As the sole proprietor of Talking Out of School, I reserve the right to pivot at the last minute! Last week I told you I planned to run a post on strategic planning but I have decided to run it next week instead. Given that people are interested in Jennifer Wallace’s new book Never Enough, it seemed to be very timely to publish my conversation from earlier this summer with Dr. Beth Cooper Benjamin.
Beth came to you earlier this summer with her post on what you need to know about mental health and kids. Now I’m happy to present this interview with Beth about one of her priorities, combatting achievement culture.
And as a welcome-back-to-reality post-Labor Day weekend treat, stay tuned Tuesday, September 5th for a fun and somewhat goofy interview supplement where Beth and I talk Barbie and grapple with the question - is Barbie just achievement culture with a pink dress and Beach? (And if you had any doubt - I am the goofball …goo goo ga’joob… )
Now on to our interview about achievement culture!
Julie Faulstich
Beth, I’d love to hear how you became interested in this topic because you’ve been researching and working with kids in this area for years, way before we all became so concerned with the mental health of our teenagers.
Beth Cooper Benjamin
I trained as a social science researcher. I have a doctorate in human development and psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education. And one of the things we always say in academia is that research is “me-search.” So you always have to understand what's your stake in the thing that you're deeply compelled to investigate because that's going to shape how you understand it. And also that’s going to keep you motivated because earning a doctorate is a slog. So I was really interested in middle class girls because that's my story. I grew up in Rochester, New York and I went to an independent school, the Harley School. I graduated in a class of 27. And I was really interested in girls’ development. I had a mom who was a psychotherapist reading Carol Gilligan when I was in high school. And I borrowed her copy of In a Different Voice and took it with me as a camp counselor, living in a cabin of 12 and 13 year old girls for the summer. So I was reading it and then looking over at these teen girls.
It took me a full year to get through most of that book in high school. There was a lot I missed, but I still have my mom's dog eared copy. And then I wound up at HGSE studying with Carol Gilligan, which was an extraordinary full circle experience. But I was really interested in girls' leadership development and the idea of voice and programming for girls. And I was doing it in this era when there was increasing attention to smaller and smaller particular populations of girls. So it was the era of focusing on urban girls and marginalized populations and girls of color and all of that was an incredibly important corrective to earlier research that had just studied privileged white girls and assumed that what was true for them was true for everyone. And I thought that that was really valuable work. But I also thought that there had been concerns identified for the privileged white girls that were still perpetuating problems and were falling by the wayside.
And also, it hadn’t really been considered with a lot of attention to how they were shaped by privilege, by whiteness, by class culture. And so I was really interested in that. That was where my work with girls in grad school came from. And one of the things I started to notice was that there was a lot of discourse and a lot of meaning around achievement, whether that was anxiety about college admissions or ambivalence about leveraging volunteer and service activities to get yourself a more impressive college resume, ambivalence about selflessness and ambition.
And so I kept seeing a lot of those issues around achievement come up when I was in New York running social justice leadership development programs for teen girls and doing collaborative research with Jewish teen girls at Ma’yan, where I was for about a decade. And these girls often were attending elite private schools, public exam schools, Jewish day schools. They were incredibly accomplished and competent and ambitious - and burnt out, increasingly really burnt out.
JF
How crazy is that to be a teenager and be burned out?
BCB
It seemed way, way too early and way more intense than what I had seen growing up or even what I had seen 10 years earlier. Something was going on. And one of the things that really surprised me was we had a pretty rigorous program. It met either every week or every other week, and they were doing deep dives into investigating issues that were of concern to their peers. By the end, we were calling it “Secrets of the Perfect Girl.”
And they were looking at things like dilemmas around how community service was being defined and practiced, or entertainment media sexism and how it impacted girls as they grew up, or experiences of everyday sexism on the streets of New York. And even though we were doing rigorous collaborative work, they really enjoyed it and bought in and didn't seem to feel burnt out about it. And I remember asking them, what's the difference between what's happening in school and what's happening here? And they would say, we're choosing this. There was a deep curiosity-based engagement that they were missing in their elite schools because it was driven by somebody else's agenda or by high stakes testing or some other external demand. It was the opportunity to do a deep dive into something that they were individually and collectively invested in and curious about and it had a different valence for them.
