WESTPORT, CT — High school junior Tobias Hellinger-Marsh, 16, spent four hours Tuesday evening at his bedroom desk conjugating the Latin verb amare through every tense, mood, and voice in preparation for the SAT II Latin subject test, an exam he is taking primarily to demonstrate “academic seriousness” to admissions committees, in pursuit of acceptance to a competitive university, in pursuit of a degree in economics, in pursuit of a career in finance or consulting, that he is, statistically, more likely to abandon within four years for a series of gig-economy positions during which he will use the Latin verb amare exactly zero times.
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Hellinger-Marsh, hunched over a Princeton Review study guide with the focused intensity of a young man whose mother has paid $4,200 for a private tutor named Veronica, completed the full conjugation chart in approximately forty-seven minutes. He then completed it again, from memory, on a separate piece of paper. He then went back through the original chart and added macrons over the long vowels, a notational practice he has been told by Veronica is “what really separates the serious students.”
Statistical models project that Hellinger-Marsh will, over the next twelve to fourteen years, deliver an estimated 3,847 burritos.
“He’s such a hard worker,” said his mother, Diane Hellinger-Marsh, 49, watching her son from the doorway with the soft pride of a parent who has, herself, never once in her life been required to conjugate a Latin verb in any professional, social, or romantic context. “He’s just got such a good work ethic. He’s going to be such a success.”
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She was asked what she meant by “success.”
“You know,” she said. “Success.”
Tobias’s father, Greg, watching basketball in the den, said only: “He’s a good kid. He’ll figure it out.” He has been saying this exact sentence about his son since 2009.
The Latin SAT II subject test was discontinued in 2021 by the College Board.
Tobias is studying for it anyway.
This is because his tutor Veronica, who charges $185 per hour, has not informed him that the test no longer exists, owing to what she described to a colleague over drinks last month as “a real Goldilocks situation, scheduling-wise, that I’m not in any rush to disrupt.” Veronica has been tutoring Tobias for the discontinued exam for fourteen months. She is, by her own quiet accounting, the third-highest-earning Latin tutor in Fairfield County. She has placed a deposit on a small lake house.
Tobias, unaware, has now conjugated amare an estimated 1,400 times.
He will, beginning approximately seventeen months from now, sign up for DoorDash to make extra money during a gap year that his parents have not yet been told he is planning to take. The gap year will become two years. The two years will become “I’m just figuring some things out, mom.” During this period, he will deliver food to the homes of strangers, including, on one statistically probable occasion, the home of Veronica, who will tip him $4 in cash and not recognize him.
He will not, during any of these deliveries, be required to identify the present passive subjunctive of amare.
He will not, during any of these deliveries, be required to identify the form of amare.
He will not, in fact, encounter the Latin language at any point in his DoorDash career, except in the form of the word “Caesar” on the side of a salad container, which he will not parse linguistically and which he will, on three separate occasions, mispronounce.
A 2023 study published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that approximately 67% of American high school students who take a foreign language SAT subject test will, within ten years of graduation, work at least one job in the gig economy. The same study found that 0.04% of those students will, in the course of that work, use any element of the language they studied. The study did not find anyone who had ever used Latin specifically.
“It’s not that the studying is wasted,” said Dr. Elena Rojas, an education researcher who has spent fifteen years tracking what she calls the long arc of academic preparation versus actual labor market outcomes. “The studying does something. The studying teaches discipline. The studying teaches focus. The studying teaches a kid to sit at a desk and grind through something tedious without complaining.”
She paused.
“Of course,” she added, “those skills are also taught, somewhat more directly, by the gig economy itself.”
Hellinger-Marsh, asked Wednesday morning whether he found Latin meaningful or interesting, considered the question seriously.
“It’s not really about whether I like it,” he said. “It’s about, like, getting in. You take Latin because Latin is what people who get in take. My counselor said it differentiates you. My tutor said it shows you’re, like, intellectually serious. My mom said colleges look for it. So I’m doing it. I don’t have to love it. I just have to do it.”
Asked whether he had any sense of what he wanted to do with his life, Tobias paused for a long time.
“Like, generally?” he said. “Or specifically?”
He was asked: either.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Make money, I guess. Be successful. Have a nice house. Like, a really nice house, with a — you know what, my friend Connor’s dad has this house, and it’s got this thing where the kitchen opens up into the backyard with these glass doors that just, like, retract, and you can be inside and outside at the same time. I want that. I want that house.”
Asked what he thought he would do for a living to obtain such a house, Tobias considered the question.
“Finance,” he said. “Or consulting. Or, like, tech, maybe. I don’t really know what any of those are. I just know they’re the answers.”
He turned back to his study guide.
The conjugation continued.
In the Hellinger-Marsh household, on a Tuesday evening in late October, with the heat clicking on, with a chicken breast cooling in the kitchen, with the family golden retriever named Truman sleeping on a dog bed worth more than most people’s couches, a 16-year-old American teenager continued the slow, careful, $185-an-hour memorization of the conjugation patterns of a 2,000-year-old language he will never use, in preparation for an exam that no longer exists, to apply to a school where he will study a major he will not finish, to enter a profession he cannot currently name, to afford a house with sliding glass doors that open onto a backyard where, in some future autumn, he will find himself standing with a beer in his hand at 2 a.m. wondering, quietly and without a clear answer, what exactly he had been preparing for the entire time.
Veronica, meanwhile, has scheduled a contractor for the lake house.
A growing body of research suggests that the American educational pipeline, particularly for upper-middle-class suburban students, increasingly resembles what one researcher has termed a system that exists primarily to perpetuate itself. The skills demanded at each stage are, in this framing, not preparation for the next stage but rather preparation for being the kind of person who has completed the previous stage. The Latin is not for using Latin. The Latin is for having taken the Latin. The destination is not the destination. The destination is having gone.
This framing, when read aloud to Diane Hellinger-Marsh in her kitchen Wednesday morning, was met with a long silence.
“That’s a very pessimistic way to look at it,” she said finally, and offered the reporter a snack.
Tobias, upstairs, was conjugating videre.
At press time, Hellinger-Marsh had completed his evening study session, shut his book, gone to bed, and dreamt — for reasons no one in his family can explain, no one in his school can explain, and no one in the entire chain of educational consultants, tutors, and admissions strategists his mother has hired over the past three years can explain — about delivering a pizza.
The pizza was for Caesar.
He woke up, briefly, and went back to sleep.
The next morning, he conjugated currere.