By his junior year in high school, a student known around campus as “AP Frank” had a course schedule so jam-packed that he couldn’t take a lunch break. All of his classes were AP—hence the nickname—all taken in an effort to gain Frank attendance to Harvard: “The Xanadu of his mother’s dream, the ticket to a life free of failure.” Frank eventually got into Harvard, but before he left for school in the mid-2000s, he wrote a post on his blog:
Weighted GPA: 4.83
SAT: 1570, 1600
SAT II Physics: 790, 800
SAT II Writing: 800
SAT II Math IIc: 800
Number of APs taken: 17
Number of 5s received: 16
Number of times I wish that my parents would see me as a person, not as a resume: 4 years = 365 days + 1 day for the leap year = 1461
The rest of the post outlines the other, non-resume-building activities Frank missed out on: He’d never been drunk, he’d never “hooked up” with a girl, he’d only slept over at a friend’s house twice in his entire school-age life.
Reading Frank’s blog post today feels deeply, disturbingly sad. But to many teen readers of that time, the trajectory of his life, as included in Alexandra Robbins’s The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, was aspirational. Published in 2006, The Overachievers is compulsively readable—Robbins, who’s embedded herself in over half a dozen other “subcultures,” paints each of her subjects as complicated, compelling characters as they go through the heady process of applying for college. But it also reads like a burnout prequel: “When teenagers inevitably look at themselves through the prism of our overachiever culture,” Robbins writes, “they often come to the conclusion that no matter how much they achieve, it will never be enough.”1
The first chapter of the book is filled with similar warnings about the psychological toll of this type of behavior—and the wages of thinking of oneself as a resume. But multiple people told me they read it as a sort of instruction manual. Sure, these kids were unhappy, stressed, sleep-deprived, and ambivalent. But they still got into good schools, right?
Depending on where a millennial lands on the generational age span, where they grew up, and what their high school was like, that attitude might be incredibly familiar. In the late ’90s, I experienced what felt like a prototype of it—College Stress 1.0—in which I was convinced that my choice of college would determine the trajectory of my life. But there wasn’t a culture of college competition at my high school: I had to drive thirty miles to take the SAT, which I did, once; my college guidance counselor actually questioned why I was interested in applying for out-of-state schools.
But six hours away, in Seattle, students at competitive prep and public schools were having a very difference experience. At the magnet school one of my soon-to-be best friends attended, students posted their college acceptance and rejection letters on a public bulletin board in the newsroom of their school paper. And that was in 1998.
Over the next fifteen years, the college application process continued to evolve, as millennials began flooding schools with applications. As more and more students were vying for (only slightly more) spots at the elite schools, overflow applicants pooled around other forms of elite schools: elite liberal arts colleges, elite public universities, schools that accumulated elite connotations through sports recognition, “schools that change lives.” The Ivies were the pinnacle. But the Ivy promise—that getting into an elite college could quell economic anxiety and buy a ticket to “a life free of failure”—trickled down to virtually every type of secondary education.
Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as “human capital”: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy.
That pressure to achieve wouldn’t have existed without the notion that college, no matter the cost, would provide a path to middle-class prosperity and stability. But as millions of overeducated, underemployed, and student-debt-laden millennials will tell you, just because everyone around you believes in the gospel doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true.
College didn’t alleviate the economic anxiety of our parents. It didn’t even guarantee our position in the middle class, or, in many cases, actually prepare us for the job market. But the preparation for college taught us a valuable, lingering lesson: how to orient our entire lives around the idea that hard work brings success and fulfillment, no matter how many times we’re confronted with proof to the contrary.
Up until World War II, college education was a rarified experience, available to those who were white and male and born into money. Most people learned their trades through apprenticeships or on-the-job training; even doctors and lawyers were somewhat self-taught (they studied on their own, or with a mentor) until the formalization of graduate school in the late nineteenth century. In 1940, just 4 percent of American women aged twenty-five or older had bachelor’s degrees, and just 5.9 percent of men.2 Only 14 percent of the population had completed high school. (In 2018, 90.2 percent of the population over age twenty-five had completed high school, while 45.4 percent has an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.)3
After the end of the war—and amidst growing concern over the United States’ place in the global world order—a commission appointed by President Truman issued a six-volume report entitled “Higher Education for American Democracy.” Amongst its recommendations: doubling the number of students enrolling in college by 1960, thereby tapping the potential of millions of Americans who’d been excluded from higher ed.
