Silicon Valley is changing the world. Why hasn’t it done the same for its students?

In May of my junior year of high school, a girl in my year committed suicide.

First period began that day as normal, punctuated by the shuffling of binders and pencils, the scraping of chairs, and the half-asleep mumblings of students. Our teacher was handed a slip of paper by an office TA halfway through the period. We fell silent when he read it out loud.

I remember seeing her friends leaving class and crying in the bathroom during the day, seeing others — saddened, somber, scared — gathering in the hallways and whispering. Why did she do it? How could it had happened to her? What did this mean for the rest of us? We drifted through the rest of the day, half in paralysis, half on autopilot — unable, or unwilling, to comprehend.

Two years later, in the middle of my freshman year of college, I heard from a friend that there had been a suicide at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, barely twenty miles from my high school. Gunn’s reputation came from its rigorous academics, similar to my high school, but also its location not too far from the train tracks — in the 2009–10 school year, four students and a graduate had committed suicide. Five years later, this past school year, a total of four Palo Alto students took their own lives.

Silicon Valley/the Bay Area is glorified nowadays as the place to be (I use the two terms interchangeably, as the tech culture traditionally associated with SV has essentially spread throughout the Bay at this point). There’s a certain magic that supposedly happens only in this 7000 square mile incubator, a bubble of you-can-change-the-world entrepreneurs, programmers, and venture capitalists of all ages.

If you are accepted into the bubble, you are set for life — inducted into the land of $8500/month intern salaries and workplace nap pods, arcade games, and helicopter rides. You are encouraged to take foosball breaks in the rec room, commute from home in the WiFi-outfitted company shuttle, and partake in the round-the-clock free buffets.

The irony lies in the fact that the adults, not the kids, are the ones who get to play.

I don’t know why — and will likely never know why — those students took their own lives. Academic pressure may or may not have been factors in their decisions. But I can say with certainty that regardless of the state of their mental health and personal struggles, the high-stress, high-pressure environment so prevalent in Bay Area schools can only have harmed.

High achievement in the Bay Area is expected beginning at a very early age — there is an immediate pressure, starting as soon as 6th or 7th grade, to earn straight A’s; to get perfect scores on your SAT, ACT, and AP tests; to become president of three clubs, play a sport and an instrument, and found your own nonprofit — all by the ripe age of 16. In a ten mile radius of my house, there are a dozen test prep and college admission centers, sporting names like Harvard Squared, Perfect 2400, and IvyMax. College is touted as the ultimate panacea — to springboard your achievements for the rest of your life, to fulfill your parents’ dreams, and, to some extent, to validate your own worth as a student and person.

It is this last point, especially, which is so dangerous. An interview of 300 Palo Alto students found that half of them would be “really embarrassed” to tell their friends they got a B. A student who earned a 2200 on the SAT has scored only in the 75th percentile of the school district, but in fact in the 96th percentile for all college-bound seniors. Last year, nearly 20% of the senior class at my high school earned National Merit Semifinalist status — signifying an extremely disproportionate level of achievement for an honor awarded to the top 0.5% of students statewide.

What used to be — and is still widely considered — extraordinary is now merely mediocre in these high schools.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m awed by these students’ intellect and the academic accomplishments, and in and of itself, achievement can be a positive reinforcer and a healthy, motivating goal to strive for. Yet in an environment that fails to adequately address the adverse side effects, the cost of success can be devastatingly high. Students are consistently stressed, sleep deprived, and under pressure to achieve even more in the same number of hours in a day. When the new expectation is an A rather than a B, you have to aim for the A+, toll on your emotional wellbeing and physical health be damned. You feel as though your only options are to excel against nearly impossible standards — or fail.

Facebook’s campus, prominently marked by a large blue “like” sign, is a thirty minute drive from my high school; Stanford’s is another fifteen minutes beyond that. These are the places that will fasttrack us to a brand name degree, an overnight tech revolution story, an invitation to the three comma club — a good life. In Silicon Valley, we are surrounded by giants of innovation and creativity, who pride themselves on attracting the cream of the crop in talent. Everyone has the potential to change the world, here — their employees are off-the-charts bright and intensely curious, and have lots of fun.

They are the ones now enjoying the air hockey tables and bicycles, that we students gave up in middle school in favor of SAT books and vocabulary flashcards.

When I finally received my college acceptance — the product of close to 6 years of chronic sleep deprivation, test prep, and extracurricular achievement— my reaction was not one of happiness, but of relief. I did not feel like someone about to change the world. I felt like a 17-year-old who was tired and frightened of failure, who was burned out by years of constant stress/anxiety/insecurity. All this for an email that read “Congratulations.”

Congratulations — you’ve achieved, you’ve won. But at what price — and why is the price still so high?

Silicon Valley is better than this.

The people who work here really are driving an immense revolution—our cars drive themselves, our homes know how warm we like our living rooms and how often we turn on the lights, our doctors can tell us a million and one things about our health from a single drop of blood. So why haven’t we done something to change our students’ lives?

There is no easy fix; I don’t have a ready solution to magically make all the stress and pressure go away. My high school has tried hosting Surprise Stress-Free Days (on which teachers cannot assign homework or give tests), limiting the number of AP tests students can take, and including a mandatory time sheet in the course registration packet (by having students map out how much time their classes and activities take in a week, the hope is they will realize that they are overloading themselves; the issue is, many students laugh at the 8 nightly hours of sleep the time sheet suggests). None of these initiatives have amount to much — rather, as college admission rates keep dropping, competition (and thus students’ workloads) keeps rising.

Something clearly needs to change, whether in students’ and parents’ mindsets, teachers’ and administrators’ approaches, or community values and culture. There is no clear-cut solution yet, but what is important is that we acknowledge and address the issue — and that it is a dialogue that must be had by all members of the community, especially those with the resources, talent, and potential to elicit the greatest change.

The innovation, the free spirit, the excitement and experimentation of Silicon Valley — in high schools, these are all overshadowed by the pressure toward hyperachievement and the fear of failing. The student culture here terrifies me, and it should terrify you too. With all its promises of a brighter future and a more brilliant world, it’s surprising that Silicon Valley hasn’t been able to foster a healthier learning environment for its students. It’s time to realize that these problems are just as important, if not more, than the problems being solved in corporate offices and startup labs. If we don’t start paying attention, our youth won’t be achieving at all — they’ll be going nowhere.

Corrections: An earlier version of this article misstated Gunn High’s location as being next to the train tracks; in reality, it’s a little farther away. An SAT score of 2200 is also now the 96th percentile of college-bound seniors, rather than the 99th, which was the metric used in a cited reference.

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