<p>I can only give you my opinion on this. My son just started Yale a week ago as a freshman. Finished HS with 11 AP classes and scored 5 on all of them! Was a swimmer for 8 years practicing over 3 hrs a day yr around and had the most dynamic social life you can imagine, that plus over 250 hrs of community hrs! He managed his life well beyond my years!</p>
<p>“I’m sure it’s far better to be depressed with an Ivy League diploma on the wall than it is to be depressed dropping baskets of fries or asking customers if they want paper or plastic bags. Sounds like these kids would be depressed and miserable no matter where they ended up. I think this generation looks for things to be down about. Something that the older generations didn’t succumb to.”</p>
<p>Oh please. Depression is nothing new; I hate when people think this generation is “worse.”
And being clinically depressed sucks, no matter what the diploma on the wall. </p>
<p>"think public HS tend to push students more into stress than private boarding schools. Only public HS students have 8-16 APs classes. Private HS have very few APs classes. "</p>
<p>I find this an odd generalization. First off, only about 40% or so of public schools offer ANY AP classes; no, Virginia, not every hs is upper middle class CC land. Some private hs offer tons of AP classes. Sounds like you’re looking at a handful of schools in your neck of the woods and projecting that they represent all publics and all privates. </p>
<p>And to think, all the college shootings (so far) have taken place NOT at Ivy League schools…</p>
<p>Those depressive are sure controlling themselves well. The school I went to had an annual weeklong party in the spring, and if we were all depressed, well, it’s amazing how we could go crazy.</p>
<p>I believe that the ones who get truly depressed either already have some kind of issue internally, or put upon them by parents who thought that their little Johnny or Janey was “perfect” and so pushed them to apply to top schools but didn’t get into any.</p>
<p>Even though both parents went to an Ivy, my son has options open to him including working directly after high school (there are some decent paying jobs out there for those with a HS education but they are niche), going for a post-graduate year, going to a CC for two years that has a transfer agreement with a top public or Ivy, going to a non-Ivy, or going to an Ivy. He needs to figure out what he wants to do in the short-term and not feel pushed into an option.</p>
<p>And to paraphrase what someone else said - better to be depressed with money than depressed without it.</p>
<p>I find that is very dismissive to people’s real emotional pain. </p>
<p>Yes, cobrat, tell us more about your hs. We are dying to know all about it. (Is there ONE thread in which you can manage not to bring it up?) </p>
<p>Depression is a real catch all term - it can be organic (clinical) or based on circumstance…or (more likely) a combination of both. Where someone attended college is hugely irrelevant! And frankly, common sense dictates that the better your circumstances, the less likely you are to be depressed.</p>
<p>I, for one, wish you would just call it Stuyvesant already.</p>
<p>The original topic of this thread does not deserve comment. The idea that all kids who achieve academically and have a full life with varied ECs are running on a hamster wheel is simply ridiculous. This doesn’t describe ANY of the recent Ivy grads I know, and have known several of them well since age 5 at least.</p>
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<p>Exactly. For the record, my father, who was a Yale grad, could not only talk to the plumber, but DO the damn plumbing if necessary. And the carpentry. And the design.</p>
<p>I hate myself for perpetuating this thread by posting on it.</p>
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<p>Also, the campus experience varies greatly depending on the Ivy concerned. Larger U experiences from schools like UPenn, Cornell, and Columbia* vs smaller LAC-like experiences from schools like Dartmouth, Princeton, or Yale? </p>
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<li>Yes, I know the undergrad colleges are small. However, the campus feel is still that of a large U campus.<br></li>
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<p>Am being somewhat more broad about it as I know most teachers at other public magnets like BxScience had similar inflexible stances regarding assignment deadlines when I attended. </p>
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<p>Aw, c’mon! Admit it…it’s fun. 
