Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tours U.S. high schools delivering what she hopes will be a wakeup call. The pressure on students to get into top colleges is ruining their health, she says. It's time to lighten up.

``We are raising the most anxious, sleep-deprived, judged and tested, poorly nourished generation steeped in stress in the universe,'' Jones told parents at Manhattan's Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in November.

The frenzy Jones worries about climaxes this week as colleges tell students if they've gained early admission. Her message is part of a growing movement among high school and college officials to deflate competition for entrance to top colleges and the anxiety that accompanies it.

A chorus of parents, admissions officers and high school guidance counselors welcomes the counsel. They also say they are skeptical about whether the advice can be followed when it takes ever-higher scores and grades to get in. Cambridge-based MIT rejected 84 percent of its 10,455 applicants last year.

``This sounds great, but if I do it, will my son be at a disadvantage?'' a parent asked Mark Speyer, director of College Counseling at Columbia Grammar and Prep, after hearing Jones speak last month at the $27,000-a-year school on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where 80 of 92 seniors were awaiting word on early acceptance.

``When we try to preach any instruction to lighten up, we find we usually just aren't trusted,'' says Bruce Poch, 49, dean of admissions and vice president at Pomona College in Claremont, California. ``They are convinced it's a trap.''

`Too Stressed'

In Wayland, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, the public high school offered students a yoga class last year to alleviate stress.

``It didn't work,'' says the school's principal, Charles Ruopp, 54. ``They said they were too stressed and didn't have the time to go.''

New Trier, a public high school of 4,100 students in Winnetka, Illinois, outside of Chicago, is encountering resistance to a proposal to make a lunch period mandatory and keep students from piling electives into their schedules, says Superintendent Henry Bangser.

In the Boston suburb of Wellesley, the public high school looked for ways to reduce anxiety after the suicides of two students in the past two years, says guidance director Thom Hughart.

Exams Canceled

The school canceled mid-term exams set for January partly to keep students from having to study over the holidays. Last spring, inspired by a talk from MIT's Jones, the school formed a panel that is working to reduce college-admission tension.

The obsession of many students and their parents with getting into top schools isn't easily eradicated, says Denise Pope, a lecturer at Stanford University's School of Education in Stanford, California.

``No one wants to be the sacrificial lamb or the first to blink,'' says Pope, 39, the author of ``Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students'' (Yale University Press, 2001).

To spread her message of calm more widely, MIT's Jones challenges other admissions officers at conferences to be more broad-minded about who gets in.

``Do you really need to see kids with all A's?'' Jones said during a College Board conference in New York in November. ``I'm telling you right now that MIT does not. I beg you to have the courage to admit the best match, not the ones with the perfect scores.''

New Essay

Jones has also reduced the spaces on MIT's application for listing extracurricular activities and has added the essay question: ``What do you do for the pure pleasure of it?''

This week, Jones posted a guest entry on an MIT Web page in which she empathizes with those rejected and discusses her own daughter's current college-admissions anxiety. Hundreds of students and parents, responding on Web sites that picked up the entry, thanked Jones. Others complained that it was disingenuous, with all except 12 percent of early applicants rejected at MIT.

Barbara Gross, an associate vice president for development at Babson College in Wellesley and the mother of a Wellesley High senior, says colleges are partly responsible for creating the stress Jones decries.

``The colleges send messages to the kids to distinguish themselves above and beyond what a normal 17-year-old could presume to accomplish in their short lives, given all the distractions,'' Gross says.

Colleges' Role

Admissions deans such as Jennifer Delahunty Britz of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, say colleges can play a part in ratcheting down stress.

Kenyon, where applications have doubled in five years to 4,000 from 2,000, streamlined its application by removing eight of 24 pages, she says, and tries to make interviews fun by asking students, for example, if they would rather be a pirate or a cowboy.

The University of Chicago encourages personal expression, noting on its application: ``We care about your grades and scores but also about what you read and the movies you like. We want to hear your story.''

Poch, of Pomona, says his staff is trying to be more humane by spreading the word that the college doesn't want a class of hyperactive, high-scoring overachievers. Pomona chose its freshman class of 383 last year from 5,054 applicants.

``The student who actually has a job during the year or the summer and who actually did let his hair down a bit and did breathe is going to look pretty appealing,'' he says.

Dad's Endorsement

Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, told high school students for the first time this year that they may submit an additional recommendation letter from a parent, sibling or friend. ``We really do want to understand them as well as possible as real people, as individuals,'' says Dean of Admissions Christoph Guttentag.

