AP Research

The reason I pursued this research is that I’ve always been interested in pursuing a balance between my academic life and also trying to develop in other areas, such as getting a job, etc. However, what I noticed is that after entering high school, especially at BISV, the increased academic rigor threw off this balance as academics became the number one priority and decreased the time available to focus on other areas of personal development. I think this is a more general trend not just as students progress from middle to high school but also over the decades as high school, in general, has gotten more competitive as students compete for spots at the top colleges. This paper aims to establish a correlation between increased academic rigor in schools and decreased financial independence of high school students in the Bay Area. This region is one of the most competitive in the country, with students taking Advanced Placement and honors courses at extremely high numbers compared to the rest of the United States. I aim to identify if this increased academic rigor comes at a cost to the financial development of high school students. Are they working fewer part-time jobs? Are they creating fewer small businesses? I wish to collect data from multiple high schools throughout the Bay Area by surveying students, asking them how many APs they are taking and if they have ever worked for the purpose of earning money, and analyzing that data to determine if there is a correlational relationship between the two variables.