Senioritis is a policy choice
I am in my eighth year of teaching, and in six of those years,I have taught 12th graders. 12th graders are simultaneously one of the most exciting and frustrating groups to teach: first semester seniors are capable of having really thoughtful and interesting conversations, but come second semester, even the best students can become insufferable.
It’s hard to blame them, though: when I was a second-semester senior in high school, even as a very motivated student, I underwent a malaise that I’m sure drove my teachers nuts.
While I may not blame 12th graders, personally, the longer that I have taught, the more I have become convinced that senioritis is not an inevitability; in fact, it is an affliction peculiar to the United States. And as such, we must treat “senioritis” as nothing other than a policy choice–one that ought to be remedied.
As a teacher of seniors, you are supposed to maintain the illusion that senior year is important. I mean, I love civics, and I love teaching civics. But students know that practically, there is little chance I can fail them—it’s a required class, and few principals are going to let 12th graders not graduate because they failed a civics class their second semester senior year. And the stronger students know that, despite colleges’ threats, few are going to rescind admission over a B in a 12th grade class second semester.
Senioritis is a universally understood phenomenon–it’s a right of passage at the end of high school. And it’s nothing new: Leonard Butler of the New York Times describes it in 1976 as “restlessness, anxiety over the future, inability to concentrate, apathy and lack of motivation.” Educationist Albert J. Huggett describes it as early as 1946 as:
“Senioritis”. One of the hardest things to combat in the whole commencement set-up is “senioritis”. This may be defined as an exaggerated sense of personal importance which comes during the latter part of the senior year to many of the prospective graduates. It makes them hard to handle because they are likely to want their way at any cost. Seniors often must be handled very carefully indeed.”
And the phenomenon is apparently even older. A school newspaper from 1927 in Cleveland asks: “At what time in the year do Seniors have ‘Senioritis’? When?” And the Bowling Green State University newspaper states in 1932, ““Things we would like to see—…A Senior not afflicted with Senioritis”
Many students believe that once they have gotten to the second semester of senior year, they ought not be asked to do work. According to Stanford University:
“For the 70% of students who go on to postsecondary education directly after high school, the primary academic tasks for senior year are, in their view, to graduate on time and to secure admission to college. The first of these tasks may be accomplished by taking the easiest courses that meet the school’s graduation requirements. The second of these tasks usually does not require any effort after the first semester of senior year, since college admissions decisions do not rely on second-semester grades and colleges rarely withdraw an admissions offer to a prospect whose grades drop sharply.”
But Stanford goes on to explain that senioritis is a rational response to incentives 12th graders have been given.
“From this perspective, senior slump appears to be the rational response of high school seniors to an education system in which no one claims the academic content of the senior year as a basis for further education. Neither the K–12 system nor the postsecondary system provide any incentives for high school seniors to work hard. To understand this institutional disinterest in senior year, we must look at the almost total disjuncture between K–12 education and postsecondary education.”
So if senioritis is a natural response to incentives seniors are given, what can be done to fix it? There is one set of perennial reforms that takes senioritis as a given and seeks to make school more interesting so that seniors want to attend. As early as the 1960s, policymakers and administrators were wringing their hands about how to fix the scourge of senioritis. Chris Wellisz, writing in the New York Times in 1981, writes that schools like Evanston Township High School in Illinois, are experimenting with seminar courses that offer “field experiences”; Syosset High School in Long Island is experimenting with independent research projects. Virgil Tompkins, writing in The Phi Delta Kappan in 1975, explains that some schools are letting students take community college courses their senior year of high school–which Tompkins claims “all but eliminated the senioritis problem.”
Many of these interventions still remain in effect today; New York City, for instance, has a massive “College Now” program that allows high school students to take community college classes.
Yet, the problem of senioritis has remained constant. And that makes sense. Students going through the American education system for 12 years driven by rewards and punishments: grades, detentions, graduation, college acceptances. Then, in the second semester of senior year, pretty much every incentive and every punishment is, realistically, taken away. Yet we expect them to all of the sudden to have internal motivation: take exciting and interesting elective classes, do work for the sake of learning, even if the grade doesn't matter. The American system of rewards and punishments, however, suffocates intrinsic motivation, and we cannot expect students to all of the sudden turn on intrinsic motivation for a semester.
And so, if these interventions have not worked, what will work? Nothing short of burning down the 12th grade year as we know it.
This is not a revolutionary idea. Ewald B. Nyquist, the Commissioner of Education of New York in the 1970s, commissioned a study that concluded that (as described in the New York Times) “the answer to ‘senioritis’ might be to eliminate the senior year altogether.” Teacher Stephen B. Heller wonders in 2001 “whether this eighteen-year-old will learn any more by being in this school for another year.” And that same year, In 2001, The Department of Education–in the days leading up to the creation of No Child Left Behind–convened the National Commission on the High School Senior Year, a panel convened by several major education think tanks. They asked, “Why does everyone have to go to high school for four years?... If they can master the material in less time, why not let them move on?”
Senioritis is the natural culmination of our system of education that is based around “serving time,” which I have written about extensively. Rather than focusing on graduating students who have demonstrated mastery of certain content, we merely graduate all students who sit in seats long enough. And since 2020, the serving time model has completely fallen apart, revealing it for the fraud that it really is. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, we actually made students sit in these seats; but since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed, but schools, facing pressures to graduate all students in 4 years, continue to reward students. Starting with No Child Left Behind AYP requirements in 2007, and continuing under the Every Student Succeeds Act, schools were required to set graduation targets. So, senioritis has naturally gotten worse: we have even removed the incentive for students to come to class.