Central to increasing college attendance would be providing government assistance, whether in the form of loans or grants. “There must be developed in this country the widespread realization that money expended for education is the wisest and soundest investments in the national interest,” the report declared. “The democratic community cannot tolerate a society upon education for the well-to-do alone. If college opportunities are restricted to those in the higher income brackets, the way is open to the creation and perpetuation of a class society which has no place in the American way of life.”
The idea that schooling would make society more democratic and equitable, more fundamentally American, was foundational to the development of what W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Laverson call “the education gospel,” which includes the idea that school, and the credentials that come with it, are the only way to keep up as the economy shifts from industrial production to the “Knowledge Revolution,” and the information-based jobs many feared it would create.
Grubb and Laverson chose the word gospel to evoke just how ideologically integrated—how naturalized—the idea had become. Of course more education is better than less education, of course you should go to college by any means necessary—even when the costs of that college outweigh the benefits—despite increasing evidence that college is not “worth” its cost for those who drop out, or for those who come from lower-class backgrounds.4 They point to the National Commission on the High School Senior Year, released in 2001: “In the agricultural age, post-secondary education was a pipe dream for most Americans,” it declared. “In the industrial age, it was the birthright of only a few. By the space age it became common for many. Today, it is just common sense for all.”5
Lily, who went to a prep school in New York, told me that she never even considered not going to college: “My oldest sister almost didn’t, and the narrative in the family was that she was in danger of failing at life and dooming herself.” That’s a common refrain amongst many millennials—especially amongst the middle class, or anyone who wanted to escape their town, or find something better than what their parents had. “It never occurred to me that college was optional,” Caroline, who graduated in 2000 from a high school near La Jolla, California, said, “or that my life would be worth living without a college degree.”
Human capital is, in Malcolm Harris’s words, “the present value of a person’s future earnings, or a person’s imagined price at sale, if you could buy and sell free laborers—minus upkeep.”6 Crass as that might sound, it’s a clear-eyed look at what capitalism does to the humans who work within it. Like the machines we work with, our worth is measured in our ability to create value for those who employ us. Think about any hiring process, or salary negotiation. The employer asks themselves: “What is this person worth?” and “Is this person a good investment?” An employer can get in “low” (get a good deal by offering less than a worker’s true value), or make a bet that a worker’s ostensibly low value will appreciate with time.
If you’re a physical laborer, your primary value is rooted in your healthy, able body. If you’re a service worker, it’s your ability to perform a task with skill, precision, and efficiency. If you work in a creative field, it’s what your mind can produce—and how regularly it can produce it. If any of those qualities diminish or disappear, you become less valuable: your human capital, at least in that industry, decreases.
You can see how this conceptualization, mapped onto the whole of society, creates problems. When one’s value depends on the capacity to work, people who are disabled or elderly, people who cannot labor full-time or who provide care in ways that aren’t paid at all or valued as highly—all become “less than” in the larger societal equation. And as much as we like to believe in a society where a person’s value is found in the strength of their character, or the magnitude of their service and kindness to others, it’s difficult to even type that sentence without being confronted with how little it reflects our current reality.
To be valuable in American society is to be able to work. Historically, more work, more toil, more commitment, more loyalty, more grit—all of that could make you more valuable. That’s the very foundation of the American Dream. But in our current economic moment—often referred to as “late capitalism,” to evoke how much of the economy is predicated on the buying and selling and leveraging of things that aren’t, well, things—hard work only becomes truly valuable when accompanied by existing connections (a.k.a. class status and privilege) or credentials (diplomas, recommendations, resumes).
