Picture a typical, hard-working student. Each day she recieves multiple

assignments to complete for homework. She is involved in several

extracurricular activities so she doesn’t have much extra time. After sports

practice, she struggles home, ladden with books, to begin studying. On a

typical evening she has to work diligently for a couple of hours to complete

her homework for school the next day. She has a rigorous schedule that

includes honors and advanced placement classes so some nights she is

forced to stay up very late to keep up with her classes. Other nights she has

an extra packet of work to complete for her SAT Prep course. All this work

puts a lot of pressure on her. This may not seem like anything out of the

ordinary and for many students it’s not. The push to be overachievers and

get into the top colleges has caused many high school students to take on

heavier workloads and more challenging classes. This push to achieve,

however, doesn’t end once students reach college. In fact, once they reach

the top schools they worked so hard to get into, many students are forced to

work even harder than they did in high school and instead of the push to get

into the top college, it becomes the push to get into the top graduate school.

Graduate students at the country’s top schools, in turn, find that they must

continue to overextend themselves in order to secure the top jobs in their

particular field. As you can see, there is something wrong. America’s

educational system is seriously flawed because it puts too much emphasis

on measuring achievement and not enough on true learning.

The problem starts as early as middle school and perhaps even before.

Students are weighed down with lengthy homework assignments, which

may involve hours of thewir time each night. In fact, U.S. students now

have more homework than ever before and it starts atan ealrier age.

Specialists, teachers, and parents alike tend to agree that homework is a very

important tool. They say that the amount of homewrok students do as

middle and high schoolers leads directly to their success rate in the future.

Many studies have been done to prove the positive effects of homework.

Some show that students who do more work score better on standardized

tests. Homework these days has come to be a measurement, a way in which

parents and techers can judge how good an education their students are

getting. The standard rule is the more homewrok the better the value of

education. After all, parents and teachers alike want to see their students do

well and that means scoring highly on standardized tests and getting into the

best colleges. This is the way our society measures the success of its

students and everyone wants to be successful so the push lately has been to

encourage students to take on more challenging classes and this provides

them with more homework.

In a recent TIME magazine article,

During the past four decades, the suicide rate for teenagers and young

adults has more than tripled. Suicide has become the second leading cause

of death among college students. It is hard to investigate the actual causes of

college suicides because while the statistics are rising and a few shocking

stories have caught our attention, the number of deaths at any given school

is very small and thus in-depth inquiries are very seldom done, but there are

several factors which can increase the risk of suicide substantially. Foreign

students are more prone to suicide than natives because many they become

isolated. They often can’t find any familiar cultural or family ties in their

new environment and thus concentrate solely on their work. Those with

suicidal tendencies may be more difficult to recognize in a college setting

because instead of being impulsive and out of control, college students who

are suicidal tend to be withdrawn, quiet, and to draw little attention to

themselves. Those students who move beyond depression to suicide, may

fantasize of a better world waiting for them. They are often very resistant to

seeking help because they see it as a weakness(Lipschitz).

The academic stress faced by college students these days is perhaps

higher than ever before. They are faced with a new situation when they

reach college and must then struggle to keep up with their new environment.

Many college students begin to feel worthless. They measure themselves

only by academic or athletic success. This can distort their perception of

reality and cause them to blow things out of proportion. The change in

attitude may not even be noticeable to close firends because students who

begin to feel overwhelmed and hopeless tend to hide their feelings by

immersing themselves in work. As stated early they will usually not seek the

help of for example, a guidance counselor, because they do not want to

seem weak. This feeling of hopelessness can become a big problem in

situations where students are expected to perform at a very high calibar for a

long period of time.

Jason Altom, considered an extremely gifted graduate

student at Harvard University, killed himself last August. He drank a liquid

laced with cyanide, that he obtained from the chemistry lab, in which he was

doing his doctorate work. He was possibly the brightest student in the

chemistry program, he had been accepted into the most exclusive lab group,

and his doctorate project was harder than anything the other students had

choosen, so it was a shock to learn of his death. The news of his death, and

the content of the three suicide notes he left, one to his parents, on to the

Chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, and one to his student advisor,

spread quickly. His advisor just happened to be world famous, Nobel

laureate, Elias J. Corey. Corey was notorious for being one of the most strict

professors in the department and he certainly had high expectations. The

note Altom had left for his parents was eventually shared with a Harvard

newspaper. It shocked his friends and fellow classmates by saying that his

death could have been avoided. Altom’s note stated that his student advisor,

Corey, had had too much control over his future. He wanted Harvard to set

up a new system which would distribute the power to other key people and

he wqanted a committee set up to monitor the quality of life for graduate

students. At Harvard, the student advisor watches over the student as the

student does his doctorate work. In the end, it is almost solely the advisor

who decides whether or not a student gets a diploma. Another power student

advisors have is recommendation. Without a letter of recommendation from

from someone many students find it harder to get jobs once they have

graduated. Since their student advisor is the only person who regularly

monitors their work, the student advisor is usually the only one qualified to

write a letter of recommendation. In this system it is easy to see how a

student could feel over whelmed by the power his student advisor had over

him and dismayed if he percieved some ill will between the two. Altom had

been having trouble in the final stages of his doctoral work. He had choosen

an especially challenging project for himself. He had to sythesize to

different molecules and then bond them together. He had completed in

sythesizing both molecules, but could not successfully bond them together.

Aparently, Altom felt that Corey was unhappy with his progress. He had

shared his concerns with some firends, but no one knew the magnitude of

his anxiety. Obviously, none of them ever thought he would go to the

extent he did and many wonder if this incident should be a warning to us.

Harvard and other top schools, where the pressure is intense, have begun to

implement changes to counteract several recent deaths, similar to Jason

Altom’s. The stress he felt, as one of the brightest students, at arguably the

best school in the country, should give some insight into what other

students, who perhaps have a harder time keeping up,

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