And so it brought up lots of questions for me about how achievement culture was shaping students' intellectual curiosity and engagement in learning and how that was related to burnout.
JF
I first became aware of achievement culture through Rachel Simmons’ Enough As She Is. We had Rachel speak at Westover and eventually, she connected the two of us. How did you initially connect with Rachel?
BCB
Rachel and I go back many, many years. We had lunch together after she spoke on a panel at Harvard Ed when I was still, I think I was still a master student. So we've known each other for more than 20 years now. We're contemporaries and had lots of folks we knew in common. And then we reconnected when I was in New York. And she used to speak to my Research Training Intensive program at the JCC at M‘ayan and talk to the girls in our program every year. And then I think she recruited some participants for Enough As She Is through our program. She and I have been kindred spirits around a lot of these issues for a long time.
JF
I just want to give a big recommendation for all of Rachel’s work (which encompasses women as well as girls) and to Enough As She Is for all those educators who want to explore more about girls and achievement culture.
BCB
The more we work together to understand this achievement culture thread that is bigger than the kids and bigger than the parents, the more we can all work together to help kids navigate it.
JF
So we’ll get to discussing the impact of the pandemic, but as you said, achievement culture pressure existed well before the pandemic. And the pressure around college admission just seems to keep increasing. And it wasn’t always this way. It seems to have really taken off in the 1980s. What’s your analysis of this evolution and where it’s heading?
BCB
Yeah. I think there are a lot of sources of achievement culture, starting with the radically increased selectivity of elite schools. Getting into an Ivy League school is, in some ways, way more democratic now than it was 50 years ago. But the acceptance rate is so infinitesimal that it's like winning the lottery to get in.
JF
And also, 50 years ago, I think for a lot of people, it wasn't even something they thought about. It wasn't even in their consciousness when they were 15 to have attending an Ivy League school as a goal.
BCB
There are some structural things in the college admissions process that have changed. The common application going online has changed the dynamic. It doesn't get talked about a lot, but that's really changed the nature of applications because you can click a button and choose a whole list of schools and send them your materials. And also, another thing that changed is that with the Common App, if you're interested in one school, it will suggest what it considers comparable schools. So there are a lot of schools that have vastly increased their application rate because students aren't seeking them out as these quirky under the radar schools. They're being prompted.
And there are so many more ranking sites and systems. And so there's a commodification of college that's been happening for a while and changed how that system works. It's an arms race, too, since kids are applying to way more schools. The schools are then trying to figure out how to increase their yield so that they are not extending offers to a ton of students and then not having them show up, which is one of the reasons why schools are afraid to let go of legacy admissions because legacies they think are more likely to actually choose that school.
I think for a long time, there's been a real economic imperative, particularly for what Barbara Ehrenreich used to call the professional middle class, which is essentially the upper middle class. Its folks whose privilege and assets come not from inherited wealth, but from credentials. And credentials can't be passed on to the next generation. They have to be re-earned by each generation. And the first toe hold on that economic ladder is college. So it's high stakes for upper middle class, professional middle class families. And that makes the emphasis on achievement increasingly intense. And if you look at this report that just came out, recently about the thumb on the scale for applicants from the top 1% economically, there's a weird doughnut hole for middle class families where their eminently qualified students are at this huge disadvantage compared to similarly accomplished students from very wealthy families.
JF
It also feels that pursuing credentials - what I think of as the idea of the meritocracy that I always believed in - isn’t really operating the same way it used to. From the fairly privileged perspective I had growing up, you worked hard and that hard work got you into college and then from there, you went to a graduate school to be trained as a professional and secure your upper middle class life. As a middle aged adult, that feels pretty naive now and I realize how many people didn’t have access to the “meritocracy.”
BCB
It's interesting to see from our points of view and backgrounds, we both made assumptions there was this ladder. And most of my friends are middle class people who got credentialed. That's what we were all told. Now the ladder seems to be broken, but we're still trying to climb the ladder.
JF
Because it’s hard to figure out another path. Beliefs are hard to shake.
