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Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - Printable Version

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Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - stupac2 - 05-16-2015

I think this counts as being Stanford-related: https://medium.com/@sanfranmag/why-are-palo-alto-s-kids-killing-themselves-9d8643925236

What do you make of this quote from the article? - Mick - 05-16-2015

"The third Gunn suicide in less than four months pushed the community into panic. Trying to curb the hysteria, perhaps at the request of the district, Lee’s family released a statement claiming that school stress was not a factor in the teenager’s death. 'Our son struggled with depression,' it read, 'and he made it clear that the cause was not due to academic pressure at Gunn.'”

Some facts about suicide - Mick - 05-16-2015

1)  The age group with the most suicides are 46-64 year olds, about 19.2 per 100,000 population per year. 
2)  Second highest rate at 18.6 per 100,000 per year are those people over 85. 
3)  15-24 year olds have the lowest rate at 10.9 suicides per 100,000 per year. 
4)  The suicide rate for males is about 4x higher than that of women across the board (77.9% of all suicides are male). 
5)  White males accounted for 70.7% of all suicides in 2013. 
6)  In 2013, there were 41,149 suicides in America.
7)  There were 494,000 people admitted to hospitals for "self inflicted harm," about 12 for every suicide.
8)  Baby boomers have had higher suicide rates across their life span than other generations.
9)  Middle-aged white males and females have had the most rapidly rising suicide rates.

Gunn has 1900 students.  Four suicides in a year is one for every 475 students, a rate that is almost 2,000x the national age group average.  Just by reading the article, you can tell that it is a toxic environment.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - oldalum - 05-16-2015

Good article that touches on many of the issues. The psychiatrist who performed the never-published "psychiatric autopsy" on the 2009 cluster told me that academic stress, while certainly a contributing factor, was not the primary driver or not a major factor. The teens had major depressive illness, undiagnosed but evident in retrospect from signs, conversations with friends, Facebook posts, etc., and they lived in a town where there is a highly effective and available means of suicide (the majority of suicide attemps fail, but tall buildings, trains and guns are very effective). The focus after 2009 was on training students, parents, and others to recognize those signs of depression in others for what they are and get professional help for the students, which seemed to work until this year.

Although academic/getting into college pressure is involved in varying degrees in each suicide, I think the high stress/high pressure environment in top high schools today is an important problem that is worth trying to fix even apart from the extreme of suicide. The colleges do have some responsibility for this. Just as standardized testing incentivizes teaching to the test, what colleges show by their actions works in college admissions incentivizes doing what works in getting into college. If all selective colleges would announce they will consider a maximum of 3 AP classes, and have an administrative assistant randomly scrub the AP designation from all but 3 AP classes on every transcript, students would take more than 3 AP classes only because they truly want to. What is the point of taking numerous college classes in high school, anyway--isn't that what college is for? Seems to me there are many more non-academic things kids should be spending their time doing during their high school years.






Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - Roberton3 - 05-20-2015

(05-16-2015, 09:48 AM)oldalum link Wrote:Although academic/getting into college pressure is involved in varying degrees in each suicide, I think the high stress/high pressure environment in top high schools today is an important problem that is worth trying to fix even apart from the extreme of suicide. The colleges do have some responsibility for this. Just as standardized testing incentivizes teaching to the test, what colleges show by their actions works in college admissions incentivizes doing what works in getting into college. If all selective colleges would announce they will consider a maximum of 3 AP classes, and have an administrative assistant randomly scrub the AP designation from all but 3 AP classes on every transcript, students would take more than 3 AP classes only because they truly want to. What is the point of taking numerous college classes in high school, anyway--isn't that what college is for? Seems to me there are many more non-academic things kids should be spending their time doing during their high school years.

That doesn't really help.  If they stopped considering more than 3 AP classes, they'd have to use some other metric to differentiate between applicants, and then students would feel pressure to improve on that metric.

The fundamental problem is that there are vastly more kids who are qualified to attend top colleges than there are student slots in those colleges.  There are really only two things that would reduce pressure on kids: either get them to be more comfortable with the idea that they might not get into a top college (which seems difficult), or increase the size of those top colleges.  I've heard Stanford is planning to expand its undergrad numbers substantially, which is great (assuming they can do it without compromising quality, which I think they can), and I hope other elite schools will do the same.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - CTcard - 05-21-2015

(05-20-2015, 01:24 PM)Roberton3 link Wrote:The fundamental problem is that there are vastly more kids who are qualified to attend top colleges than there are student slots in those colleges.  There are really only two things that would reduce pressure on kids: either get them to be more comfortable with the idea that they might not get into a top college (which seems difficult), or increase the size of those top colleges.  I've heard Stanford is planning to expand its undergrad numbers substantially, which is great (assuming they can do it without compromising quality, which I think they can), and I hope other elite schools will do the same.

