It’s Wednesday, and 19-year-old Amanda Oye seems remarkably upbeat despite the fact that she’s running on less than five hours of sleep: this is a rare moment of free time in the midst of a 40-hour workweek. She sips coffee as she describes how she came to bury herself under an ever-growing mountain of stress.

“I only have half an hour or so to talk; I have to be in class soon,” Oye says. She also shoots a nervous glance at her cellphone. Her place of work has already called three times in the 15-minute span since she sat down in the foyer of Kwantlen University College’s Richmond campus. “It’s hard sometimes,” Oye says. “I can’t get away from work no matter where I go. They rely on me.”

Like an increasing number of those of college age and younger, Oye is stressed-out, worn through, and on the verge of breaking down.

Oye, a journalism student, has been working at this breakneck pace for as long as she’s been able. Aside from the long hours she puts in for pay, she is enrolled full-time at Kwantlen, coaches soccer on the weekend, and is involved in competitive cheerleading almost daily. She estimates her precious moments of downtime add up to less than one day a week.

Despite the grind, Oye didn’t come here to complain. Instead, she makes it very clear that she believes this lifestyle is what she needs.

She’s one of a swelling number of youths who are burning the candle at both ends, fearful of falling behind. The halcyon days of youth are becoming a proving ground for the next wave of workers.

Statistics Canada has reported that a record-high 45.9 percent of college-age students worked during the 2004-05 school year, the last time this data was recorded. Even before high school ends, 39 percent of Canadian teens feel they are constantly under pressure, and 16 percent consider themselves workaholics. A troubling 69 percent said they cut down on sleep to compensate.

Oye is unaware of those numbers but doesn’t seem surprised. She describes how, at her peak, she could feel her mental health fraying.

“I used to wake up shaking in the middle of the night, panicking about not being at work, that I was late,” Oye says. “It was only after a little while that I’d realize that it was the middle of the night. But when I finally got back to sleep, I just dreamed about work, dreamed about failing at school.”

Oye had to cut back. She had a mounting sleep debt, felt nervous and paranoid, and was losing touch with friends and family. But it was only when faced with the choice of cutting back or breaking down that Oye chose to quit one job and take on fewer hours at the other.

Although Oye buckled under the weight on her shoulders, there are far too many others who have broken. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death in Canada for youths aged 15 to 25, according to the Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention Centre of B.C., which also relays that up to 10 percent of high-school students will have attempted suicide by the end of their high-school years (and that two-thirds will have considered the subject) and that stress is one of the most common causes of suicidal feelings.

Andrea Staples is the program coordinator for YouthinBC.com, a service (with real-time on-line chats) for youth in crisis provided by the Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention Centre of B.C. She says that the stress being put on students to succeed plays a large role in these numbers.

“When I was in school, which wasn’t that long ago, we were required to get good grades but there wasn’t nearly as much pressure to be involved in as many things,” Staples tells the Georgia Straight by phone. “Now there is an increasing pressure for students to not only get good grades but to excel in many other aspects of their life. The amount of on-line chats we’re getting from students who feel overwhelmed by this pressure has increased significantly since 2004.”

Staples points out that the increase in cries for help has been startling. Since 2006, the number of chats on the site regarding suicide has doubled. In fact, Staples reports that there have also been significant increases in chats
regarding other mental-health-related issues, such as self-harm, depression, and anxiety.

Stanford University lecturer Denise Pope is the author of Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students (Yale University Press, 2001), and she has extensively researched the causes of stress in youth. She is critical of the materialism that leaves students running in the red.

“There’s definitely a feeling of ‘more is better’ that’s being created, and it’s not healthy,” Pope tells the Straight over the phone.

“We’re seeing students now who are being pushed, sometimes by themselves, to take on far more than they can handle because they believe that this is the route to success. This isn’t right, this is a way to create workaholics.”

Pope isn’t sure exactly when things changed for youth or when the push to get ahead became an all-consuming drive, but she thinks that the changing role of education has something to do with it. According to Statistics Canada, an advanced-degree recipient makes on average $25,000 more than those with just a high-school education.

“The college degree of today is almost like the high-school degree of yesterday,” Pope says. “You have more people applying to college, and with that comes a ‘more is better’ attitude. There’s this misconception that you need to get into a frenzy of extracurriculars.

“Not everyone needs to start a nonprofit before college, but there’s a mindset that you do.”

Although some students don’t want to push themselves to the breaking point, they are now, more than ever, finding that the breaking point is being pushed on them. Faced with tuition costs in B.C. that have risen an average of 91.5 percent since the 2000-01 school year, students are realizing that, in many cases, education now requires at least a part-time job.

Lorrie Haelter is 19 years old, and has the messy thrift-store appearance of a cost-conscious student. She works full-time, but unlike Oye, she’d rather not. She says that the costs of school, along with strict parents, have forced her into the working-student grind.

“My parents told me from day one that they couldn’t afford to bankroll my college but they wanted me to do better than they did,” she says in a Starbucks on the UBC campus. “Everyone would like more free time, but that’s not the kind of life we’re living. My parents know that school is the way to success, and they made sure that I knew it too.”

When asked if she ever feels like letting success take a back seat to health, Haelter laughs and shakes her head.

“If I end up living in some shithole, making less than poverty because I didn’t push myself now, my parents would kill me and I’d probably help them,” she says.

Although their backgrounds are different, Oye and Haelter both believe that success in society comes through strenuous competition, sacrificing free time to take the right path, which, in B.C., is getting narrower. University admission averages have been rising steadily, and UBC now tops out at 86 percent.

But while competition grows here, there are calls for rigours to be loosened overseas. Highly competitive Japan has been in an economic tailspin since the bubble of the mid-1980s, and the Japanese are beginning to question if their emphasis on “cram schools”,
weekend classes, all-or-nothing tests, and long working hours is partially to blame.

“We’re seeing an education panic in Japan right now, with many Japanese pointing the finger of blame at their educational system,” says Julian Dierkes, a UBC sociology professor who has studied and written extensively on postwar Japan and its educational system. “A lot of Japanese are lamenting the lack of creativity education brought them and that their youth is a time for working instead of developing.”

According to Dierkes, even as Japanese point the finger of blame at their school system, North America is moving closer to it.

“We’re seeing less cram schools over there, but we’re seeing more over here,” says Dierkes, who counts roughly 40 cram schools operating in Vancouver now. “We’re seeing that entrance requirements are getting tighter and tighter for Canadian universities, but we don’t have the sort of high-stakes testing that they have in Japan. As a result, there’s not just one exam to cram for; the process of making yourself look good to employers is nebulous, more ongoing.”

But right now, Amanda Oye and Lorrie Haelter don’t care about flaws in Japanese education, or whether they are pushing themselves too hard to attain a perfection that doesn’t exist. Haelter has to go to work, and Oye has a test to study for.

“I’m not ashamed to tell anyone about who I am and what I do,” Oye says. “I look at friends who are just wasting their time and I think about how they could be pushing themselves so much harder and really making something of their lives. That’s what I’m doing.”