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I have written on several occasions previously about Chinese/Chinese-American Students on US college campus. http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-1042903.html Harvard College Admission Statistics and Stories

http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-1008346.html Advice on applying to graduate school

http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-986673.html College Admission for Chinese American Students

http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-951994.html Gaining admission to US Colleges for Chinese Students

http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=1565&do=blog&id=471528 Chinese American College Admissions and the Glass Ceiling

Since our own children has long since left the college admission scene more than twenty years ago, my impression on this issue has been that of a  disinterested observer until very recently. The New York Times just featured a  national headline article about the Chinese American parents and  students in  our town of Lexington MA on college admission. This has become  a hotly debated and serious topic deserving national attention.  Since NYT is blocked in China. I reproduce the article below for you information. (It contains nothing offensive to China or the Chinese government)

It Takes a Suburb: A Town Struggles to Ease Student Stress

GRETCHENERTL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By KYLE SPENCER APRIL 5,2017

Small rocks from thebeaches of eastern Massachusetts began appearing at Lexington High School lastfall. They were painted in pastels and inscribed with pithy advice: Be happy.… Mistakes are O.K.… Don’t worry, it will be over soon. They had appeared almost by magic, boosting spirits andspreading calm at a public high school known for its sleep-deprived studentbody.

Crying jags over testscores are common here. Students say getting B’s can be deeply dispiriting,dashing college dreams and profoundly disappointing parents.

The rocks, it turns out,were the work of a small group of students worried about rising anxiety anddepression among their peers. They had transformed a storage area into arelaxation center with comfy chairs, an orange/peach lava lamp and a coffeetable brimming with donated art supplies and lots and lots of rocks — to bepainted and given to favorite teachers and friends. They called it the RockRoom.

“At first it was just us,”said Gili Grunfeld, a senior who helped with the effort. “Then everyone wascoming in.”

So many rocks were pilingup, they had to be stored in a display case near one of the cafeterias. Themaxims seemed to call out to students as they headed to their classes inconceptual physics, computer programming, astronomy and Advanced PlacementMusic Theory.

And they became a visualreminder of a larger, communitywide initiative: to tackle the joy-killing,suicide-inducing performance anxiety so prevalent in turbocharged suburbs likeLexington. In recent years, the problem has spiked to tragic proportions inColorado Springs, Palo Alto, Calif., and nearby Newton, Mass., where stress hasbeen blamed for the loss of multiple young lives. In January, a senior atLexington High School, who had just transferred from a local private school,took her own life.

Residents in thistight-knit hamlet, with its high level of civic engagement, are hoping to stemthe tide. Mary Czajkowski, the district superintendent, was hired in 2015 withthe mandate of “tackling the issue head on.”

Elementary school studentsnow learn breathing exercises and study how the brain works and how tensionaffects it. New rules in the high school limit homework. To decreasecompetition, there are no class rankings and no valedictorians andsalutatorians. In town, there are regular workshops on teen anxiety and collegeforums designed to convince parents that their children can succeed without theIvy Leagues. Last October, more than 300 people crammed into the town hall fora screening of “Beyond Measure,” a sequel to Vicki Abeles’s documentary onyouth angst, “Race to Nowhere.”

“We want to be a model,”said Jessie Steigerwald, a longtime school board member.

But it has not been easy.

Claire Sheth, a mother offour who had invited Ms. Abeles to town, describes Lexington students as “tiredto the core.” Students say depression is so prevalent that it affectsfriendships, turning teenagers into crisis counselors. “A lot of kids aretrying to manage adult anxiety,” said the principal, Laura Lasa.

The problem is notanecdotal. In a 2015 national health survey, 95 percent of LexingtonHigh School students reported being heavily stressed over their classes and 15 percent saidthey had considered killing themselves in the last year. Thinking about it mostoften were Asian and Asian-American students — 17 percent of them, as is thecase nationally.

The town’s growing Asiancommunity has not been timid acknowledging the problem. Through college forumsand chat rooms, a group of parents and leaders of the local Chinese-Americanand Indian-American associations have been working to lower the competitive barand realign parental thinking. Others are pushing back. They don’t want theworkload reduced — they moved here for the high-rigor schools. At associationmeetings, where the tension is most pronounced, discussions about academic competitionin the district have brought some to tears.

Indeed, reversing theculture is complicated in a town that prides itself on sending dozens ofstudents to the Ivy Leagues: 10 went to Harvard last year and seven to theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Young people are lauded at school boardmeetings and online for having published academic papers or performed atLincoln Center. Last year, the varsity team placed second in the 2016 HistoryBowl nationals and fourth in the National Science Bowl. The robotics team hasqualified for the FIRST Championship, an international technology andengineering competition, for five of the last six years.