Which explains our current “best practices” for achieving middle-class success: Build your resume, get into college, build your resume, get an internship, build your resume, make connections on LinkedIn, build your resume, pay your dues in a soul-sucking low-level position you’re told to be grateful for, build your resume, keep pushing, and eventually you’ll end up finding the perfect, stable, fulfilling, well-paying job that’ll guarantee a place in the middle class. Of course, any millennial will tell you that this path is arduous, difficult to find without connections and cultural knowledge, and the stable job at the end isn’t guaranteed.
And yet it’s easy to see how parents of all classes would become fanatical about college prep: If you can just get on the path, that good, stable job is in sight! To make things better for the next generation, you don’t need revolution, or regime change, or raised taxes. All that’s necessary, at least to start, was your kid’s college acceptance letter.
That idea, of course, isn’t entirely novel. Millions of Gen-Xers and boomers also grew up believing a college education was a ticket to the middle class. But as the economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti point out, the rise in economic inequality and the fear of class instability have significantly shifted parents’ attitudes and behaviors, particularly when it comes to educational achievement. “In a world of high stakes, the appeal of permissive parenting faded,” they write. “Middle-class parents started pushing their children to adopt adult-style, success-oriented behavior.” Instead of raising kids, so many parents, consciously and subconsciously, began raising resumes.
In Kids These Days, Harris points out how the obsession with building value—that is, building resumes—intersected with the tenets of concerted cultivation. Pickup games, for example, became organized, year-round league sports—a potential line, somewhere down the road, on a resume. Playing an instrument for fun became playing an instrument for public, judged performance—another resume line.
The value-adding process starts with grades, which, depending on location and class, means that it begins with preschool. “The idea that underlies contemporary school is that grades, eventually, turn into money, or if not money, into choice, or what social scientists sometimes call ‘better life outcomes,’” Harris writes.7 “When students are working, what they’re working on is their own ability to work.”
Put differently: What you’re doing when practicing your times tables or taking a standardized test or writing an essay isn’t learning, but preparing yourself to work. This is an incredibly utilitarian view of education, implying that the ultimate goal of the system is to mold us into efficient workers, as opposed to preparing us to think, or to be good citizens. And this utilitarian view matches how our current educational system operates, in which success hinges on a student’s ability to adhere to a narrow understanding of “successful” behaviors: getting good grades, performing well on standardized testing, behaving “appropriately” and deferentially toward teachers, establishing “normal” social bonds with peers, and being willing to participate in physical education.
And none of these “successful behaviors” actually reflects a student’s intelligence. I’m reminded often of what I was told while studying for the GRE, which holds true for so many types of standardized testing: It’s not a test of your intelligence, but a test of your ability to take this particular test. And what each particular test is testing for, over and over again throughout our childhoods, is our capacity to perform work in its rawest form: to be presented with a series of problems and a rigid set of constraints in which to solve them, and to accomplish the task uncritically, with as much speed and efficiency as possible. But the curious thing about these tests, at least in America, is that a student’s results can always—with the right amount of money, and connections—be supplemented.
Having talked to hundreds of millennials who experienced or rejected the pressure around college, I’ve found that there are three overarching categories of students: 1) those whose parents oriented their children’s lives entirely around college acceptance, like AP Frank’s; 2) those whose parents didn’t really have an understanding of the realities of the college application process, thus forcing the student to take the burden of self-development onto themselves; 3) those who found themselves somewhere between those two extremes, with their college desires and self-development supported by their parents, but not enforced, systematized, or militarized.
Again, a lot of the variance had to do with location, experience, and parental history with college and/or downward mobility. My parents graduated from a small Lutheran college in Minnesota, and there was never a question of whether or not my brother and I would go to college, but it was simply where we would attend—and what opportunities, most of them social and cultural, that college experience would offer us that our small-town Idaho upbringing had not. (My primary interest in college, if I’m being honest, was finding boys who would think that smart girls were hot.)
I had a similar experience, in many ways, to Daria, who grew up in a white middle-class home in Sonoma County, where she attended a magnet high school with an IB (international baccalaureate) program in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “I don’t remember not thinking about college,” she told me. “I got focused on the idea that I was going to be a professor in about eighth grade, and so I always imagined getting my PhD.”