BCB
Right. I think one interesting thing about the Supreme Court's affirmative action decision is that it's opening the doors for all these other critiques of the higher ed admissions system. So now you can't use race as a factor. Then what are all the other things that we shouldn't be allowed to use as a factor? Let's talk about those. And what would it mean to have a truly meritocratic college admissions system? And is part of the problem that we're funneling kids who maybe don't need to be in college or don't need to be in college right now into this... sometimes I call it a meat grinder. The college admissions process is brutal for these kids. It is brutal. And maybe there are other changes that we could make that would make it more fair or less necessary or feel less necessary.
JF
And how do you think girls are particularly vulnerable?
BCB
I think it's complicated. One thing that almost never gets discussed is that there is an unwritten, unofficial affirmative action policy around gender at a lot of selective schools where for a long time, qualified female applicants have far outnumbered qualified male applicants. But the schools are concerned that if their gender balance tips too far towards girls, their attractiveness as a school will decline because in their perception, students want gender parity. So at a lot of these schools, it used to be that the schools that were formerly all female that went coed would lag. They would have a hard time attracting male applicants. Now those schools are pretty close to parity. All the schools have been putting a thumb on the scale for male applicants in order to preserve the gender parity that they think is really important for their broad appeal as a school.
JF
I will say there are times you need a certain gender balance to run your co-curricular programs, like populating athletic teams, or, at Walnut Hill, it was programs like pre-professional ballet. But I still feel bad for girls.
BCB
As do I. I think one issue for girls is that they tend to internalize pressures and tend to blame themselves. They see themselves as the cause of their failures in a way that tends to be less true for boys. And that really leads to a lot of suffering and a lot of shame and a lot of isolation that they're really inclined to hide their imperfections from other people. It reflects poorly on them because it's so tied to how they see themselves as people.
JF
How do you see the impact of the pandemic given these girls and their relationship with achievement culture that they're already struggling with?
BCB
It was contradictory. I think initially for a lot of students, it felt like a respite from achievement culture. Schools were not grading, or there were no standardized exams, and there was a real imperative to focus on being human and supporting each other. And there was a shared recognition that everyone was struggling and that it was okay to be struggling. And that everyone had circumstances in their lives that were challenging. And that that was a common experience, and you were allowed to name it in a way that was not true before. You couldn't do activities, right? You couldn't max out your resume when you were in lockdown. And so it really freed up a lot of students. There's some research that showed in the early months of the pandemic that some high school students' stress levels dropped because they weren't going all out trying to max out every opportunity and turn everything into a resume builder because you just couldn't do it. And so in the absence of that, then what does your life look like? What do you choose to do with your time? When you are home with your family, unexpectedly a lot more, how are you all connecting?
Then it came back with a vengeance. There was a backlog of applicants the following year for college. And so there was increased pressure on applicants, too. They were competing against more students, and everybody felt like they had to compensate for pandemic learning loss and those lost opportunities. And screens, that was brutal for lots of folks.
I don't know how I would say that it affected girls in particular. I mean, certainly the data from 2021 that came out this year showed that girls were struggling at higher rates than boys. Although the adolescent psychologist Lisa Damour offers the caveat that the questions we ask about distress are often things that are going to look more like the ways that girls tend to experience distress than they are for boys. They're more internalizing than externalizing.
JF
So my follow up question is what is your stance on the role screens and cell phones play in where we are with achievement culture, anxiety, depression, kids struggling?
BCB
I think we're still learning. In the absence of definitive answers, I think the safest course of action is to limit access, to be really cautious. I don't think we're really prepared for the consequences and the effects of the amount of time we're all spending on screens. And this includes adults. And the extent to which social interaction is mediated through screens, which is really... I have an eight and an 11 year old, and they don't have phones. They have those Gizmo watches that they can use to call a limited number of people. But they can FaceTime with their friends when they're playing Roblox, and they can message when they're on their laptops. And already, that's super complicated. Already, my eight year old got in a fight with a friend of his on a group text thread. And I was totally unprepared to deal with that with an eight year old. And it has definitely made me much more leery about unleashing that access on my kids.