After school recently atthe public library, which was packed with students poring over textbooks,calculus work sheets, lab reports and term papers, a sophomore looked up fromher world history textbook and said, “You see all these people? They want thesame thing — that’s really overwhelming.” What they want: Entry into a topcolleges when acceptance rates are at an all-time low.

Lexington looks and feelslike a lot of other affluent suburbs: serene, stately, with a whiff of mutedmoney. Minivans and aging Volvos are packed with violins and well-worn soccergear. There are meticulously restored Colonials and Tudor revivals. Walk alongthe red brick sidewalks of Massachusetts Avenue, which cuts through the centerof town, and Lexington’s Brahmin past is evident: a statue on the Battle Greenof a musket-toting Captain John Parker, who led the fight against the British in1775.

In evidence as well aresigns of the burgeoning biotech industry, and the changing face of America’selite.

Since 2000, the Asianpopulation has ballooned from 11 percent to an estimated 22 percent ofLexington’s 32,000 or so residents, surpassing Newton (at about 13 percent) andCambridge (15 percent). Today, more than a third of Lexington’s students areAsian or Asian-American. The demographic mirrors the migration of Asianfamilies to suburbs across the country.

In the Crafty Yankee or theAsian bakery across the street, you are likely to bump into electricalengineers from Seoul, physicists from Beijing and biochemists from Boston. Theyteach at Harvard (10 miles away) and run labs at M.I.T. (11 miles). They holdtop positions in the pharmaceutical companies that dot the Boston-area techcorridor. More than half of the adults in Lexington have graduate degrees. Andmany want their children to achieve the same.

In many ways, students inLexington are the byproduct of the self-segregation that Enrico Moretti writesabout in his book “The New Geography of Jobs,” which addresses the waywell-educated, tech-minded adults cluster in brain hubs. For their children,that means ending up in schools in which everyone is super bright andhypercompetitive. It’s hard to feel special.

Best-selling authors andchild psychologists have long urged parents to divest themselves from theirchild’s every accomplishment, thereby sending the message that mental healthmatters more than awards. In Lexington, the attack is more comprehensive,involving schools, neighborhoods, churches and synagogues. It is riffing off research that shows that resilienceand happiness, reinforced by the entire community, can be just as contagious as stress and depression.

“You need to bring along everybody,” said Ms. Abeles, whose campaign has taken her to towns  with similarcommunitywide efforts, including Elkins Park, Penn., San Ramon and Burbank,Calif., and New Rochelle, N.Y.

Peter Levine, associate dean for research at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at  Tufts, says that communities that bond to promote pro-social behavior can be powerful inoculators for young people.

“Family problems are oftencommunity problems,” he said. “They need community solutions.”

No one is more aware ofthis than Ms. Lasa, who grew up here, earned degrees from nearby Springfield College and Lesley University, and then returned to the district — watching all the while as the population  morphed from relatively laid back to Type A. She often wakes to emotional emails from parents delivered to her inbox after midnight. Most, she says, are about their children’s academic standing, and the tone is often disappointment.

Last fall, as 557bright-eyed freshmen gathered in cushioned folding chairs in the auditorium for orientation, she gave a speech that over the last few years has come to focus more and more on stress reduction. She begged the students to make mistakes.“Do not believe that you must acquire  straight A’s to be a successful student,”she said. “If you and/or your parents are caught up in society’s  picture of success, let us help you change the focus.”

Students are now required to meet with counselors when choosing courses to talk about  their academic loads. The practice is largely seen as a way of keeping students from over scheduling to beef up their college transcripts.

“”We are trying to change aculture that is deeply rooted here,” Ms. Lasa told me in a sunny Boston accentas she barreled through the school. She was showing off the 45-minute free period she instituted this year, allowing  — or in some cases, forcing —students to take time to unwind. Some were playing basketball in the gym. Others were talking with teachers. A few hung out in classrooms, chatting with friends. An awful lot, though, were getting a head start on homework.

Ms. Lasa says she is trying to “balance all the messages” they are getting about success  and happiness. The one she wants to most impart is: “Slow down.”