Her parents were both first-generation college students who’d had little information or choice when it came to college. “They wanted my sister and me to go to the kinds of great schools they never knew existed,” Daria said. “My dad in particular was enamored with small liberal arts schools. A copy of Colleges That Change Lives showed up in our house very early in high school.”
To make that dream happen, her parents prioritized activities from a young age: She started taking ballet at five, for example, but they remained open to letting her “organically” find her passion, which turned out to be theater. They then focused on clearing the way for her to become the “very best”: Her high school career was filled with play practice in nearby towns, summer intensives, and participation in every theater camp available.
Daria was focused on school, but not overly stressed; she fondly remembers her and her boyfriend alternating between studying for their IB diplomas (a sort of finishing exam) with making out. She worked a part-time job and fulfilled her school’s volunteering component, but mostly focused on theater. She scored an 800 on her verbal SAT and in the low 600s on her math, which her parents hired a tutor to help raise. But apart from the SAT tutor, the building of human capital was not overt, or even conscious. “Never once do I remember them saying something out loud like ‘You should do this for your college applications.’”
Across the country, Elliott grew up working class in rural Pennsylvania, on the edge of Appalachia, and attended a high school that ranked in the bottom tenth percentile in the state. His mother had a master’s degree in nineteenth-century material culture, but worked as a substitute teacher; his father worked as the local sewage plant operator. College, to Elliott, was the “ticket out”—to “do something more freeing, to get paid to do those things you love.” And he started thinking about how to make it happen when he was very young.
Few people around him had gone to college, though, so his intel was poor. All he knew was that he needed to stick out from his peers. He enrolled in academic programs every summer, starting in seventh grade. He took the SATs for the first time the year after, through a program supported by the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. He filled his resume with extracurriculars he “didn’t really enjoy.” When he spent his summers at academic college programs, his friends resented him. He avoided any scenario that could get him into trouble, for fear that anything on his permanent record could prevent him from entrance into the very best college possible. Elliott’s mother helped with applications, but the impetus to develop his resume was all self-imposed.
The tendency toward self-imposed resume-building became widespread in the ’90s, when millennials first hit high school, but it intensified over the course of the 2000s. One reason: technology that facilitated visualizing (and tracking) that competition in unprecedented ways. Danielle, a Korean American from a suburban magnet school in Southern California, recalled constant, looming stress, exacerbated by “the advent of portals like ‘school loop,’ where we could log in and check our grades and see how they fluctuated as test/essay/assignment scores were uploaded by teachers.”
At the same time, websites like College Confidential, College-wise, College Prowler, as well as communities on LiveJournal and Tumblr, provided an online apparatus to compare, contrast, and obsessively check to see when others across the country received acceptances. On College Confidential, the most sprawling of the forums, “basically every anxiety you could imagine about any topic had a massive thread,” someone who went through the college application process in the mid-2000s told me. On Parchment, you could ask members to “chance” you—i.e., guess at how likely you were to be accepted to a given college—based on your resume, location, and test scores.
The overarching goal was to make yourself the most interesting, marketable version of yourself—even if just on paper. Conrad, who attended a Catholic high school in Texas in the mid-2000s, internalized the idea that in order to get into college he had to “emphasize a Hispanic identity that [he] didn’t really feel at all connected to,” and started joining clubs with impressive names his freshman year. Most didn’t even meet.
Gina, a Chinese American immigrant from outside of Detroit, recalls crying in the fourth grade after receiving a B+ in Science, because an older kid had told her that all letter grades were reviewed by Harvard admissions. In high school, she knew that her stellar grades wouldn’t be “that interesting of an angle” for an Asian applicant, and so she became desperate for a sport, any sport, to fill her resume, before eventually settling on synchronized swimming. It exhausted her so much that she developed trichotillomania, or chronic hair-pulling. She still has a small bald patch from that time.
