A new survey asked Americans about their high school experiences, honing in on a few commonalities, including having a crush on someone (87 percent), having a group of friends (83 percent), attending a school football game (68 percent) and lying to your parents (67 percent). That last question just shows that at least 33 percent of respondents don’t mind lying to pollsters. Some responses were perhaps painted with the warm patina of memory, as just 10 percent of people said they had bullied someone, which sounds like a Liz Lemon situation if I’ve heard one. One interesting crosstab is the death of the high school job. While 72 percent of respondents aged 45 and up had a job in high school, just 50 percent of those aged 18 to 44 did. This makes sense; that’s what happens when an entire generation of students and parents realize that (aggregated across lifetime earnings) the marginal utility of spending an hour studying for the SAT almost certainly exceeds minimum wage.
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