Tension builds immediately for those high school seniors seeking early admission. Colleges such as the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, offer the option. It allows students who are clear on their first choice of college to get an answer early, usually by mid-December. If accepted, the choice is binding.

Because financial aid typically isn't offered to applicants until March or April, less-affluent students often don't have the option of seeking an early decision.

Stanford, which chose its 2005 freshman class of 1,630 from 20,194 applicants, finds that some of its high achievers arrive already burned out, Pope says.

``We have dorms full of stressed-out kids who have mortgaged their adolescence to get in, and they aren't resilient,'' says Pope, a founder of the SOS-Stressed Out Students Project, which counsels schools on alleviating pressures.

Running on Empty

``There are people who arrive at college out of gas,'' says William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ``It's crazy for students to think in lockstep they must take four or five or six advanced-placement courses because colleges demand it.''

Fitzsimmons and his staff dub some applicants ``summer school warriors'' because they spend every vacation enrolled in academic programs.

``It's not clear they've ever been exposed to fresh air,'' he says.

Harvard posted on its admissions Web site an essay Fitzsimmons co-wrote entitled ``Time Out Or Burnout For The Next Generation,'' where he worries about the fallout of a fast-track life aimed at getting into ``the right'' schools.

`Rigorous Curricula'

Still, Harvard is demanding. Its admissions Web site says: ``The strongest applicants take the most rigorous secondary school curricula available to them.'' In addition to four years of English, math and one foreign language, Harvard wants four years of science -- biology, chemistry, physics, and an advanced course in one of these subjects.

Harvard accepted only 2,074, or 9.1 percent, of a record 22,796 applicants last year.

Doctors at the American Academy of Pediatrics are concerned about the pressures, says Kenneth Ginsburg, a Philadelphia adolescent-medicine specialist and academy member. Ginsburg is co-writing a book on the topic with MIT's Jones, to be published by the Elk Grove Village, Illinois-based academy.

``We worry about eating disorders, mutilation and the consequences of perfectionism,'' says Ginsburg, 43. ``There is a fear of failure that comes from kids being pushed too hard.''

Nonlethal self-injury such as cutting can arise during puberty and is often associated with low self-esteem, anxiety and depression.

Depression on Rise

Across the U.S., the number of college students diagnosed with depression has increased 56 percent over six years, to 16 percent of students in 2005 from 10 percent in 2000, according to a 2005 study by the Baltimore-based American College Health Association, which represents campus health services.

Ninety percent of those diagnosed in the U.S. with eating disorders such as bulimia or anorexia are adolescents and young women, according to the Eating Disorders Coalition, a Washington advocacy group.

Jones's mental health campaign has been bolstered by Lloyd Thacker, a former college counselor and author of ``College Unranked, Ending the College Admissions Frenzy'' (Harvard University Press, 2003). Thacker's nonprofit Education Conservancy in Portland, Oregon, is receiving support from college presidents and admissions deans.

`Gut-Wrenching Things'

Thacker attracts standing-room-only audiences as he decries college admissions as too commercial and market-driven. He encourages students to forget about impressing others and think about what they are interested in learning.

``At the private school where I worked, I saw terrible, gut-wrenching things -- kids who felt they had to lie about their interests in sports to get in, crying if they didn't make the top,'' says Thacker. ``These over-polished, over-refined, high-end kids are completely missing it.''

The New York suburb of Scarsdale, north of Manhattan, urges seniors to be discreet when they hear from colleges this week, says Principal John Klemme. About three quarters of the seniors applied early, and more than 98 percent go to college.

``We tell them, `Some of your peers are going to be very happy, walking around high-fiving their friends, and others are going to be really disappointed,''' says Klemme.

The high school may also eliminate vacation homework and is studying the impact of limiting advanced-placement exams that offer college credit, Klemme says.

At Wellesley High, Gross's daughter, Claire Chazen, 17, says the chill-out message she heard from Jones earlier this year left her skeptical at first.

Mom's Alma Mater

``I thought, who is she, coming from one of the most prestigious and hard-to-get-into universities in the country, telling us not to be stressed out about getting in?'' Chazen says. ``Then I realized what she had to say was valid.''

That hasn't stopped Chazen from using every available advantage -- including SAT tutors and the private college- admissions consultant her parents hired -- to help shape her application to her mother's alma mater, Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

Chazen has adopted her own anti-stress message to cope with the early-decision news when it comes this week, good or bad. ``My friends and I have a don't-talk-about-it pact,'' she says.

To contact the reporter on this story: Liz Willen in New York at ewillen@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: December 15, 2005 00:07 EST