“You should be happy you’re a student here. Now you’re just embarrassing yourself. Why on EARTH would you want to drop out?!”

This was the talk I received when I told my teacher that I wanted to drop out of high school. I was miserable in my high school, to the point that I had started self-injuring. I didn’t fit in and more importantly, I hated the curriculum. 

At the time, I was going to one of the “best schools in the United States,” a recipient of a Blue Ribbon Award from the Department of Education. Even today, it remains in the top five schools in America year after year. 

When I went to my school, which I’ll anonymize by calling it MTHS* (not real first letter), it was not an easy task to get in. Technically, it was an invitation-only school.

There were only 60 students per year, and you had to compete against THE ENTIRE COUNTY to get in. You had to attend an open house, meet people, show your middle school grades, write an essay, show extracurriculars, and also take a specialized test to be accepted.

MTHS was a specialized engineering school and it was famously selective. Only two out of every town was allowed entry and if they didn’t pass the standard, they weren’t allowed in. Hundreds would apply, but not many were invited to attend. 

As of right now, the acceptance rate for my high school is slightly under 20 percent. (I think it’s like 15 percent or so?) It’s so notoriously hard to get in, several specialized cram schools popped up to help kids pass the entrance exam. 

In other words, you had to bust your ass to get in.

In my class, around 10 percent of all the students got into an Ivy League school. The only thing kids in this school cared about was getting into college — specifically, the college of their choice. 

We had counselors who regularly sat us down to talk about the scholarships we could get or the best college choice for me. It was all our parents ever talked about. And yes, most of the kids enrolled wanted to be engineers — and you could tell they really didn’t like the arts. 

Going to high school wasn’t enough at MTHS. You also were expected to take college level courses at the local college by sophomore year. At one point, I was attending two different colleges at the same time while still in high school…and also doing cram school, too.

Most students graduated with anywhere from 12 to 20 college credits. I was technically a sophomore, maybe junior, by the time I turned 18. I already had taken almost all my mandatory college foreign language courses by 17.

I’m not some kind of rare wunderkind in that school system, not by any means. At my high school, I was getting tutored by a 12 year old who was just coasting along freshman year.

At MTHS, there was a weird advertising thing where teachers would boast about the “positive peer pressure” among kids. The truth behind this was that it was hypercompetitive, to the point of being a bit sick. 

Students would regularly get pitted against one another in subtle ways. Everyone would ask what everyone else got on tests. If you were one of the dumber kids in school (like myself), certain kids wouldn’t even talk to you. 

So, being a flunkie wasn’t even just bad for your grades. It was a form of social suicide. And every single kid would sign up for as many extracurriculars as possible — or even start their own clubs — all for the sake of the college application.

I want to point out that my high school did not hit kids nor berate them — usually, anyway. I had one teacher who had no qualms about telling me what she thought of me, and it wasn’t pretty. Still, the parallels are uncanny, especially when you look at “elite track/Tiger parent” families.

Students had the opportunity to attend college classes as part of their curriculum. If you had an 84 GPA, you couldn’t even graduate. You were flunked out of school. 

I was one of the only behaviorally-fucked up kids in my school at the time. Most were terrified of talking back to the teachers or even to other kids because they feared for their college futures.

School, school, school. That’s all it was. 

Have you ever seen a student have a full-blown meltdown over getting a 92 on an AP Physics test? I have. Have you ever seen a student have a panic attack over a 95 GPA? I have. 

While not every student had that level of panic, it was always somehow there in the background. The pressure was always on. Some felt it far more than others — often with the worst of reasons why. 

With certain students, you could very well tell that their parents’ love was conditional on how well they performed in school. With others, the pressure came because they genuinely didn’t have friends. They thought they could fix it with perfect grades.

For many students, MTHS was a very lonely experience. There was no real “genuine high school experience” there — just a bootcamp for college. As for the results? Let’s just say that I was far from the only burnout from that school. 

The other day, I spoke to a girl who went to a sister school of MTHS. She was with her father and I asked what school she was in. Her father matter-of-factly told us that he pulled her out of the sister school so she could finish her schooling online instead. 

I immediately understood why she was removed. It wasn’t a dropout, per se, but a transfer. This was a sign that the school got so toxic that it was affecting her health — and that it got to the point where her parents had to pull her out to protect her. 

I thanked her dad for doing that, because honestly? I wanted to do the same. I felt like there was no escape from the cycle of suck, so I felt like dropping out would have been better. He gave me a nod and said that it was getting really bad with the social pressure. 

“A lot of people are transferring out because they can’t take it anymore,” he said. 

“Really? How bad did it get?”

It became clear that this kid was far from the rare exception. Others have been hospitalized, depressed, and anxious messes. Some openly said they missed out on having a classic “high school experience.”

They then told me that one student transferred out of school with only three months left to graduate, simply because his parents were that worried about him committing suicide over the pressure. The students have gotten characterized as timid, depressed, nervous wrecks. 

Honestly, it’s a mix of things. Speaking as someone who is on the inside of this, let me explain a couple of things.

Let’s start with the first issue: a lot of the students in these kinds of schools don’t want to be there. Or at least, they’re not really that passionate about studying. The reason they’re so desperate to get in and study is because their families push them that hard.

I’ve seen people blossom at my high school because they actually did like STEM. They were happy doing experiments and reading 24/7. You couldn’t get them out of there if you tried. 

Others? Like me? Or others who were more artsy? Yep. Nope. Not the same vibe. They felt pressured to be someone they weren’t, they had parents who often screamed at them for the slightest infraction, and it often culminated in fits of tears in the bathroom. 

