In recent years, new types of educational institutions have appeared in the secondary education system: gymnasiums, lyceums, classes with advanced study of various disciplines in traditional schools, and new academic subjects have been introduced. New schools declare a higher level of education. And, indeed, students of such schools demonstrate a deeper assimilation of educational material, are characterized by a high level of learning. The question arises: at the expense of what resources are students ' success achieved? This is facilitated by the system of entrance selection of students, innovative training programs, selection of teachers and other factors. There is no doubt that new educational institutions are characterized by large academic loads. How does this affect the younger generation entering life? What is the socio-psychological cost of achieving a higher level of education? This article uses the results of a study of the social well-being of secondary school graduates in Togliatti in the 1996-97 academic year. According to the "Graduate Questionnaire", 699 students of the final grades of 17 schools were interviewed (which is 15 % of the cohort of graduates of the city). In the study, a nested sample of general education institutions of the city was implemented, proportionally distributed by school types, by the number of graduates in the city districts, and evenly distributed over the territory. The average sampling error is 1.5 %. The distribution of the surveyed graduates by district allows us to correctly distribute the data to the totality of all graduates of the city within the representativeness error: 3% for the significance level of 0.05. It should be noted that, despite its age, the provincial city of Togliatti, where the automobile giant is located, is a fairly advanced city in terms of pedagogical innovations of a substantive and organizational nature, there are non-state and private educational institutions in the city; among the educationa ... Читать далее