:D</p>
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<p>LOL!!! I wish it were this easy!!</p>
<p>The article isn’t about depression which is real and serious. It’s about the author’s lame position that the kids who get into Ivy league schools have apparently all sold their souls and become drones in order to get into these schools and they’re all on the road to suburban upper class misery. Surely, some have, but many others haven’t. This guy, Deresiwicz, would be out of circulation if it weren’t for all of us on CC and those at the NYT fanning his flames. Ivy league schools: good, but not the end all and be all of education. Next!</p>
<p>Agree with @cobrat and @Pizzagirl that it really depends on the public and it really depends on the private. There’s a surprising amount of variation of culture/ethos even among schools in the same category (magnets, boarding schools, whatever).</p>
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At elite boarding schools, the honors classes far exceed the AP curriculum, so these schools don’t bother w AP classes. </p>
<p>And u don’t even begin to know stress at a conventional public high school if you’re not competing against 3 dozen other National Merit finalists, a doz Siemens semifinalists, offspring of heads of state/US governors/Senators, Kennedy legacies, and deep-pocketed development cases in your graduating class.</p>
<p>Life’s not a contest, and clinical depression doesn’t occur only among those who are intense academic competitors. </p>
<p>Would you say it could be more likely to occur among those who are intense academic competitors? I think statistics should be taught before anything else. We can’t ever have an intelligent general discussion before anyone going off to claim, “That’s false! My kid didn’t do it like that. Discussion over” It baffles me that parents who have such smart kids make so nonsensible remarks. If you have 70 red marbles, 20 blue marbles, 5 white, 3 balck, 2 green, it is not wrong to call it mostly red. </p>
<p>Because of course people in prison or mom’s who work in Walmart while trying to raise two kids on her own or military personnel returning from Iraq don’t suffer from depression (at levels statistically higher than the general population). And mental health issues tend to spike for the 18-24 cohort regardless of whether they are in community college, flipping burgers, or attending Princeton.</p>
<p>Why do people post these articles?</p>
<p>Clearly, right or wrong, we perceive the academic competition heated up recently. People look into the cause and possible consequences of it if the perception holds true. A careful study may conclude it otherwise but the perception is there. There are more learning centers, more kids are spending their summers in acdemic activities, you hear more about tutoring, and tutoring starts earlier and earlier. Aren’t you curious to see what it all means? I am. </p>
<p>The depression in the title doesn’t refer to depression among 18-24. It is more about depression later in life, after they “succeed” in life.</p>
<p>“Would you say it could be more likely to occur among those who are intense academic competitors?”</p>
<p>Nope. The evidence suggests that these folks are more likely to be/stay in the upper middle class, which has fewer problems with mental illness than other classes. There are all kinds of protective factors that mitigate against frequency and severity of depression. Access to good care, stable marriages and social networks, and some sense of power and control over your life are three big ones. Being in the upper middle class is strongly associated with all three.</p>
<p>I should have added the depression the article is referring to is not clinical depression. I’d say it is more broad, as in lack of sense of satisfaction after achieving. </p>
<p>Hanna, for your argument to be valid, we first need to know who make up the upper middle class. I thought the vast majority of the upper middle class came from flag ship state universities. There aren’t that many Ivy graduates to make the majority of the upper middle class. Since the upper middle class is happy, Ivy grads must be happy? Interesting logic.</p>
<p>“Would you say it could be more likely to occur among those who are intense academic competitors?”</p>
<p>It depends, doesn’t it? I mean, look at all the unfortunate kids on CC who post that their parents make them feel like abject failures if they don’t get into an Ivy League school, because how will they ever hold their head up to the folks in the old country, and they browbeat their children. That’s the kind of depression where you might never have had a depressed kid <em>but</em> for those pathetic, ignorant parents. “Caused” by the parents, so to speak.</p>
<p>However, there’s other kinds of depression which have nothing to do with being “caused” or “exacerbated” by parents’ actions. </p>
<p>I’ve been clinically depressed twice in my life (once requiring hospitalization). I was a high academic achiever. However, I wasn’t pushed to do so by my parents, in the least - they were proud and supportive and encouraged me not to take academics so seriously. For me, my academic gold stars were <em>ways</em> that I dealt with sad feelings, not the <em>cause</em> of those feelings. In other words, it wasn’t that I had parents who said, “If you don’t get straight A’s / get into an elite school / blah blah blah, you’re a failure and we’re ashamed of you.” I put that pressure on myself. But I’m still happy that I valued academics highly and the answer wouldn’t have been to have not gone to an elite school. I’d have been plenty depressed if you’d stuck me at my state’s average state flagship, so then what? </p>