But these kids would never say no to an elite school, because then, it’s likely their families would disown them. Moreover, if it wasn’t their families that disowned them, it might be their clout-chasing friends.

In America, we’re seeing a battle between the have’s and have-not’s. The new have-not’s are the children whose parents avoid giving them an education, prevent them from learning sex ed, and don’t bring up basic life skills. The new have’s are the educated, literate kids.

Uneducated kids become adults who are ripe for being taken advantage of. They’re exploitable and more likely not even capable of realizing how badly fleeced they are. (Trump said, “I love the poorly educated,” for that reason.)

Educated kids are the new have’s. They are aware of when they’re being used, how to combat it, and are more likely to be able to get out of a bad situation via a good career. There will be fewer and fewer of these kids as years pass, simply due to America’s anti-intellectual streak. 

This is a school that is for the have’s. And have’s are going to get more and more elite as years pass simply because the competition is part of the culture of the elite. That’s the way these things tend to be.

Millennials probably remember how hard schoolteachers and parents drilled it into them to stay in school and get a diploma. It wasn’t just advice. If you dropped out (like me) before getting a college degree, you were seen as a failure.

Being a blue collar worker? Failure, despite earning more than most degreed jobs. Being a business owner? Failure, unless you earned millions in a “respected” (degreed) field. Wanting to not blow your brains out from depression? Suck it up, buttercup, or be a FAILURE. 

Welcome to Diploma Disease.

This is a mentality where the need for a diploma outweighs everything else, even common sense. China got hit with diploma disease pretty bad, and so did many of the parents of the kids in my school. 

After a while, many of the kids began to realize that their mental health didn’t matter to their parents. Only that fucking piece of paper did. 

For some students, there’s also an experience I call the Jump. If you were a straight-A student in a mediocre or bad school, you tend to think you’re king of the castle. Then, when you transfer to a good school, reality hits hard.

Many college students experience the Jump in their freshman year. They’re used to lollygagging about in high school, despite barely being able to read. When they get that first college essay grade back, it slams them in a way that shakes them to their core. 

A lot of students spend their first or second college year just dealing with the aftermath of the Jump — realizing that they didn’t know as much as they thought, having to play “catch up” with the curriculum, and getting their self-esteem kicked down a notch. 

In a place like MTHS, you don’t get the luxury of an extra year to deal with the Jump. You get kicked out if you fail. So, students end up in a spastic, dramatic, all-work-no-play schedule until they can function as a student. 

If that fails, well…they fail. 

Chinese schools are notoriously difficult to pass through. Every single student has to take a standardized test called the gaokao. If they don’t pass the test or score high enough, they are not allowed to go into college. The colleges you can choose are totally focused on this test, too. 

Good score, good college.

Bad score, you’re going to work in a factory until you die. 

Students in China don’t have time to play. They are studying almost constantly. They go to their main school. After school, they go to cram school, sometimes staying as late as 11 PM. Then they also do homework. 

Or at least, that’s how it was up until recently. In a bid to boost birth rates and decrease suicide rates among children, President Xi Jinping banned out-of-school training centers. 

Having experienced that type of life myself, I can say it’s brutal. I mean, shit, it broke me. The fact that Xi banned cram schools actually is a massive boon to the kids there. It’s one of the kindest policies he could have enacted.

It mirrors my high school’s results to an uncanny degree, including the fear and panic kids feel when they are leading up to high school and college applications. To give you an idea, I found a research paper of the psychological effects of gaokao panic:

Reread that quote. That study was for CHILDREN who were not even in high school yet. They were nine through 12 years of age. Think about what that must be like. 

China has started a massive crackdown on cram school (Buxiban) behavior, extreme tutoring hours, and physical punishment practices, calling it a form of child abuse. The government shuttered around 700,000 school of these schools due to physical and verbal abuse allegations.

America’s elite, though…?

Well, it’s kind of split. 

There’s a new level of nouveau riche that don’t seem to be particularly interested in education. They’re more interested in students finding their purpose, finding a way ahead, adapting to a changing world. Social skills and networking are now the real kings, followed up by education.

In many cases, the “elite” of the country aren’t even that interested in science or math or critical thinking anymore. They either “have others to help with that” or in the cases of religious oligarch families, view it as a moral failing to believe in scientific proof.

For every new style of parent who insists on a more rounded approach to life, there will still be parents who insist on the Diploma of their choice. More specifically, elite schools like Harvard and Yale tend to have legacy families where just attending is the basic requirement. 

Old Elite behaviors aren’t just an “America” thing. Rather, they’re a global thing. In most other countries in the world, a high educational attainment — especially one with quality — is reserved for only the wealthiest and most sophisticated. Those are the people who become the decision-makers in most societies, at least traditionally.

This is especially true from poorer countries or countries that experienced horrors. My mom used to say, “The Communists took everything from our family, but not what’s in our heads. That’s why so many of us survived.”

When you’re playing on a global scale, Diploma Disease becomes as much a way of life as it is a mark of honor. I see the value of education and critical thinking, but it’s become a matter of self-flagellation.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: everyone deserves an education that involves multiple languages, critical thinking, decent math, an understanding of science, anatomy, history and language arts. 

That should be the bare minimum. 

And if you can’t do it all, that’s fine. We should let people grow as they can, not break them with shame, pressure-cooker policies, and a lifetime of no fun.

A lot of people who pushed through the process roll their eyes and say, “Oh, God forbid you get educated. It’s child abuse, right…?”

Well, it can turn into abuse. And that attitude needs to stop — speaking as someone who almost died in pursuit of the Diploma from Hell. After all, it’s better to be happy and alive than dead with a piece of paper in your hands.