An Elite School Is the Saddest Spot in Manhattan, a Study Says

Yana Paskova for The New York Times Is this the saddest place in Manhattan? A study of Twitter posts asserts that Hunter College High School is indeed the most negative spot.

Hunter College High School is a highly rated school whose coveted spots are filled with many of the city’s top performing students. It feeds Ivy League colleges and provides a free education that supporters believe surpasses what is offered at many of the elite private high schools in New York City.

So it came as a surprise to students and others when the school was labeled the saddest spot in Manhattan, based on a recent study aimed at gauging the emotions of New Yorkers by their Twitter messages.

The highest volume of what the study labeled “negative sentiment tweets” in Manhattan came not from a subway platform, emergency room, soup kitchen line or even a crowded branch of the Department of Motor Vehicles. They came, researchers reported, from Hunter.

Was this student body â€" once described in a 1982 New York magazine article headline as “The Joyful Elite” â€" really a bunch of misanthropes unpacking their miserable hearts, 140 characters at a time?

The “saddest spot” label, if not the details of the study, has become the buzz of Hunter as the new academic year starts.

“Everyone was talking about it â€" we’re the saddest school,” said Grace Cruz, 17, a senior at Hunter College High School as she walked out of the school recently and onto East 94th Street. Nearby, a group of freshmen outside the school groaned collectively when asked about the “saddest school” study.

“I mean, I can see why it could make sense,” said Caroline Goodman, 14, waving toward the brick, fortresslike school building. “The school has no windows, so being inside can seem dark and depressing. And some kids do get stressed out from the workload.”

Now wait, interjected her friend Lizzie McCord, 14.

“But it’s not like there’s more competition here than at schools like Science or Stuy,” she said, referring to other high-performing and demanding city high schools: Bronx Science and Stuyvesant. “I think it’s more about the fact that students don’t enjoy going to school, as a rule.”

What are we even talking about, said Sarina Gupta, 14, who pointed out that, yes, some students used social media to grumble about being in school â€" but not on Twitter. Most students prefer Facebook and Instagram, she said, a fact she had to break to her uncle, Mike Gupta, who happens to be the chief financial officer at Twitter.

“I told him, ‘None of my friends are on Twitter, so I don’t need an account,’” she said.

Well, someone’s tweeting from that big brown brick building, say researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute, an independent academic research and educational institution in Cambridge, Mass. And a computer program they developed found that a high percentage of those Twitter messages contained a negative sentiment, based upon key words, phrases and emoticons.

Researchers used the program to classify the over 600,000 geographically tagged messages they recorded citywide during a two-week period in April 2012 - That was two school years ago, students pointed out â€" to create a “sentiment map of New York City” along with the study, which was published in August.

Some findings seemed obvious. A higher percentage of happy messages came from Central Park and other green spaces than from cemeteries, medical centers, jails, sewage plants and high-traffic areas during rush hour. The highest percentage of positive sentiment posts in Manhattan - the happiest spot, to Hunter’s saddest â€" came from uptown, in Fort Tryon Park.

A post on the Web site of Science Magazine on the study mentioned Hunter as the saddest spot, and an article in Our Town weekly newspaper in Manhattan bore a headline calling Hunter “The Saddest Smartest School Around,” adding that the school “ranks last in happiness study.”

On the first day of school, on Sept. 9, an assistant principal, Lisa Siegmann, opened her welcome-back remarks by mentioning how strangely happy the students seemed.

“She said, “You don’t look like the saddest students to me,’ and everyone laughed,” said Patrycja Witanoska, 17, a senior from Maspeth.

“No one took it seriously,” said Grace Cruz. “Every student I know feels fortunate to be at Hunter. I could see kids getting upset if they have a bunch of tests on the same day, but really, it’s just a positive place.”

Asked for comment, Ms. Siegmann seemed to take the idea of interpreting an emoticon and turn it on its head.

“I love that the students found the humor in what I said,” she wrote in an e-mail. “They, themselves, know that our school is anything but an upside-down smile.”

Yaneer Bar-Yam, the institute’s president, pointed out that the Twitter messages were monitored just as students returned from spring break and were facing the daunting few weeks before finals.

He said that one Hunter parent e-mailed him to say, “I told my son he was indeed going to school at the saddest place, and he took a certain pride in it.” The parent added, “Maybe this will inspire the administration to add some windows.’’