Where is students' pressure from?

   My students from a general-education class studied why the present generation of young people appeared not as strong as the older generation in coping with pressures. They said the examination pressures were higher than before. Meanwhile, today’s teenagers grew up in an environment where parents took too much care of their children. As a consequence, today’s youngsters often failed to foster the ability to properly cope with the examination pressures themselves, some even resorted to suicide as a means to avoid facing the pressures.

   I am not immediately convinced that examination pressure is higher nowadays than in the past. Opportunities to study in universities have doubled over the past few decades. It should only be easier to get into universities for the present generation of teenagers than in the past.

   My students also suggested that examination became more important for today’s students and so the pressure was higher. However, I actually witness how universities make allowance for various types of non-academic performance such as sports and some special extra-curricular activities. In comparison with the past, examination is less important for university admissions.

   I also want to say examinations are much easier today than in the past.

   My students replied by saying that securing a higher degree (such as a bachelor degree from university) was much more important now than a few decades ago. (This means that even if exam is less important for you to get into university, getting into university is more important in life than in the past.) I agree. Also, I agree that academic result is still the most important (though slightly less important) assessment criteria of admissions.

   Nevertheless, it is then the social rewarding system that matters, not the examination pressure that matters. If there are more examinations and examinations are harder, then we can say examination pressure is higher. But this is not true. Examinations are fewer (for a normal high-school student not intending to study overseas) and easier than a few decades ago. So, what matters is that the consequence of getting an unsatisfactory result in examination is worse than before. What are the changes in the consequences? There might be two changes.

   Firstly, as mentioned by students, it could be that higher-education degrees are much more important today than in the past. Although universities degrees have doubled, non-university jobs may also decrease substantially. Today if one cannot get a university degree, it is more difficult to find a decent job than in the past. What we need today is skilled labour instead of unskilled labour as in the past.

   Secondly, the payoff structure may also matter. Even if it is easier to find jobs without a university degree, the payoff may be substantially lower when you do not have a degree. Suppose the rewarding structure in our society has become increasingly skew. This means securing the first place will get a high pay. But the first runner-up may get substantially lower pay. The second runner-up gets even much lower pay, and so on, and so on. In the past, perhaps being the first may not be better than the second very much but now this difference is very large. With such a change in payoff structure, people should feel a very high pressure from any contests because becoming the winner or not makes a very big difference. Modern economy is turning towards skill-oriented. Unskilled labour can be easily substituted by outsourcing the jobs overseas (or perhaps, one day, by robots). Our current payoff structure seems to become skewed to the top. In a “winner-take-all” society like this, people will really be stressed. (Cornell economist Robert H. Frank has written a book The Winner-Take-All Society, demonstrating this phenomenon and trying to explain.)

   Nonetheless, this is a consequence from a society change. An educational reform (such as emphasizing less on examination result and more on creativity) cannot help. People will still feel stressed when they are judged based on other (non-exam-based) criteria. Anyway, the society will find some ways to pick the winners and the income gaps between the winners and the losers are still big. Unfortunately, if the above observation is true, youngsters will still be facing pressures even if the education or examination system is reformed. Even if the system is changed by de-emphasizing exams (e.g. everyone will get the same exam grades),  they still have to face the non-exam-based competition in society.

   Well, if you believe in this analysis, we have to conclude that things cannot be easily solved by changing educational requirements when elsewhere bosses or the society do not change their requirements or rewarding schedule. People often tend to blame the education system when they discover that students face high pressure, saying that the education system should be reformed into a more creativity-oriented and less exam-oriented. The above analysis does not support this response. It reveals that solutions to students' pressure are even harder than reforming an education system: we are not able to persuade bosses or other institutions not to reward winners by a skewed payoff structure. 
   Yes, perhaps things cannot be so easily solved. But, at least, identifying the problem correctly is the first step to solve any problems, especially for economists (or economics students) whose primary task is to explain phenomenon.