By: Alexandra 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. You have to constantly be out on the town partying, and then you have to get straight As. And most of all, you have to appear to be happy.” – CJ, age seventeen
Purchase
High school isn’t what it used to be. With record numbers of students competing fiercely to get into college, schools are no longer primarily places of learning. They’re dog-eat-dog battlegrounds in which kids must set aside interests and passions in order to strategize over how to game the system. In this increasingly stressful environment, kids aren’t defined by their character or hunger for knowledge, but by often arbitrary scores and statistics.
In The Overachievers, journalist Alexandra Robbins delivers a poignant, funny, riveting narrative that explores how our high-stakes educational culture has spiraled out of control. During the year of her ten-year reunion, Robbins returns to her high school, where she follows students including CJ and others:
· Julie, a track and academic star who is terrified she's making the wrong choices
· “AP” Frank, who grapples with horrifying parental pressure to succeed
· Taylor, a soccer and lacrosse captain whose ambition threatens her popular girl status
· Sam, who worries his years of overachieving will be wasted if he doesn’t attend a name-brand college
· Audrey, who struggles with perfectionism, and
· The Stealth Overachiever, a mystery junior who flies under the radar.
Robbins tackles hard-hitting issues such as the student and teacher cheating epidemic, over-testing, sports rage, the black market for study drugs, and a college admissions process so cutthroat that some students are driven to depression and suicide because of a B. Even the earliest years of schooling have become insanely competitive, as Robbins learned when she gained unprecedented access into the inner workings of a prestigious Manhattan kindergarten admissions office.
A compelling mix of fast-paced storytelling and engrossing investigative journalism, The Overachievers aims both to calm the admissions frenzy and to expose its escalating dangers.
From The Critics
New York Times
"I couldn't get enough of it . . . It reads like very good . . . fiction, thanks to its winning cast, surprising plot twists and pushy parents."
Publishers Weekly
In this engrossing anthropological study of the cult of overachieving that is prevalent in many middle- and upper-class schools, Robbins (Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities) follows the lives of students from a Bethesda, Md., high school as they navigate the SAT and college application process. These students are obsessed with success, contending with illness, physical deterioration (senior Julie is losing hair over the pressure to get into Stanford), cheating (students sell a physics project to one another), obsessed parents ( Frank's mother manages his time to the point of abuse) and emotional breakdowns. What matters to them is that all-important acceptance to the right name-brand school. "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." The portraits of the teens are compelling and make for an easy read. Robbins provides a series of critiques of the system, including college rankings, parental pressure, the meaninglessness of standardized testing and the push for A.P. classes. She ends with a call to action, giving suggestions on how to alleviate teens' stress and panic at how far behind they feel. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
In today's competitive world, high school students face extreme pressure to get into the most prestigious colleges. In this follow-up to her best-selling Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, Robbins shadows real students from a top Maryland high school for more than a year, focusing on a few juniors, seniors, and a Harvard freshman as they deal with heavy course loads, extracurricular activities, and social lives on- and offline. For example, there's "Julie," a straight-A student and triathlete whose hair is falling out from stress. Interspersed with the compelling, novel-like narratives of each teen's hectic life are revealing looks into the issues these students face. Robbins offers information about academic cheating, drug use, demanding parents, preschool competition, private college counselors, and college admissions offices; she quotes research about the uselessness of SAT scores to identify good students and exposes other myths of the college application process before concluding with suggestions for schools, colleges, parents, and students on how to deal with "overachieverism." Highly recommended for all libraries.-Janet Clapp, Athens-Clarke Cty. Lib., Athens, GA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An overwritten account of the overachiever culture that is stressing out teenagers. Robbins, an investigative journalist who has previously explored the secrets of Yale's Skull and Bones society (Secrets of the Tomb, 2002) and those of college sororities (Pledged, 2004), returns after ten years to her old high school, Walt Whitman, in Bethesda, Md., to see how today's students are coping with the pressures of competition. Over the course of roughly one school year, she followed nine students, who are given pseudonyms and descriptive labels indicating how they are perceived by their classmates: super star, teacher's pet, slacker, etc. Most are seniors working extremely hard to get accepted into a prestigious college or university; one is a Harvard freshman struggling to find his way in that setting. Sandwiched between these repetitive and minutely detailed profiles are some informative, short pieces on the deleterious impact of No Child Left Behind, issues with SAT testing, the problematic ranking of colleges and universities by U.S. News & World Report, the obsession with Ivy League and other top-ranked schools, the hypercompetiveness of parents, the questionable role of private college consultants, the effects of adolescent sleep deprivation, the rise in teenage suicides and the pressures on teachers to inflate grades. The author's interviews with college admissions officers may assuage some parents' anxiety that their kids' getting into the right nursery school is the necessary first step toward a prestigious college that will launch their offspring on a financially successful career. Her report on the process by which children applying to kindergarten at Trinity School in New York areevaluated captures that phenomenon well. Robbins winds up with a list of actions that high schools, colleges, college counselors, parents and students can take to change the culture of overachievement, which she sees as pervading our educational system. Some worthwhile research here, buried under an off-putting amount of teenage trivia.
"In this engrossing anthropological study of the cult of overachieving that is prevalent in many middle- and upper-class schools, Robbins (Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities) follows the lives of students from a Bethesda, Md., high school as they navigate the SAT and college application process.
These students are obsessed with success, contending with illness, physical deterioration (senior Julie is losing hair over the pressure to get into Stanford), cheating (students sell a physics project to one another), obsessed parents ( Frank's mother manages his time to the point of abuse) and emotional breakdowns. What matters to them is that all-important acceptance to the right name-brand school. '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.' The portraits of the teens are compelling and make for an easy read. Robbins provides a series of critiques of the system, including college rankings, parental pressure, the meaninglessness of standardized testing and the push for A.P. classes. She ends with a call to action, giving suggestions on how to alleviate teens' stress and panic at how far behind they feel."
The bestselling author of "Pledged" returns with a groundbreaking look at thepressure to achieve faced by America's teens.
