Academic Pressure on Rise for Teens, Poll Finds

High school students are more pessimistic about the future of the country and feeling more stress over grades, compared with their counterparts earlier this decade, but are still confident about their own futures, according to a report released today.

The latest edition of “The State of Our Nation’s Youth,” which has published poll results episodically since 1996, finds a marked increase in academic pressure reported among the nation’s teenagers.

The proportion of students reporting that pressure to get good grades creates a problem for them increased from 62 percent in 2001 to 79 percent this year, according to the report, which was issued by The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans , a Washington-based nonprofit educational association. Over that same period, the percentage of those reporting grade pressure who classified it as “major” has risen 19 percentage...