions,” a page tallying nearly 120 million posts to date. In these videos, high schoolers post their “stats”—GPA, SAT scores, extracurriculars, even race—so that internet personalities might predict their school-by-school acceptance. These people are not college counselors. They’re influencers. “I will post the results in Part 2,” says this guy. Is he right? Is he wrong? The void draws near.
As The Overachievers shows, high schoolers don’t require social media to lose their cool over college admissions. Back in the aughts, Robbins wrote that students across the country “felt similarly, that all of the effort they had expended to present themselves as attractive applicants—the grades and test scores, the extracurricular stardom—would be a waste if they weren’t admitted to highly ranked universities that would justify their sacrifices.”
Herein lies the pitfall of our admissions race: It treats sleep and free time like sacrificial goods, losses to be “justified” by ill-defined future gains. Internet-era Whitman has yet to alter this narrative, which didn’t surprise me. But I wondered about the original subjects of The Overachievers. Even without Viking Destinations and prediction TikTokers, they’d driven themselves mad with ambition. Did they do it for themselves? Their parents? Was it worth it?
I caught up with two stars of The Overachievers, “AP Frank” and “Julie,” at the beginning of March. By virtue of his widespread nickname—he earned an ungodly 17 high school AP credits—Frank is the de facto poster child of Robbins’ book, his adolescence a harrowing study in helicopter parenting. So “horrified” was Frank’s mother at his 1570 SAT score, she signed him up again. He made up the 30 points. But the duress became physical as well as mental. Of his high school nadir Frank told Robbins, “Imagine being trapped inside a glass box. You can see everyone outside, and people can see you, but they can’t touch you, and you can’t touch them, and you can’t really move around.” During his freshman year at Harvard, as Robbins’ book chronicles, Frank’s parents divorced, and child protective services transferred his younger brother into foster care.
“I haven’t looked at the book itself in a while,” Frank tells me from the greater Boston area, where he works in video game design. “That period in my life does still hold a lot of space in my head and my heart.”
Frank, now 38, unexpectedly reentered the classroom in his late 20s when an edutech startup he was working for assigned him to pilot test physics and comp sci curricula at a private high school. “They just wanted grades,” he says of today’s students. “These kids from Day One are programmed to learn the formula, plug shit in, do the test, get a good grade. Basic comprehension is low.”
Frank sympathized. He’d done the same. He also saw his students’ Instagram accounts as a new-age mirror of his high school Xanga blog: “a way to cultivate and express identity away from parental eyes, like a third space.” Having seen the classrooms from this new perspective, Frank says, “If I was to come across the parent of a high school–age kid who in my opinion was too strict, I would tell them you’re running a gamble. Do you want to prepare your kid to operate without supervision? That’s a risk.”
As the only college-aged subject of The Overachievers, AP Frank’s story exemplified how mental health and creative expression could improve after leaving the confines of home. One subject very much in the frying pan when the book was reported was “Julie,” now Julia, an author and career strategist living in Ashland, Oregon. Shortly after her early acceptance to Dartmouth, Julia wrote in her high school journal, “Just like my room, I may look organized and put together on the surface, but under my bed and in my closet where I hide junk, my life is a mess. It’s weird to put time and effort into things that make me happy. … I’m a mental disaster.”
When I mention “journal entries” to Julia over the phone, she says, “The book is kind of cringey for me.” Like Frank, she doesn’t return to it anymore. “I thought it would be this big launching point in my life. That hasn’t been true. It’s more of a party trick: Did you know that my high school experience was written about in a book?”
My conversations with Frank and Julia arrive at unprompted commonalities around the “Whitman mindset,” which they now see as inherently deceptive. The insane premium on grades and Ivy Leagues—did it matter then? Does it matter now? “I feel that in our world today,” says Julia, “there’s so much uncertainty. Is going to college even worth it? The old dream of coming out of college and being able to get a good job, I’m not sure where that is anymore.”