The paradox of LexingtonHigh School is that while indicators of anxiety abound, so too does an obsession with happiness. A large banner from the town’s newly formed suicide prevention group, a chapter of the national organization Sources of Strength, greets students as they enter the sprawling red brick building, proclaiming: “Be a Part of Happiness.”There are close to 50  students in the group. Below the banner are remnants of their project to spread positivity.  Students were asked to write down their sources of strength, which were then posted beneath  the banner and on Facebook.Some named their pets or friends. One wrote: “My mom.” Another: “Trip  to Israel!” A girl with green hair: “Chicken curry.”

One morning in February,students in “Positive Psychology: The Pursuit of Happiness,” a popular elective, were following up on a discussion about the psychologist BarbaraFredrickson’s “broaden and build” theory, which posits that negative emotions like anxiety and fear prompt survival-oriented behaviors, while positive emotions expand awareness, spurring new ideas,  creativity and eventually building skills.

“Today, we are going tolook at pretty simple ways to make it more likely that you experience positive emotions on a day-to-day basis,” Matthew Gardner told his “Happiness” students as they pulled out notebooks and pencil cases. The class discussed the benefits of exercise and eating foods that release feel-good hormones. The students also learned that smiling and being smiled at releases dopamine, which has an uplifting impact.

Mr. Gardner offered analternative to smiling: “Our brains are not so perfect that, sometimes, if you hold a pen or pencil like this” — he held a pencil between his teeth — “you activate some of the same face muscles. You might get a little bit of a dopamine effect, too.”

Several students held pencils between their teeth to test the theory.

At one point, the class practiced laughter yoga, raising their arms slowly as they breathed in,  then lowering them as they breathed out, and bursting into peals of laughter.  Afterward, the  students recorded changes in their pulse rate to demonstrate research from the HeartMath Institute that shows heart rates slow downand smooth out after bouts of good feeling.

“It’s not just that yourheart rate goes down and you become very calm,” Mr. Gardner explained. “It’sthat the shape of your heart rate is smooth and more controlled. Frustration ismore jagged.”

Their homework assignment:Do laughter yoga or “smile at five people you wouldn’t normally smile at.”

The effects of smiling arealso taught in the A.P. Psychology class that Gili Grunfeld is taking, and it has informed her thoughts on stress. On a winter afternoon, she and several classmates were  uncoiling in the Rock Room, making friendship bracelets and sketchingin fat coloring books. A Post-it that read “Unplug” was taped to the wallclock. The students were bemoaning how so many of their peers develop “tunnelvision,” in Gili’s words, about schoolwork and extracurricular activities,sacrificing sleep and time with friends.

“They isolate for academics,” she said glumly.

Soon the students had changed topics, and were discussing the ice that had caked  the school parkinglot that morning and how to balance on it. The subtext, once again, was well-being: How much can friends support each other if both feel overwhelmed?

“Are we more likely to fallor are we more steady if we hold onto each other?” asked Jocelyn Geller, a junior.

“I feel like if you have afriend with you, you feel safer,”   said Millie Landis, a sophomore, pullingJocelyn up and wobbling on the floor with her to demonstrate. “But you couldpull each other down.”

•

The district has increasedthe number of counselors and social workers, including those working in thedistrict’s elementary schools, and expanded the training they receive inidentifying and supporting at-risk students.

Cynthia Tang, whose parentsemigrated from Taiwan, has been a counselor at Lexington High for 12 years.Warm and well-liked, she organizes workshops addressing the pressure on Asian students to succeed, borrowing insights from the childhood discord she experienced with her own parents  as well as research on biculturalism. Studies show that the less  assimilated parents are to American culture, the more stressed the children.

Adding to the pressure, she says, are cultural differences in how parents, raised abroad, and their offspring, raised in the United States, are expected to process setbacks and strife: American educators routinely encourage students to share their feelings; not so in Asia.

“I really see a lot of thisbeing bicultural conflict,” Ms. Tang said. “When you have one side of thefamily  holding one set of values and the other embracing a new set of values,that inherently creates a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of tension.”

Ms. Tang says that th edisconnect is compounded by a lack of knowledge about the various routes  to success available in the United States. Last year, she was brought in by the vice president of the local Chinese-American Association, Hua Wang, to help plan the college forum, a three-hour event on Father’s Day. Dr. Wang, an engineering professor at Boston University, wanted to shift the focus away froma guide on applying to  top colleges.

Despite resistance from the organizers, he and Ms. Tang prevailed. At the forum, she presented a  slide show celebrating the academic trajectories of respected Chinese-Americans: the fashion designer Vera Wang went to Sarah Lawrence College; Andrew Cherng, the founder of the fast-food chain Panda Express, went to Baker University in Kansas; the best-selling author Amy Tan, San José State University. Parents were surprised. But, Ms. Tang said,  “I think a lot of parents felt like: ‘What do I do with that information?’”

