Ambitious students at a Connecticut high school sacrifice sleep, TV, and time with friends to keep a straight-A average, a reporter for the school’s newspaper has found.

Sydney Rubin, writing for The Round Table and published in the Stamford Advocate, interviewed three high-achieving Stamford High School juniors and found that maintaining a 4.0 average while participating in extracurricular activities comes at a cost.

“I truly love all the activities I participate in,” said Samantha Heller, “but it leaves me little time to do other things I love like bake, play the piano, and read.”

Extracurricular activities such as band, sports, student government, and volunteering keep students away from home until as late as 7:00 p.m. Top students make things work by skipping dinner with their families, isolating themselves from friends, and not watching TV.

These students also sacrifice sleep. “It’s common to see plenty of sleep-deprived students in Stamford High AP classes,” Rubin writes.

Junior Rohith Naralasetty has two coffees at home after clubs, works till midnight, then gets up at 4:00 a.m. to finish anything left undone.

But in schools where achievement and performance are upheld as supreme, students often sacrifice more than sleep for grades.

Dr. Kathryn Wiens conducted field research in elite schools for the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and found that “a majority of the students interviewed at each school suggested that their school did not ultimately care what kind of person they became. Instead, they felt the school was most concerned about their academic achievement and where they went to college.” At half of the schools she researched, Wiens reported, “it was clear that students often calculated the cost of sacrificing their honor as lower than the high cost of earning a bad grade.”

Parents and schools play an important role in communicating what is truly important. Indeed, Dr. Wiens found that one elite school so crafted their curriculum, discipline, and college applications process as to release the pressure—and allow students to pursue learning for its own sake. Her findings appear in The Content of Their Character, which is now available for pre-order through CultureFeed.

How can these students—and their parents—cultivate the virtue of temperance in an age of extraordinary pressure? The Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues offers a poetry anthology that provides a glimpse into this virtue. It is an adventure that one can take alone or with a class of students.