Many people who talked to me about their high school college prep stress also reported physical and psychological ailments: forms of trichotillomania, insomnia, anxiety attacks—symptoms that for some, still linger today. So much of their worry stemmed from being put in a position with so few options: for most, it seemed like the only outcomes were total success or abject failure. One woman, diagnosed with the learning disability dyscalculia, felt enormous pressure to pursue college with the same tenacity as her peers. Every year during finals, she stressed herself out so severely that she skipped her period. Another woman, who started taking practice SATs in fifth grade, developed IBS and insomnia.
“When As are expected, there’s no way to exceed expectations,” Meghan, who grew up in the Portland suburbs, told me. “Physically, the pressure felt like a burning pain around my sternum. I once had a chest x-ray because of it. Now I know I have panic attacks, and I imagine that’s what it was . . . I threw up so much I inflamed the cartilage between my ribs.” It’s easy to see the message internalized during this process: The only route to success involves working to the point of—and then through—physical pain.
Some people reported yearning for even the possibility of opting out of college. “I found school exhausting,” Marie, who is white and attended a public high school for gifted students in Florida, told me. “But I never considered not going, because I knew it was unlikely I’d find financial security with just a high school education. It also would have just disappointed my family.” Instead, she spent her high school years on an “unbearably intensive” minimal-sleep schedule. “I learned how to sleep anywhere for any amount of time, including sitting up on sidewalks,” she said. “I maintain to this day that high school was the hardest thing I did in my life.”
David, a first-generation Chinese immigrant, graduated from an elite all-boys prep school in New York during the same period. The most important messages about college came from his mother, who wanted to him to go to Harvard, “which holds a singular status as a college for immigrant Chinese Americans,” and study medicine, a career she’d left behind when she came to America.
David recalls the importance of getting into the right schools, but it wasn’t until his sophomore year of high school that he became, in his words, “self-motivated.” While his high school was fancy, he had grown up in poverty, and quickly realized what would be necessary “in order to jump class strata.” He maxed out his academic schedule, with no free periods and avoided all social activity, save sporadic dating, which, because it did not explicitly contribute to resume-building, he did in secret. “All of my objectives were cast in terms of college,” he said.
Depending on the high school, there are as many stories of people who escaped or rejected this compunction—or just flamed out. But the overarching narrative, internalized amongst these middle-class and middle-class–aspirational teens, was the same: Optimize yourself into a college-application robot.
For many millennials, the college preparation process felt preprogrammed—but also severe, cold, and out of their control. If your friends are an impediment to success, you cut them off. If an activity can’t be spun into a line on a resume, it disappears. If a situation presents a potential “risk” to overall resume value—drinking, having too many sleepovers, reporting a teacher for inappropriate behavior, even having sex—it should be avoided at all costs.
“I remember my dad saying, regarding boys, ‘Pregnancy means PCC,’ e.g., Portland Community College,” Meghan, who grew up in a Portland suburb, told me. “I routinely blew off partying, social events, and guys in college, and I have a sneaking suspicion that my general incompetence in relationships has something to do with the absolute priority I gave school over developing social skills.”
It’s difficult to see those resume-building behaviors as destructive when they’re consistently validated. “My high school allowed you to skip lunch to squeeze in more classes,” Mary, who went to high school in a Chicago suburb, told me. “I still think about how fucked up it is that fourteen-year-old me ate baggies of Cracklin’ Oat Bran instead of meals for years.” At Antonia’s school in Washington, DC, students were allowed to apply to “only” nine schools; their parents were given a limit on how many times they could meet with counselors. “Years later, I asked my guidance counselor why my school had such strict rules about apps,” Antonia told me. “She laughed and just said ‘To stop your parents.’”
And then there’s the creeping disillusionment that none of it really mattered, not then, and not now. Peter, who grew in a white upper-middle-class suburb of Boise, Idaho, developed severe anxiety and depression from “forced perfectionism” in high school. His parents had little idea of the extent to which he’d tied his self-worth to his GPA. “Honestly, I think if I failed to keep my GPA over a 4.0, I might’ve killed myself,” he told me.
The effects of Peter’s perfectionism still linger, but so does another realization: “One common refrain I’ve heard from Gifted and Talented kids is how none of us really learned how to think,” he said. “We could just retain information so much easier, and most importantly, we had great reading comprehension, which is 90 percent of school assignments. Once I got to college, I realized how little I really know about studying and effectively learning and thinking rather than just reading and knowing.”