This year, organizers will delve deeper into the differences between the Chinese and American systems,  and are planning to add another new element: a panel discussion on combating stress. Dr. Wang said they want to showcase families who have adopted a more“holistic view” of  education. Selected parents of graduating seniors will be asked to talk about how they encouraged their children to get enough sleep, comforted them when they came home with B’s and discouraged them from skipping ahead in math to be eligible for higher level classes earlier.

This would not be the onlytime that Dr. Wang has engaged in this kind of dialogue. Using the Mandarin words “danding,” which means to keep calm and steady, and “ruizhi,” which means wise and  farsighted, he has initiated conversations on WeChat, an online chatroom popular among Chinese parents. Recently, he told them: “Calmness andwisdom from the parents are the Asian child’s greatest blessings.”

But the message was notwell received by everyone. Among the posted responses: “If your child gets a C, how do you get to a point of calm? You think we should be satisfied because at least he didn’t get a D?”  And: “But my heart still whispers: Am I not justletting my child lose at the starting line?”

One parent, Melanie Lin,found herself, too, in a heated conversation on WeChat after early-admissions decisions arrived last school year. She urged the other parents to stop bragging on the site about  acceptance  letters to top-tier schools: “If it’s only those students who are attending the big-name schools that are being congratulated, then the idea being passed on is that only those students  are successful, and attending a big-name school is the only way to become the pride of your parents.”

Dr. Lin, who works at a pharmaceuticalcompany, emigrated in the 1990s from Beijing to get a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Arizona State University. She says her rebuttal annoyed  even closefriends,  whose online responses accused her of trying to deny parents and theirchildren their moments in the spotlight.

Recounting the conversationwith me brought Dr. Lin to tears. “There is just so much pressure,” she said.For her, the struggles are not theoretical. On the home front, she too can be just as obsessed as her  peers, she says.

Her daughter, Emily, would agree. During junior year, she dreaded car rides and family dinners  — any time,really, that she was alone with her parents — because conversations routinely veered back to college. Now a senior, Emily has eight A.P. and 13 honors classes under her belt. She is also a violinist, choral singer, competitive swimmer andclass vice president.

For a chunk of her highschool career, Emily was one of those who “isolated for academics,” working into the early morning hours on homework and waking up, sometimes before dawn,after only five or so hours of sleep. She skipped birthday parties and lunch to squeeze in more studying. “I was never doing  anything for pure fun,” she said.“I put my head down and I was always running somewhere with some purpose.”

But as a member of a youthboard for a teen counseling center in town, she realized that her study habits were unhealthy. To get support for herself and others, she helped launch the town’s Sources of  Strength chapter. She has assisted in planning student outreach events and spoke up at a town meeting  about “the dog-eat-dog”competition that still persists at the high school.

Homework remains heavy,students say, particularly in high-level classes. Class rankings may be gone but students have a pretty good sense of where they stand. And while there has been talk of a later start time to the day so students can get more sleep, the idea is on hold.

In December, when earlydecisions came in, Emily found out she was deferred to the regular admissions pool by Yale, her top choice. Parents on WeChat were more sensitive this time around, but accepted seniors still bragged on Facebook.

Since then, Emily has been admitted to nine universities; rejected by three, including Yale; andwaitlisted by Harvard and the University of Chicago. She is deciding betweenColumbia and Duke.

Through it all, she has wondered if it’s worth it.

“I lost out on a lot of high school,” she had told me as she waited for college decisions. What she hopes is that students who come after her find some balance before their time at Lexington is up.

Note added: My own experience as a Harvard admission officier and on the inside.

1.      If you intend to go to graduate school, then where you went forundergraduate does not matter. We all know where Clinton, Bush, and Obama went for graudate school (Yale Law, Harvard Business,  Harvard Law), but how many of you know their undergraduate colleges?

2.     In fact if you go to Harvard for undergraduate you have less of a chanceto go to Harvard graduate  schools since Harvard graduate school look for and bent over backwards to attract outside applicants

3.     Sometimes  a small college is less costly and beneficial for a child who is a late bloomer.  Highly competitive elite school may actually ruin a child if s/he iis not yet ready

4.     Look at all the Presidents, celebrities, and famously successfulpeople featured in the Wikipedia  only a small percentage went to named schools. America is a land of many and repeated opportunities.  There is no reason to despair if you did not get into the school of your choice nor a  guarantee for  success in later life if you by chance went to an ivy league college