At 11:30 PM, the blue light from the phone’s screen illuminates the student’s face as it creates a bridge between two worlds. Senior Thien An Lam of Torrington High School is in the middle of an intricate calculus problem when a series of “pings” from a group chat erupts on the desk. It is a quintessential war: the allure of chatting with friends or maintaining that perfect 4.0 GPA. The attention span of students from Connecticut schools has been violated. It is unviable to concentrate on any one task – the expectations from a UConn Early College Experience (ECE) course, the upcoming Advanced Placement (AP) exam, the demanding social life they could pursue, but are too fatigued to follow.
“I feel trapped,” shares Thien An, “I want to be a teen. I want to be able to scroll, chat, and really just relax. But when I take a ten-minute break from my notes, I feel like I’m an hour behind. It feels so exhausting as if my head is at war with itself.”
The challenges posed by Thien An – and most other high school students – highlight the nationwide and mainstream “culture of acceleration.” At Torrington High, the drive for “college and career readiness” has made what was once a regular high school path into a high-pressure competition. And while that program could help students bring home a considerable amount of credits transferable to college – and translate to savings of approximately thousands of tuition for their families – the toll this is taking on their wellbeing, from their minds to their bodies, is becoming more and more apparent.
This “grind culture” is beginning to have students act like they are full-fledged professionals, even when they have not yet learned to be full-blown teenagers.
The school of thought that the “race to get ahead” is not a student decision but a school choice indicates that such choices are programmed into the structural DNA of the high school. The increasing high school motivation to incentivize “getting ahead” advanced coursework is a response to the “College in High School” initiatives, whereby state-level accountability rankings of high schools become predicated upon the percentage of students in “college-ready” pathways.
If there is a specific attraction to this concept at Torrington, it is financial. It can be an alluring prospect to get college credit for free or deeply discounted when the costs of education are soaring. Still, the GPA “weighting,” in which an AP or UConn ECE course carries more value than a regular class, puts pressure on students to enter these pathways just to stay in the game for class rank.
“The school is promoting it, because it looks good on paper,” Thien An says. “But when you’re actually in it, it’s not just about the credits. It’s the fact that 4.0 GPA is no longer good enough. If you’re not taking the hardest possible path, you’re starting to look like you’re behind.”
Trecia Austin perceives the impact of this stress from both sides. She is a parent of a teen who is currently taking these advanced classes and also works as an intern coordinator for the Connecticut Judicial Branch, where the ‘acceleration’ trend has gone full circle, from the classroom to the workplace.
Austin explains that, “In my job with the Judicial Branch, we have the students who have done it all. Their resumes include specialized track and college credits in high school. They seem fragile, however. They have been so busy preparing to jump through the next hoop that they haven’t had time to build the grit and ‘soft skills’ that really count in a professional environment.”
Austin argues that early decision-making for career trajectory is often not healthy. The Federal acts, such as Perkins V, permit exposure to careers starting from middle school, and Austin argues that it creates a “narrowing” in students’ identity. “We tell kids at 15 they need to pick a track. But the most successful people are those who are immersed in a variety of different careers. We are hollowing out something that is really valuable about being a teenager: That exploratory phase.”
Recent research backs up Austin’s claims. Although some articles claim that acceleration has no negative impact on the most gifted learners (the so-called 1% of the population), the “high-performing” population tends to suffer from severe emotional burnout due to constant over-performance. Latest research conducted by Harvard and Indiana University in 2024 reveals that 56% of teenagers experience high levels of pressure when it comes to their “future game plans”.
Thien An described his stress as the “mental disarray” from which he was experiencing. This “race to get ahead” has given birth to this phenomenon, psychologists termed “contingent self-worth” which equates to a student’s worth being dependent on performance. “If I’m not doing something ‘productive,’ I feel guilty,” Thien An elaborated. This guilt contributes to stagnancy and the cycle of burnout, wherein the “attention span” is sucked dry “because there is so much testing” and college-level school work.
Meanwhile, a study published in 2025 by Syracuse University revealed that dual-enrolled or high school students taking college courses tend to articulate “statistically significant” lower self-esteem than those outside the program. Being physically in high school but mentally enrolled in college places students in what researchers call a “socioemotional gap,” where these students are never completely present in either area.
The constant hurry leads to a “hollowing out” of adolescence. Through the lens of high school as a four-year warm-up for college, the current moment is erased. Graduating with a “5.0” is more valuable than socializing without a clear agenda, free play, and the chance to make mistakes that won’t go on a permanent transcript.
As Austin comments: “We are training kids to be really good at hitting a rubric, but they are lacking the ability to take creative risks… If every action has to be ‘marketable’ on a resume, you no longer engage in activities purely for the sake of enjoyment”.
In Torrington, as the night spirals on, Thien An reluctantly puts away his phone and gets back to the calculus notes. The group chat has died down, but he feels the weight of expectations.
For Torrington – and the American education system in general – the central question is whether this mad dash to the finish line is actually benefiting students like Thien An, or simply tiring them out before the real competition has even begun? There’s no doubt that the money students save by receiving college credit in high school is a plus, but it seems the toll on students is becoming increasingly difficult to overlook.
“I wonder if we’re asking ourselves what we’re rushing to,” says Austin. “Success is not a degree conferred quickly. It’s a complete person, a curious person, one who hasn’t had the life snuffed out of them before age 18.”
The ambitions of Thien An are more direct: “I just want to feel like I’m a person, not just a set of grades. I want to be ahead, but I don’t want to leave my teenage years behind to get there.”