Others told me that because of their manic activity schedule and homework load, they never got to read the classic books assigned to them, or spend time with creative projects. “I was embarrassingly proud of reading the first and last fifty pages of A Tale of Two Cities and getting a 100 percent on the test just from context,” Tyler, who went to a magnet school in Louisville, Kentucky, explained. “Every once in a while, when something really connected, like when I fell in love with The Great Gatsby, I’d feel like I wasted my time by not skimming it and moving on to the next thing.”
And then there was the “resume padding,” as Tyler put it—which involved a lot of volunteering in the community. “We got so much credit from counselors for things like ‘Paint an old person’s house!’ or ‘Rake up leaves!’ when it was essentially me and my friends dicking off for a few hours on a Saturday morning,” Tyler explained. “I guess it just made me much more cynical once I realized that everyone, including adults, were pretty much bullshitting to make themselves look better. I didn’t really feel like I was making people’s lives better. I just felt like a teenager trying to pad his resume to get into college.”
If you need a good resume to get into college, and the resume is filled with accomplishments that are largely hollow—then what, ultimately, is college for? And why do so many people pretend that it’s about education when it’s actually about “jumping class strata,” as David, the Chinese American student from New York, put it, or maintaining your parents’ current class? So-called Tiger Moms have often been demonized in the press, framed as crass, domineering, and un-American for their single-mindedness in preparing their children for college. Yet “good” Americans—which is to say, upper-middle-class white Americans—do the same thing. They simply cloak conversations about college in the rhetoric of “happiness” and “fit” and “fulfilling one’s potential.” It’s less crass. But it’s still bullshit.
Ideas become commonly accepted for a reason—and in this case, higher education was framed as the “commonsense” solution to a much more complicated set of economic problems: automation, competition from Russia (and then Japan, and then China), and downward mobility and “the disappearance of the middle class,” which, as Ehrenreich reminds us, was mostly the disappearance of the blue-collar middle class.
It’s easy to see how college became the easy—if imprecise—solution to those massive, daunting, ever-compounding issues. There were and remain multiple flaws with this framework. First, there are still many high-paying jobs that don’t require a traditional four-year degree: HVAC installers, pipe fitters, electricians, and other construction trades, especially union ones, offer relatively stable middle-class standards of living. But many millennials have internalized the idea that any job that does not require college is somehow inferior—and ended up overeducated, paying off loans for credentials they didn’t necessarily need. I’ve heard this argument countered with the idea that there’s no such thing as “overeducation”: Everyone should be able to go to college. Take away the crippling student debt, and I’d agree. Of course a plumber should have the opportunity to get an English degree. But we should also be honest that if you want to be a licensed plumber, you don’t need to have an English degree, or a four-year degree in any form.
Oftentimes—especially in “college prep–oriented” high schools—that idea can feel like blasphemy. One woman told me that her husband, who attended a high school similar to the ones previously described, rejected the process altogether—and received tremendous pushback from his teachers and peers. “He nearly ended up in the military because of the lack of resources on how to pursue trade schools or apprenticeships,” she said. “He had to find his own way.”
The second problem is one of distinction. In the past, many “knowledge jobs” used a college degree as a filtering mechanism: If you have one, you can stay in the applicant pool; if not, you’re automatically excluded. But as a college education became more and more standardized through the ’80s and ’90s, employers needed new means of differentiation and distinction. In practice, this means even more reliance on the perceived prestige of a college—but also a newfound demand for graduate degrees. It’s a classic case of a time-worn phenomenon: Once an elite experience is opened to many, it’s no longer elite, and another cordoned area is created to redraw the lines of distinction.
While students internalized the idea that they must to go to college, they and their parents often had little idea of how to make it a reality. In The Ambitious Generation: America’s Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless, Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson examined longitudinal studies of students in high school in the mid and late ’90s, now known as old millennials. What they found was profound: By the end of the decade, more than 90 percent of high school seniors expected to attend college, and more than 70 percent expected to work in “professional” jobs: as doctors, lawyers, professors, business managers.
