It’s a historically odd phenomenon that in our current academic system, the most consequential year is your junior year of high school. You’re expected to work the hardest you may ever work at ages 16-17 in order to determine your future, in college or elsewhere. Senior year is an awkward step down, spent continuing and winding down on the obligations you signed up for in the heat of the previous year. 

As seniors soft quit their clubs and excommunicate their teachers from December through March, it can be tempting to place blame on them as lazy quitters. Senioritis is instead a rational response to the system of perverse incentives by which students determine their post-secondary plans.

The college application process encourages students to take on responsibilities that they wouldn’t otherwise; either they lack the time to commit or they don’t actually care about the topic, often both. Students find themselves in a space race to see who can take the hardest classes, join the most clubs, and push themselves the farthest in order to compete for increasingly competitive slots in post-secondary opportunities. This is an explicit alternative to a healthier system where students take classes and join clubs solely because they want to gain something out of them.

This phenomenon presents serious problems to clubs and classes that are filled with a critical mass of students who are trying to optimize for the least possible effort, as opposed to maximizing the value that they get out of them in terms of learning and experience. If you’re only taking a class for your college prospects, you aren’t going to try and milk it for every ounce of learning available to you; you’re going to do as little as you humanly can in order to maintain the grade you want. The result is an atrophy of learning, in which classrooms and extracurriculars become transactions in which students perform the bare minimum in return for a credential to embellish their applications. Teachers are no longer helping students achieve their high school goals but instead gatekeeping them through rigorous grading.

The disinterest in learning as opposed to gaining a credential is palpable, and is epitomized by the natural experiment which occurs when a class goes without a teacher. Several classes in the past few years have lacked a teacher for extended periods of time, notably environmental science and physics. When the students in these classes were essentially denied the opportunity to learn content for extended periods of time, for the most part they didn’t complain. The sense was that as long as they got their A, they were happy to sit in class and watch paint dry. But when their grades were in question, things got heated. 

What forms in a situation like this–– where students are mostly in a class because it will look pretty on their transcript, and the administration doesn’t want to deal with the headache of nagging families–– is an unspoken contract in which the students get A’s in exchange for not incessantly complaining to the administration about not having a teacher, i.e. learning. When students complain to the administration about their substitute teachers making them do work, it’s not typically because the subs are holding them to higher standards of academic conduct than an average teacher, it’s that the administration is failing to hold up their end of the bargain–– to guarantee an easy A. What’s lost in this transaction is both education and a sense of academic integrity as grades are no longer reflecting learning but instead shrewd career management.

Senioritis is the process by which students return to a normal set of incentives, the transaction over and post-secondary plans made. With the pressure off, seniors are making different cost-benefit calculations about how to use their time. 

And yes, that means that some seniors will gradually stop showing up to their calculus classes and cease attending the weekly meetings of the Greenhouse Club. They’re not showing up because they decided that it isn’t worth it; they chose to prioritize social life or another interest. That’s okay. What it also means is that the people who do show up are there because they want to be. They’re there because they want to learn or to gain experience from it. That’s a good thing — we should be encouraging it.

In the age of an unprecedented youth mental health crisis, we should resist the puritanic urge to scold the kids for easing off and recognize that the real problem is the high-pressure culture that encourages disingenuity in the first place.