The four-year-long competition among high school students to maneuver
and outrank each other on the basis of their final grade point averages
is perhaps as close as one might get to a real life Hunger Games. This
single, sacred computation often functions as a primary filter for
admissions officers who stand at the entry gates to college and by
extension to a successful life.
The contestants, supporters and promoters of this annual reality
event, however, should take note of Google executive Laszlo Bock's
assertion that "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring." Likewise,
in a recent issue of The Atlantic magazine, human resources expert Peter
Cappelli of the Wharton School speaks of the "long literature in
psychology showing that job performance and college grades are poorly
related."
What to make then of GPAs at the high school level? As a youth, I
attended an affluent suburban high school in Ohio and, with the benefit
of honors coursework, my final high school GPA surpassed 4.0. I was
accepted by every college to which I applied. I was on the fast track.
But the folly of my ways didn't become apparent to me until many years
after I had graduated from college magna cum laude. As a student at
Georgetown University in Washington, I was so fully invested in a GPA
mindset that I rarely ventured off campus. Capitol Hill, the Supreme
Court, and Ford's Theater comprise only a partial list of landmarks that
weren't worth my time. I never even went to a Hoyas basketball game.
But in a final stinging analysis, no employer has ever very much cared
about my GPA.
Today, I am a father of two young girls who both have the aptitude to
be future straight-A students. Maybe down the line they will choose to
compete to become high school valedictorians. But if I successfully
raise them according to the values I now hold, they won't. They won't
compete. Understand, I would be ecstatic if my daughters became
valedictorians -- but not if they spend years competing for it. I am
truly awed by the tenacity of those gifted students who actively contend
for that supreme honor in spite of the costs. I am only saying that I
do not want my daughters to pay those costs.
As a high school administrator I have some visibility into the costs
of GPA worship -- and they are worse than lost opportunities to go
sightseeing. The most obvious cost comes from having to inhabit an
ethical hazard zone where the pressure to take academic shortcuts is
perpetual and intense. More subtle and troubling, kids who measure
themselves on the basis of GPA are less free to explore educational
interests and more likely to fixate on only what they think their
teachers want to see. The result is an uninspired recipe for
conventionality, or worse, cynicism.
What we desperately need from our youth, on the other hand, is
creativity and boldness. Placing high school GPA in its proper place in
our children's lives takes, above all, parental wisdom. The beauty of
our children's teen years is too precious to squander away in the
oppressive belief that there is only one precariously narrow pathway
leading to that one transcendent college that will set life on a
perfectly engineered trajectory. We all know better.
First of all,
college education is a product, and for any given student there are
dozens of institutions vying for the opportunity to win his or her
business. But more to the point: So much of how we emerge on the back
end of our college experience depends on happenstance. The friends and
professors we meet along the way. The discovery of new passions and
pursuits. The maturing of our social and emotional selves. And by the
way, the job market.
The finality of winning may be all that counts in
Monopoly and the Super Bowl, but life with all its celebrations and
setbacks is about progress. Though we may feel like the weight of our educational system is
forcing us to surrender our children into a winner-take-all, Hunger
Games mentality, let's step back and reclaim for our youth their unique
allowance to live and learn with authenticity.
a collection of my recently published essays
