"Friends, grades, sleep" - You get only two

That was the statement by an undergraduate interviewed for an interesting article by Craig Lambert in the current issue of Harvard Magazine describing the frenetic life of superachieving students who pack their daily schedule with extracurricular activities.

Some parents have assumed new roles in their childrens' lives:

There was a time when children did their own homework. Now parents routinely “help” them with assignments, making teachers wonder whose work they are really grading... Having had their parents organize play and social activities, many young people now arrive at college expecting the institution to operate similarly, in loco parentis... “When they identify what they think is lacking, they say, ‘You haven’t organized other things for us’—things like ‘trips to bowling alleys"... The “helicopter parents” who hover over nearly every choice or action of their offspring have given way to “snowplow parents” who determinedly clear a path for their child and shove aside any obstacle they perceive in the way.

Students do not appear to resent the parental influence:

A survey carried out, in collaboration with Cornell and several other colleges, by associate professor of psychiatry Paul Barreira, director of behavioral health and academic counseling for the University Health Services, showed that one-third of undergraduates are in contact with their parents daily.

One reason for the change at Ivy League schools is a change in demographics:

New financial-aid initiatives have accelerated change in the last five or six years; consequently, for many students now, “This is their big chance,” Fitzsimmons says. “They have no safety net, no family money—or ‘social capital’—to fall back on.”

Harry Lewis explains: “People who come, on average, from more comfortable backgrounds are less worried about getting a job after college than those who are very strongly motivated to do better than their parents did. The second group are their parents’ best hope for moving the family up in the world...

And the students they are competing with come from different backgrounds:

“To get in, you’re competing with people all over the world,” he continues, “which makes it an incredibly selective process.”

Hard-working, enterprising international students may well be raising the benchmark on achievement for everyone, as well as enlarging students’ reference group to global scale. “The average American kid does very little homework,” explains Fitzsimmons. “You can find statistics that show high-school seniors averaging 45 minutes to an hour of homework per night. In many other countries, the norm is four, five, or six hours of homework each day.”

These are brief excerpts from an extensive six-page article. The content and conclusions may not apply to all colleges/universities, but I think the article offers worthwhile reading for those interested in education or those with children of college age.

Photo credit Stu Rosner.