Well, Stanford is accepting around 5% of its applicants. To get to the point where every "qualified" applicant gets in, it would have to expand ... a lot.

But, that also misses the point. The elite colleges are desired precisely because they are elite and reject most applicants. If the elite colleges suddenly had twice as many spots, public perception would shift so that only about half of them would be considered elite.


... and whether Stanford can expand substantially without affecting quality depends upon what you consider the quality of Stanford. I would consider one of it's important qualities is not being too big - and all that means for interactions between and amongst students, professors, and everyone else. Getting substantially bigger will affect that quality.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - fullmetal - 05-21-2015

(05-21-2015, 06:43 AM)CTcard link Wrote:Well, Stanford is accepting around 5% of its applicants. To get to the point where every "qualified" applicant gets in, it would have to expand ... a lot.

I think the quoted figure was that there are ~4 qualified applicants for every accepted applicant.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - oldalum - 05-21-2015

(05-20-2015, 01:24 PM)Roberton3 link Wrote:That doesn't really help.  If they stopped considering more than 3 AP classes, they'd have to use some other metric to differentiate between applicants, and then students would feel pressure to improve on that metric.


It would shift the pressure from taking double-digit AP classes, which I view as harmful, to something else that might be better.
Yale is expanding its undergraduate slots, but the worry is that it will affect the nature of the undergraduate experience.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - oldalum - 05-21-2015

thanks for linking the article. It raises the conundrum well: a global competition is developing for success in various forms, and to what extent does one encourage/help one's children prepare for that competition? It is bad to try to overreach one's abilities, which I think accounts for much stress and problems that many kids go through. But there is really smart, tough, hardworking competition out there, and do our kids want to try to compete with it? What is happiness, and success, for them?



Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - Farm93 - 05-22-2015

The article was really depressing on a lot of levels.


I sometimes wonder if the SF Bay Area's rather limited set of college experiences only intensifies that quest for Stanford or UCB or bust.  There are just not that many schools, especially smaller private schools, in the Bay Area in that slightly less selective national second tier.


In my day, living on the East Coast, the HS students all knew that there were plenty of pretty good schools that would enable you to have a career, start a business, go to law school or med school.  The families knew those options and students visited multiple schools over their time in HS.  Many of those schools accepted students with 1100 SAT & 3.0 GPA students.  Life could continue without Harvard or Princeton.  The number of college choices also allowed future graduates to craft credible "Why did you decide to attend X?" answers.  Many wanted the best, but the rest were OK too.


I am not so sure that set of options is as evident to families in Palo Alto or Cupertino schools.  Stanford or bust or Stanford/UCB/UCLA or bust would just create a world of stress.  Kind of sad.  There are lots of paths to happiness and most of them do not include 1500 SATs, 4.0 GPAs and admission to Stanford University.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - 81alum - 05-22-2015

My daughter is a student at Gunn and knew one of the young men. 

Not that it matters, but there have been 3, not 4 suicides at Gunn this year.  The fourth suicide was at Paly.  What adds to our concern is that this is the second suicide cluster in recent memory.  In 2009 there was a similar cluster with identical headlines.  Many of the students and parents at Gunn today had siblings or older children who were traumatized by the 2009 incidents--or at least we all experienced the town's angst over this once before.

The new information from this particular article that I did not know includes the fact that there were 50 Gunn kids in counseling for serious suicide ideation.  I'm not sure how the author even found that out--that seems to be privileged information.  Also unknown to me before reading this article was that one of the young men who died was traumatized by a previous suicide--the cluster effect was quite real.  I am not very happy that the names of all four victims were published.  The local media has mostly been avoiding doing that unless the family makes a public statement, although identities do become known.

A great deal of argument has raged over whether academic stress was or was not related to the particular suicides involved.  I think that is not a terribly productive debate.  This article does a better job of showing the very serious problems in the overall atmosphere of an elite college-prep school.  In my mind the atmosphere has been terribly distorted not by the school so much as from two other factors. 