Frank is more candid. “The promise of the American dream has disintegrated,” he says. “Students are wising up to the reality that what was promised to us—both millennials and Gen Z—is a lie. Study hard, get a degree, and you’ll get a good job? People know this is a lie. But there’s still an enormous amount of pressure to play that game.”
Across generations, overachievers keep using this word—game—to describe school, jobs, income. The very stuff of life. I see a few problems with this. First, games are zero-sum endeavors. Second, aren’t they supposed to be fun?
I feel qualified to write about overachieving at Whitman for the same reason Robbins did. We both tried hard, probably too hard, in our teens, and wound up at Yale (13 years apart). Pressure was a pervasive part of my own high school experience. I remember early-morning cramming sessions and pleading with teachers for higher grades. I remember a spate of testing chicanery involving TI-83 graphing calculators. I remember a friend being legitimately upset when my own college admission arrived, blaming me for “taking” their Ivy League spot.
Rereading The Overachievers unearthed these memories and more. Just like the setting’s linoleum hallways, the book itself is a time capsule. “As my alma mater,” Robbins told me last month, “[Whitman] was the only high school at which I could gauge what had changed.”
The same thought process led to my return visit, one where I expected the worst. The internet was in its greenhorn phase during my time at Whitman, and the continuous degradation of online life—supercharged by smartphones and the pandemic—made me pessimistic. But my interviews painted a more complicated picture. If we consider social media as a window to the world, we have to remember that most windows come with a certain amount of specular reflection, internal light forming our own negatives. Look at the internet long enough, you see yourself, too.
The high schoolers I interviewed had been stretched thin by the college admissions process. But they were also preternaturally aware of Whitman’s pressured environment, which gave them a level of maturity that I don’t recall from my own Viking career. They used terminology like “mental health”—which would’ve rung hollow for my generation—when assessing the state of the student population. And although they digested college content on the internet, they also understood its many snags, including its predilection for lies. One of them, junior Benjamin Levy, was even writing his own rendition of this very article for the school news website, “Whitman Students and Stress: When Expectations Clash With Reality.”
Robbins works occasionally as a Whitman substitute (see her 2023 book, The Teachers). After I reached out, she raised the topic of pressure in one of her classes. “The kids ended up talking to me about it for 90 minutes,” she says.
“At this school,” one junior told Robbins, “it’s like if you can’t handle it, you’re weak.” Another added, “Even if we don’t have anxiety, we’re burned out.”
I’m not sure my class of ’07 had the wherewithal to issue such verdicts. Yes, we were stressed. But we lacked a broad understanding of things, having gleaned worldviews from television and word of mouth. I’m curious if, with today’s levels of screen time—a portal in every pocket—Gen Z might simply know more than we did. Robbins seems to agree, saying, “I think today’s high schoolers are more aware of the realities than previous generations.”
The Overachievers concludes with a personal account of Robbins’ own ambition—“I was my own harshest critic. A relentless workaholic”—and a list of policy recommendations to ease K–12 stress. Some of these have seen enactment, from later start times to a slight deemphasis on testing (compared with 2006). Importantly, Robbins says that there’s “more attention to mental health today than when The Overachievers was published.”
Unfortunately, this “attention” comes amid continuing disaster. Having read the aforementioned surgeon general advisory, how could we not pay attention to student mental health?
Two decades on, The Overachievers is a useful control in gauging technology’s impact on this crisis, showing, for example, that social media did not invent today’s culture of comparison but rather played on quintessential teenage persuasions. Students in the midaughts, wrote Robbins, “were stuck in a cycle in which they lived their lives according to other people’s perceptions, expectations, or labels, even though those labels were often wrong.”
So long as America’s largest corporations continue to profit from this “cycle,” progress will stall. But maybe it’s less sinister than that. “At its core,” says current senior Charlie Martin, “Whitman is a rigorous school. It’s hard to change.”
Update, April 14, 2025: This article has been updated to remove some personal details of a source.
