Why We Don't Need Valedictorians
My son Ben graduated from high school over the weekend. What no one in the jubilant crowd seemed to 
miss was a speech by a valedictorian.
To its great credit, High Tech High in San Diego doesn't believe in class ranks so there wasn't a valedictorian or a salutatorian.
Plenty of high schools, however, are moving in the opposite direction. At some schools, according to a story in The New York Times, multiple students are claiming the right to be valedictorians. A school in Houston selected 30 valedictorians and one Colorado school district produced a total of 94 valedictorian among eight schools. A school on Long Island just honored seven valedictorians.
Why the valedictorian inflation?
Many bright students are so focused on getting into top schools that they kill themselves by taking four or five Advanced Placement classes each semester. High schools don't want to disappoint these overachievers, who sacrificed so much to obtain gargantuan grade point averages, so they split the valedictorian prize.
Getting the top grades isn't automatically going to guarantee a student a spot at a school that rejects nearly everyone. There are more than 20,000 high schools in this country, which means there are at least 20,000 valedictorians.
Is There Enough Room for All the Valedictorians?
If you add up the freshmen slots -- and that's what I did over the weekend -- at the nation's top 10 ranked universities and top 10 liberal arts colleges, there are 19,000 spots. If these schools only took valedictorians, there wouldn't be room for anyone else. These colleges, however, have the luxury of taking a more holistic approach to admissions so grades are just one part of the equation.You might be thinking that as long as your child overloads on AP classes, it won't matter if he or she is named a valedictorian. But even there, I'd have to disagree that teens need to overdose academically to get into great colleges.
My son's school doesn't believe AP classes -- the administration has dismissed AP classes as providing learning a mile wide and just an inch deep. And yet somehow without inflated grades and valedictorians, the teenagers at my son's high school do all right when they apply for college. Among the 150 or so graduates on the stage were teenagers heading to Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, Mount Holyoke, Air Force Academy, Stanford University, UCLA, University of California, Berkeley, Notre Dame and many other excellent schools.
These students pulled it off without completely sacrificing four years of their lives. Now that's something to celebrate.
Lynn O'Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller, and she also writes for TheCollegeSolutionBlog. Follow her on Twitter.