And the emphasis on seat-time, too, is clearly not actually rooted in…anything. State requirements for student seat time range from 700 hours per year to 1100 hours, and while some states reduce seat time requirements for 12th graders, it is usually by no more than a few dozen hours.
So, imagine that you have essentially completed all requirements to graduate and you had been accepted into college–but you were still required to come to school because of seat time requirements? Lacking any real incentive, students respond logically by ceasing to care.
The lack of importance of senior year credits is compounded by the peculiarity of the American college application calendar. Students in other countries frequently spend their final year of secondary school preparing for college entrance exams: students in the UK attend 6th form or “college” to prepare for A-Level exams, which are used in university admission; students in France attend grand lycées to prepare for college exams; senior high schools in China work to prepare students for the Gaokao. All of these are traditionally taken at the end of your last year of secondary school and have huge impacts on your college choice.
If the US were trying to create a system that made absolutely no sense, it succeeded. In the US, top students frequently submit college applications as early as October, and they take their SATs in their junior year. Moreover, the tests students take for high school have little to no impact on their acceptance to college. SATs and ACTs–not state standardized tests based on subject content–determine a student’s college opportunities. Universities emphasize that junior year grades are most important and that they will look at first semester senior grades; and while universities threaten to revoke acceptances if you get a particularly bad case of senioritis, few, in reality, do.
What’s also uniquely American is the extent to which seniors in high school must work. The United States has a repulsive 16% child poverty rate, and as such, more high school students in the US have to work–three times as many final year students have jobs in the US as in other developed countries. The National Commission on the High School Senior Year reports: “Only in the United States is working during high school commonplace, particularly among those bound for university studies. No other advanced country expects students to work, or permits them to work long hours just to have spending money.” One student says, ““By the senior year I was done with math. I was done with history, I was done with all the other classes. I was just taking a bunch of other classes that I didn’t need…I’d rather be going to work and doing something else than this.
In addition to the policy problems that make senioritis a uniquely American phenomenon, it is likely that other forces are at play, too. While mentions of senioritis were essentially nonexistent until 1930–and really didn’t start increasing until the 1970s–this also reflected the expansion of high school to significantly larger parts of the population. Prior to the 1920s, the vast majority of people going to high school were college-bound and represented the elite of society; in 1900, only 6% of Americans had graduated from high school. By the 1940s, a majority of Americans earned diplomas.
In the post-war years, even more students attended high school, but post-war prosperity gave teenagers a sense of independence; middle-class jobs could be obtained even without a high school diploma, and women could more easily attain financial independence from their families. With the increase in economic independence and great access to secondary education, teenagers also developed a clearer, independent identity. Being in high school went from being narrow, adult-guided “character development” of naive, impressionable, and frequently well-off youth to a way to develop your own independence and personality–a cultural marker. Indeed, the rise in the use of “senioritis” increases right around this time period. Grade Palladino writes in Teenagers: An American History (1996):
“Teenagers rule their own social space, too. As a group, they have come to expect a level of personal freedom that is limited only by their own sense of decorum and discipline—a remarkable shift from the days before the Second World War, then high school students were supposed to put heir free time to good use, preparing for adult futures. In the 1990s, they assume they have what the papers call ‘a right to party’ (whether they exercise the right or not), and the take it for granted that their teenage years are prime time to let off steam with their friends.”
Yet, even though the economics of education have changed, senioritis has remained; high school education (and even college or vocational education) are necessary to achieve middle class jobs, and high schools face immense pressures to graduate all students; but culturally, 12th graders (and now there are a lot more of them!), still act with the cultural abandon that started in the 1960s. Palladino continues:
“[A]mbitious teenagers who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s were already well aware that they would have to make money (and plenty of it) to live almost as well as their parents did….Those with no taste or talent for schoolwork, or no interest in science and the technical world, face the greatest obstacles. For unlike their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s, who could at least look forward to good manufacturing jobs, regardless of how they spent their teenage years, teens today cannot expect to support themselves (let alone a family) without a solid education. This economic wake-up call has fashioned a new public image for teenagers. No longer amusing adolescents eager to ape adult styles or cultural rebels in conflict with society’s constraints, the 1990s teenagers are presumed to be a mixed bag of independent, risk-taking individuals, forced to grow up too fast in a dangerous, demanding world.”
Perhaps senioritis is a rational response to the dread of being thrown into our economy: there are no incentives to do anything; you will likely not be rewarded for work in college, unless you go to a select number of schools and graduate (most community college students do not graduate); the jobs that you are likely to receive are boring and meaningless (at least ⅓ of Americans are not satisfied by their jobs, and this increases the less your income is, and only half of Americans say they are satisfied by the tasks they do at work); and your senior year of high school may be the last time you have to really slack off for a sustained period of time until you retire.
Senioritis is a culmination of competing forces, any one of which would be enough to topple even teenagers with the strongest of constitutions. Our schools have quashed internal motivation, yet we expect 18 year olds to have it; we demand that our 18 year olds both support their families and attend classes that have no impact on their lives; we expect independence….but not too much independence! In order to fix senioritis, we must first fix the senior year.
