College Culture Is Stuyvesant Culture

The defining characteristic of “Stuy Culture” is masochism. Students complain about their hardships: the scarce free time they have between homework, studying, and extracurriculars. We revel in “failed” tests and late nights. We want sympathy, but often the pain is the point. It demonstrates just how Stuyvesant we are. It’s a non-gendered toxic masculinity of academic pain tolerance. Everyone who attends Stuyvesant chose to enter this academic coliseum. Most of us were well aware of Stuyvesant’s legendary competitive environment. So next time we complain about academic competition or the intense fixation on elite colleges, take us with a grain of salt. Stuyvesant wouldn’t be Stuyvesant without the culture of high achievement, academic motivation, and the ultimate goal of attending an elite college. It’s why we chose to go here and our parents chose to send us here. While bad mental health and toxic fixation on elite colleges are problems, college culture is a feature, not a bug, of the Stuyvesant experience.

Stuyvesant is a school of high achievers. Sixty percent of the incoming freshman class thinks they’ll be in the academic top 25 percent of the grade come senior year. Stuyvesant students were the best at math and humanities in their respective middle schools, ingraining high achievement in their identities. We believe that we are the best and will do whatever it takes to showcase our academic knowledge to the rest of the school. This hardworking mindset can have positive implications. Most students attend school, participate in classes, and stay on top of their studies to their best ability. They prioritize their future success in a way that will be advantageous down the line. These attributes we take for granted are absent from so many other schools.

However, the obsession with future success and admission to an elite college can be detrimental to the present. Stuyvesant students love to pile on stress and anxiety, which damages their mental health. We pride ourselves on running on low sleep, even when it’s known to harm our physical well-being. Additionally, the distant four years of college take priority over high school, which lasts just as long––some perceive Stuyvesant as merely a stepping stone to a prestigious university. Most of us would probably care about college wherever we went, but Stuyvesant serves to reinforce and strengthen toxic college culture.

The culture tells us to make it into an Ivy League college or be a failure. It tells us prestige over price, private over public. Intellectually, we know it’s not true. We know that many schools can deliver a quality education and that we don’t need a high ranked school to reaffirm our intelligence. But we’re unable to comprehend those facts on an emotional level.

Stuyvesant’s college culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The American college system has major issues. America seems to view college as the pinnacle of human experience, the culmination of all previous years. The application process is arduous and the tuition gratuitous. We have hundreds of options, each more luxurious and expensive than the last. And at the end of the day, it’s not about the experience but the credential. Most people don’t really want to go to Harvard, they want to have been to Harvard. This phenomenon was revealed clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when universities charged the same tuition for remote classes. Obsession with college has kept pace with prices.

Fanatical parents do everything they can to get their special snowflakes into the school they deserve: throwing fits over low test scores, hiring expensive college advisors to help with their applications and essays, and building the ideal extracurricular combination. Nothing embodied this trend more than the recent college admissions scandal, when wealthy and connected parents cut the line, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their kids into elite schools. We have gone too far.

It’s not a Stuyvesant college culture, but an American one. We do have a high achievement culture, an obsession with the best and most exclusive. Of course we want to go to the best schools.

In the coming months, many of us will be let down. While 70 percent of freshmen wanted to attend an Ivy League or elite college, once they became seniors, only 47 percent actually did. We’ll look around at our friends going to their first choice schools, see them wearing their college shirts and stating their schools in humble brags. They’ll get to live out their Stuyvesant dream, getting rewarded for their hard work with the elite university they deserve. We’ll feel inadequate and unsatisfied, like someone ended our story before we got the happily ever after. It doesn’t have to be this way. Elite colleges may be no better than state schools, which have challenging honors programs. And a brand name isn’t the key to happiness or the meaning of life. Don’t tether your well-being to an illusory achievement so likely to let you down.