The Winged Post is the official student newspaper of our campus, printed for for the people who walk through the halls, for those who teach us, and for the members of the faculty whom we encounter every day. We strive to tell the stories of the community we serve.

The last issue of every year attracts particular attention from both those within and without our community for one reason: the college map, simultaneously an emblem of our seniors’ success and the tremendous expectations levelled on them.

Let’s be clear: we believe that the commodification of the college map — two pages intended to celebrate the achievements and hard work of the seniors — runs contrary to our values as a school.

Last year, the staff contended with the very publication of the college spread; while it was eventually published, then-editors of the Winged Post published an editorial about how each senior is more than the college they choose to attend. Reducing them, purposefully or implicitly to a data point, is not the kind of mindset we seek to perpetuate as a publication.

The topic of the college map resurfaced again this year as we planned out this seventh issue, and we again debated the merits and demerits of its publication. Like last year, we concluded that the map is a service to both the seniors, the majority of whom are proud to report the colleges they will spend the next four years at, and the faculty, who also take pride in knowing the institutions that their students attend. It stops being a service to the community when it is co-opted by those who simply see students and their colleges as statistics to be counted.

Unfortunately, this over-glorification of the college map touches all members of our community — not just the seniors. When we asked a room full of freshman journalists if they had seen the college map during their time in the middle school, all of them raised their hands, having been shown the newspaper by parents. Middle school students as young as 11 and 12 are already being exposed to the pressure to attend a prestigious university.

We want to emphasize: the college spread is intended for the upper school student body, the families of our seniors, our alumni and our dedicated faculty — nobody else.

The falling admissions rates at elite institutions correlates with an uptick in student stress – the American Psychological Association reports that 31 percent of teenagers feel “overwhelmed” and that 30 percent feel depressed and sad as a result of stress. A Wesleyan University honors thesis written by Laura Deborah Fields in 2011 attested that 61.1 percent of students believed that pressure for going to a prestigious college was a barrier to stress reduction.

In December of last year, the “Atlantic” published a long-form feature entitled “The Silicon Valley Suicides”, an account of the incredible pressure to succeed at several Bay Area high schools. While their communities are different from ours in many ways, the pressure to attend a prestigious “top 10” school is strikingly similar.

It’s time for us to change that narrative. When you open the center spread this year, where the college map once was, you’re going to notice a few changes from previous years — for one, we’ve done away with the design of a map that categorizes, and thereby defines, students by the school they attend, separating them from and grouping them with one another on that basis. Readers can get a glimpse of the community as it looks best — all together.

Most importantly, each senior has written a few words of advice to the community: parting shots, wisdom and words of reassurance to the next generation of students. We’ve asked them to give back some of their hard-earned experience. We can’t stop those who would dissect the map and reduce us to statistics, but we can show them, in a few words, the hopes, dreams and advice of 187 graduating seniors from our school.

Every student, parent, and faculty member at our school has a choice: we can deify the college spread and chalk up each senior as a tally-mark under the institution of their choice. Or we can congratulate them as they move onto the next stage of their lives — tell them to explore, live life on their own terms and enjoy themselves. When you flip open to the pages of the college spread, the choice is yours.