My oldest is starting middle school, and I know he's going to want to be able to coordinate with his friends in the afternoons. And we have to figure out how can we give him access to technology that will enable him to socialize in person, to have that in-person interaction with his friends and that unstructured playtime that is so developmentally important and important for mental health without giving him the access that is going to cause rifts in his social relationships and detract from his sleep and preoccupy him when he is supposed to be focusing on other things. And I think in the absence of policy, it is a heavy lift for parents and for schools but I think especially for parents when kids are at home. It is a heavy burden on parents to monitor and assess and restrict and negotiate access, to set policies, to amend their rules, to figure out when things need to change, to go slowly. I feel for parents, but I am a parent. I feel it because it's also the challenge that I'm navigating.
JF
And also it feels like social media platforms end up degrading. I feel Facebook in a lot of ways started out as this nice way to keep in touch with people. And it's now this sewer of fake news and sponsored accounts. I'm trying to see pictures of someone’s wedding and it’s lost in all this crap. Twitter, very famously, has degraded as X. Maybe it will rise again as the platform Elon Musk wants? I know I used to use it like a newsfeed and that’s not possible anymore, really.
As all these things become commodified, the invisible hand of somebody's profit motive where we're all selling our data for convenience and our eyeballs are being sold to advertisers. It ends up making all the pleasurable parts worse and all of the frustrating parts more frustrating.
BCB
It's one of the things I think is really important for parents and educators to make more visible to young people whose literacy around advertising is pretty limited. It's hard to tell the difference. It's really hard to tell the difference between paid content and editorial content. It's really hard to tell what is product placement and what is not. I would say, especially on Instagram, they are masters at pushing paid content and advertising that looks like other stuff in your feed.
It's seductive. I mean, to wrap your brain around the idea of an algorithm that's reading everything you post and then feeding you more stuff like that. You're getting a particular slice of the stuff that the company thinks is what you want to see, but might also not be good for you. It's hard for us as adults to grasp it and keep it in mind. So it's really hard for young people to keep in mind. My kids play games on our phones sometimes, and sometimes the games have ads, and we talk about the ads a lot so that they understand that the ad is paying for the game. That's why the game is free. And the hope is even if it's a dumb game, that if you see the ad 20 times and for that 10 seconds, you're playing the sample level, then you're going to want the game. That's how it works. That repetition is the thing that's supposed to hook you and make it more familiar and break down your resistance. That's hard work to keep making that dynamic visible.
JF
Do you see your work as relevant to boys as well?
BCB
Absolutely. Achievement culture is not a gender-based phenomenon. I think it has some gendered flavor, it has some gendered impact, but I think it's absolutely affecting boys, young men as well. There's a ton of pressure.
JF
So as we finish up, what would you like to tell the audience about your work and where they can find you?
BCB
I was so fortunate to get to work both as a consultant and as a staff member with the faculty and staff and students at Westover, really learning about achievement culture and strategies to address it and particularly creating very accessible practices for faculty and staff to start shifting classroom culture and college admissions culture. I really love working on these issues with independent schools and school networks and helping them to better recognize how these issues present in their particular institutions and how they can use their strengths and talents to move the needle.
I’ve recently started a new day job in philanthropy, as Director of Programs and Peer Networks at the Jewish Funders Network, which I’m excited about. But I’m eager to continue consulting with schools, speaking, and leading workshops and professional development trainings. So folks can find me easily through my professional website, or my Instagram, where I’ve been having fun curating tracks for an Achievement Culture Playlist, or they can connect with me on LinkedIn.
Dr. Beth Cooper Benjamin is an adolescent development scholar, an achievement culture critic, and a designer and facilitator of civic engagement and leadership programming for young people. She has developed civic engagement strategy as Founding Associate Director of the Center for Social Responsibility at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center, and served as Director of the Westover Resiliency Project at Westover, a girls' boarding and day high school in Middlebury, CT. There she led a grant-funded initiative to challenge achievement pressure and perfectionism and to foster resilience and well-being among students and adult staff. She was recently named as Director of Programs & Peer Networks at the Jewish Funders Network, where she develops programming for philanthropists and foundation professionals. Benjamin has authored both scholarly and popular articles, and she consults on research, strategy, programs, and training through her website bethcooperbenjamin.com. She received her masters and doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Benjamin lives with her husband and their two young sons in Maplewood, New Jersey, where she practices embracing imperfection as a cook and a knitter (and as a parent, too!).