But many were confronted by what Schneider and Stevenson call “misaligned” ambitions: those with “limited knowledge about their chosen occupations, about educational requirements, or about future demand for these occupations.” About the fact, for example, that six times more students wanted to be doctors than the number of doctor positions projected to be open when they hit the job market.
All that young ambition comes from somewhere—and if it’s not from parents, or pop culture, or friends, it’s often from schools themselves. Liz, who graduated from high school in 2002, was part of a small Latinx population at her public school in Orange County, California. Her sister, who was two years older, had been accepted into a college-prep track, and Liz followed her. But her parents “did not believe in college as a reality,” Liz told me. “They never even finished high school in Mexico. It was this amorphous blob of an ambition, something to strive for without a map.”
Liz wanted to get out of California, preferably to NYU or somewhere “intellectually interesting,” and started building toward that goal during her freshman year in high school. “I made sure I was in clubs that emphasized how smart I was, and that would look good to colleges,” she said. She was stressed all the time, but not, as she recalls, from school so much as her home life, which was “awful and cagey.” There were activities that she wanted to participate in but avoided because they required parental participation. She wanted to be a part of the upper choir, but it would’ve cost five hundred dollars that her family couldn’t afford.
Her college-prep program required that she apply to a number of California schools, which she did, with waivers for the application fees because of her family’s income. She had to veer off her school’s set course, though, to do what felt right for her: Instead of attending any of the UCs or CSUs where she was accepted, she opted for community college, tuition-free, and transferred to UC Berkeley two years later.
For other students, the reality of the misalignment didn’t hit until they arrived at school. Ann, who is white, grew up on Long Island in a family where no one had gone to college or even really pushed her—save to use a different family member’s address to enroll her in the rich-kid college-prep public school. At that school, the percentage of students who went to college was extremely high—and there was pressure, Ann recalls, to keep that percentage up. When she told her guidance counselor that she couldn’t afford college, they countered that it was “what you did,” and she could take out loans. “I was told that if I went to college, I would get a big fancy job and a nice paycheck,” she said. “That appealed to me because of my parents, who are divorced and never had very steady employment.”
Ann was never at the very top of her class, but she made honor roll and took every available AP class. Her memories of high school are of crying all the time and being so stressed while taking tests that she would give up near the end. At the encouragement of her counselors, she applied to twelve different New York schools. She picked the one with the best aid package, even though she’d never been to the campus because her family couldn’t afford a college tour. Ann’s mom had always told her that they’d “make college work,” but she was so financially unstable that she couldn’t cosign her student loans. Instead, a woman Ann babysat for cosigned her loan application.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” Ann told me. “No one in my family did. High school, which had pushed us to go to college so hard, did no real prep whatsoever. I showed up at college, started classes, and was rushed to the ER my first week when I thought I was having a heart attack.” It was a panic attack—the first diagnosis of anxiety issues that have never gone away, especially after she graduated with $56,000 in loans “right before the economy went to shit.”
Today, Ann works at a nonprofit in New York, and is trying to throw as much money at her loans as possible. She’s never missed a payment, and has an 800 credit score—about as close to perfect as you can get. But when she thinks of burnout, she thinks about that student loan payment—over $500 a month, which means maybe they’ll be paid off by the time she’s forty-two—and how exhausted she is with paying for a mistake that was sold to her as a solution.
“I should’ve never gone to college,” Ann says, and I believe her. What she wanted was stability, and a life that was different than her parents. She got some of that. But she also got a life pocked with a different sort of fear and stress, made all the more potent by regret.
There are so many reasons for millennial burnout. But one of the hardest to acknowledge is the one that Ann faces down every day: that the thing you worked so hard for, the thing you sacrificed for and physically suffered for, isn’t happiness, or passion, or freedom. Maybe college provided choices, or got you out of your small town or a bad situation. But for the vast majority of millennials, getting a degree hasn’t yielded the middle-class stability that was promised to both us and our parents. It’s just the same thing it always was, even when it gets dressed up in the fancy robes of the education gospel: more work.