Around 75% of high school students report constant stress over homework and 30% of American teenagers say they feel sad or depressed due to academic stress. According to a 2024 study by Transforming Education, Academic pressure is a huge stressor on high school students and even middle school students. As soon as kids step into their classrooms— especially starting in ninth grade— teachers, parents, counselors, adults, and peers remind them that they have to do well in school to go to college. They are reminded constantly that they need to have a plan as to what they want to spend the rest of their lives doing. However a four year university isn’t the only option. Trade schools and other programs exist, offering more opportunities for the future.

While thinking about college won’t hurt, students don’t need to decide their whole future plan while in high school. The University of Tulsa put out an article, “Normalizing the Norm of Changing College Majors” which claimed that 80% of students in college change their major at least one time. When kids are pressured into picking a major, they might choose something they won’t really be happy with. High school kids are still young; they have limited experiences and their whole life ahead of them. We shouldn’t expect them to have their whole life planned out.

The stress that is put on students can also impact their mental health. The overabundance of school work, balance between clubs and extracurriculars on top of figuring out who they are, teenagers already have so much on their plates. When asked how the pressure to decide her future impacts her mental health, Freshman Emily Espinal Alvarez says “I feel a lot of anxiety and pressure from society, making that decision so early on is not good for you. Your brain isn’t fully developed and there’s a chance you could make a bad decision.” As she said, this stress can create deeper problems like anxiety and depression which can affect all parts of your life and is a hard cycle to break out of.

There are lot of people who graduate college and still have no idea what to do. The only way they can discover what they’re passionate about is through experience. Some people say they should’ve started sooner in life or that they should’ve chosen a different major, however the only reason they know they chose wrong was because they experienced it. They learned from that experience whether it was good or not. People grow and change over time, they could be happy doing something right now, but not happy with it in five years. We have a whole lifetime to experience life.

Instead of pressuring kids into deciding their paths in life, they should decide on their own time what they’d like to do. Kids should explore different careers and do things like volunteering or extracurriculars so they can develop their interests. It’s nice to have a plan, but if you need to go through trial and error to find it, that’s okay.