1) The parents.  The parents of children at Gunn are almost all very high achieving individuals who bring enormous pressure on their kids without even trying.  We live in a society where children are expected to exceed the accomplishments of their parents--or at least to do as well.  That is simply an unreasonable, intolerable expectation in a place where virtually all the parents are among the highest achievers in America.  It reminds me very much of my freshman year at Stanford when I suddenly became average.  My attendance at a parent meeting about college admissions was revealing--the overflowing crowd and the barrage of questions about "how high an SAT does my child need for Harvard" etc.  When the CSU was discussed the parents looked at the floor and shuffled their feet, and not a single question came up.  When they got to the Ivies it was like a trading pit.

2) College admissions.  College admissions--especially to Stanford--is wreaking a horrible toll on these young people.  In 1977 I applied and was accepted to Stanford without a single AP course and coming from a rotten school without a strong college preparatory curriculum.  In the last month my daughter has taken the SAT, three AP exams, and is about to complete 2 subject tests--in between all of her normal finals, projects, and the normal avalanche of end-of-the-semester extra curriculars.  She has friends who took half a dozen AP classes.  These kids work much, much harder than my college students and most of them lack the maturity to handle it.  When your friends seems to be doing more to pad their resume than you are, even a reasonable kid begins to feel the gnaw of self-doubt.  What the students said in the article about the competition for college admissions is absolutely true--it has become the all-defining prize at the end of the high school experience. 

I wish that the elite privates and publics would reform their admissions process.  1) Follow Duke's example and refuse to consider more than 3 AP classes from a given student.  In addition,  2) refuse to consider more than 2-3 extracurricular activities from any given student.  3) Consider either GPA or SAT scores but not both--give students a chance to show their merits in alternative ways but do not make them think their chances of admission become 0 if they get a B.  My daughter got a 2300 and told me "that is the lowest score I would accept without retaking the exam."  Good grief.  The perfectionism is rampant.

I am sorry to say that Stanford's admissions process has become one of the worst drivers of this kind of behavior at Gunn--to the point where Gunn counselors beg students not to apply to Stanford.  Last year 17 Gunn students were admitted to Stanford, and we were told 16 of them were the children of Stanford faculty.  I do not know how many were denied, but a great many outstanding Gunn students were among them.  Nearly everyone in my daughter's circle began their high school years in awe of Stanford and thinking that if they did well academically they could go there, the way (many of their) parents did.  Wrong. 

Here is the speech that I think says it all, from the Gunn valedictorian in 2012, a wonderful, outstanding girl who almost did not make it.  Almost no one in the audience knew what she was going to say.  It still brings tears to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63AJioJkQ-k&feature=youtu.be

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - stupac2 - 05-22-2015

I wonder if it would be better if the big schools just came out and said "We know that there are too many qualified applicants to choose between, so we're simply going to draw a line of achievement and then do a lottery for everyone past that line." That's functionally what they're doing now anyway, once you get beyond the Olympians or charity-founders or other truly ridiculous high-achievers. I have very little doubt that I mostly got in through sheer luck, I wasn't that different from anyone else.

Although I have to say, one thing I find weird about the AP thing is the idea that taking lots of APs is inherently hard. I took at least 4 my senior year and didn't struggle at all (5's on everything but Spanish and I think mostly A's). I'm not particularly smart (at least in terms of Stanford-hopefuls, I think I'm decidedly middle-of-the-pack), so that makes me seriously inclined to think that it really is the schools piling on with homework or other work that's not particularly necessary. I just find it really hard to square my experience with these descriptions.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - washingtonismoney - 05-22-2015

I took four and did terribly on my APs...but mostly because Stanford wouldn't accept any of them. I, infected by senioritis, simply did not care. (at least, that's what I like to tell myself.)

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - 81alum - 05-22-2015

It is not the exams so much as the rigor of the courses.  They are supposed to be the equivalent of a college course, and the high school teachers who teach them take that distinction very seriously.  Too seriously, in fact.  I have talked to other college faculty who agree with me that the amount of work their own kids did for an AP course at Gunn was significantly greater than the amount of work their college freshmen did in the equivalent course where they were teaching.  What my daughter did for APUSH at Gunn is vastly more extensive than what SJSU freshmen do for their US History requirement.

Basically, if someone is taking 5 AP courses they are starting college early.  College taught by high school teachers.

Gunn has implemented an AP waiver form--students must do a time-planner and have their parents sign a waiver form to be allowed to enroll in more than 2 AP courses.  But nothing would work quite as well as if Stanford just came out and said "we won't consider more than 3 AP classes in our admissions decision." 

