The 2024-2025 school year has gotten past its early stages, and as October closes, students new and old come to classes in the swing of things. Seniors, who have already taken three full years of schooling, begin to reenter the same routine once again, and it is at this time when a certain phenomenon begins to appear.
Some students, when nearing the end of their time at a school have been showing signs of fatigue and loss of motivation throughout many past decades and up to today. The term “senioritis” has been colloquially used since 1957 to describe this and is defined by Oxford Languages as “a supposed affliction of students in their final year of high school or college, characterized by a decline in motivation or performance” though it particularly refers to students declining in attendance and effort on assignments after having been accepted into a college or university.
At Foothill Technology High School (Foothill Tech), students manifest these traits like in any other school, with Dragons already witnessing or suffering from senioritis. Joshua Gonzalez ‘25, when asked about if he saw such symptoms, claimed “I see grades dropping, people being lazy, I myself have homework due next class, and I haven’t finished it yet.”
Tino Velasco ‘25 similarly claims to have seen many in the same boat adding “not as [many] people are really trying as much, because they know they have their A-G requirements already done and they’re thinking they don’t need to really try anymore … a lot of people are just dropping classes because they don’t really care.”
Caleb Franco ‘27, a lowerclassmen with an alumni sibling, saw evidence of this too, asserting that only in his older brother’s senior year he “procrastinated on [homework] and did it at night” adding “I think that as people in high school realize they have to do more and more work their motivation kinda goes down.”
Multiple studies condemn this affliction and proclaim its danger to the afflicted. An article produced by Psychology Today and written by Carl Pickhardt claims that seniors are more susceptible to exerting less effort in school as they may be consistently seeing their friends for only one more year. While this is understood, Pickhardt maintains that “Socially they may be in great shape to cope with the college experience, but academically they have grown rusty and this may be one contributor to the low average college retention rate … that hovers around 50 percent — about half of entering freshmen failing to graduate from the college in which they first enroll.”
Similarly, in Volume 41, issue one of the NACADA Journal, it is claimed that senioritis is mainly present because there is a culture of less social expectation for maintaining academic momentum in seniors stating “Students will remain intrinsically motivated and will engage in adequately structured academic environments where they are challenged with high expectations, where their autonomy is supported with opportunities to align their behaviors with their values and interests and where they experience meaningful relationships with instructors.”
These opinions are not unpopular at Foothill Tech. Melanie “Captain” Lindsey, a former senior English teacher and current AP Psychology teacher, not only sees “a very definite drop [in motivation] from quarter two to three [in seniors],” but warns of greater dangers than Pickhardt.
According to Lindsey, “Seniors have this misguided idea that once they have submitted their college applications and made it through semester [one] … they think that they’re golden, and they’re not because colleges look at your [second semester in senior year] grades and we’ve had students removed from their dorms because their semester … grades did not match the rest of their year grades.”
While senioritis may sound like a stretch or exaggerated idea, its presence among the soon-to-graduate in high school is hard to deny. Many students nationally, for better or worse, are making the most of their last few months of high school. While students may side with Pickhardt, or see the danger Lindsey poses, they may also understand the cumulative weight of high school, looming college duties and the parting of ways among friends, possibly causing the warnings to fall by the wayside. Either way, in the sense of survival, senioritis is alive and kicking, and may be in the future of any current high school student.