All this aside, the real problem is far deeper than AP classes.  It is a distortion of values, whereby success is measured like big-game trophy hunting.  Who gets in to the best university?  The value of an education and the joyful process of obtaining it get completely lost.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - yvonne - 05-22-2015

Thanks for posting that, 81alum. A lot of that rings true, and helps me make sense of a family friend's son's suicide. He was the son of an executive at one of Silicon Valley's pillars. A year after he took his life, his sister's boyfriend took his – right in front of the sister. So, yes, the cluster effect is real. The former took the Golden Gate bridge route, and his body was never recovered. His friend used a different method, so the families placed the former's memory marker near the latter's grave. At the time, we were stunned about my friend's son's death because from our eyes, he had everything.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - fullmetal - 05-22-2015

I agree, stupac2, the AP courses weren't all that hard.  The amount of homework assigned for them might be increasing though.  And heaven forbid that you live in the northeast and lose several days worth of school, ruining your AP test preparation...that was one of the first remarks from my calculus BC teacher that opened my eyes to the unfairness of a national test policy.  AP test dates don't move for anyone, so if you lose a week of school due to snow, you've just lost a week of material and preparation.

I think it's more the peer group than the parental pressure.  My parents were as tough on me as any tiger parent, but I didn't feel like I had to "eat or be eaten" amongst my friends.  Perhaps a spirit of cooperation rather than competition would help.  Much easier said than done.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - Nan3cy - 05-22-2015

Farm93, I think you're absolutely right that kids around the Bay Area tend to think that the "good college" world begins and ends with Stanford and UCB. I was so concerned about that that I took my son on his first trip to see colleges the month after he graduated from 8th grade. We didn't see anyplace that turned out to have the slightest interest for him, but he realized that there were lots and lots of places on the East Coast that might be just right. And indeed he wound up on the East Coast. (The risk I took, which came true, is that he'd wind up staying there... But at least he's in a nice place to visit.)

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - Mick - 05-22-2015

(05-22-2015, 10:23 AM)81alum link Wrote:It is not the exams so much as the rigor of the courses.  They are supposed to be the equivalent of a college course, and the high school teachers who teach them take that distinction very seriously.  Too seriously, in fact.  I have talked to other college faculty who agree with me that the amount of work their own kids did for an AP course at Gunn was significantly greater than the amount of work their college freshmen did in the equivalent course where they were teaching.  What my daughter did for APUSH at Gunn is vastly more extensive than what SJSU freshmen do for their US History requirement.

Basically, if someone is taking 5 AP courses they are starting college early.  College taught by high school teachers.

Gunn has implemented an AP waiver form--students must do a time-planner and have their parents sign a waiver form to be allowed to enroll in more than 2 AP courses.  But nothing would work quite as well as if Stanford just came out and said "we won't consider more than 3 AP classes in our admissions decision." 

All this aside, the real problem is far deeper than AP classes.  It is a distortion of values, whereby success is measured like big-game trophy hunting.  Who gets in to the best university?  The value of an education and the joyful process of obtaining it get completely lost.
My son did an inordinate amount of work for both WHAP and APUSH, probably less so for APES.  But those first two classes were killers.  He and I toured UCLA with a family friend who had graduated from the same high school.  The friend had taken a lot of AP courses and he stated quite forcefully that freshman year courses were much easier than his high school AP classes.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - Bruce Wang - 05-23-2015

AP courses must be harder than they used to be.  Let me preface my comments by saying I'm near the lower end of the intelligence curve for a Stanford graduate.  I just barely got in (waiting list) in the easiest year to apply since the start of the Cold War (Loma Prieta year).  I took 6 AP courses my senior year of high school and got AP credit for all of them.  I found Stanford to be much more challenging than anything in high school.

To be best prepared for Stanford you really should take as many AP classes as offered.  I don't think the problem is the number of AP courses.  The problem is the fierce competition for every 3rd or 4th significant digit on the GPA and class rank.  That's what takes a lot of work and stresses kids out.  Getting As and A-'s are relatively easy.  Getting all A+'s takes way too much work.  I didn't have the time to engage in that competition due to work obligations in the family businesses and extracurriculars.  To a certain extent, I think Stanford sees through that and emphasizes class rank less than the other schools.  Stanford accepted 4 kids from my public high school class.  The highest ranked was 5th or 6th in my class and he was by far the smartest person in the class.  My classmates ranked 1-3 did not get in the most elite schools and did not end up being the most successful people from my class.  1-3 avoided AP Physics to protect their GPA and jockey for valedictorian.  The most successful people from my high school class were all in that class even at the cost of Bs and Cs.

Re: Why Are Palo Alto's Kids Killing Themselves? - Mick - 05-23-2015

This kid did OK


http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/northern-california-child-prodigy-gets-college-degrees-at-age-11/ar-BBk6hfX?ocid=wispr