Middle Childhood: Schools and Issues of Diversity, Building Resiliency

While remembering this week's material I kept returning to the article half our class read, "Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill". This article explains through interviews how common it is for students who feel pressured to succeed choose to take prescribed ADD and ADHD medications in order to exceed expectations of parents, teachers and colleges. Rates are higher at competitive private high schools and even more in higher grades, which have college applications and SATs looming over their promising futures.  Taking these pills gives the student the ability to hyper-focus on studying or tests so that they do better than they naturally would. Not only is this a dangerous habit; teenagers don't understand the severity of these pills that aren't any less addictive or harmful than other pharmaceuticals, but it is a habit that is only digging them deeper into a stressful and overstimulating future.
While continuing to supersede the individual's stress and intellectual limitations in high school and college, the body and mind are not practicing the skills necessary to handle the high amounts of stress associated with the profession one is working toward while medicated. Why would someone choose a path they cannot excel in naturally or without extra help? Isn't this why we choose careers that we are passionate about and are good at? We want a job we can do well. Assume a student stops taking these medications once she reaches her freshman year of college at an Ivy-League college, a school to which she was accepted to because of her excellent high school grades and SAT score. Once she is in a setting that has the same or even higher expectations of her, there is no way she could succeed without having established adequate ways to cope with that amount of stress. She would be doomed to fail, or at least perform poorly.
Even more importantly however are the motivations of these students, which are fascinating but discouraging. To imagine a population of our youth that medicates themselves to accomplish the ideal American Dream only makes me question our ideals even more than usual.
I personally didn't go to a very challenging high school so I can't say I was tempted then, but there have been times in college when I have felt like I could never fulfill the expectations held for me. I don't believe that self-set expectations are necessarily a bad thing, but they can become dangerous when they are pressured by parents and schools.
How common is Aderall used in college and how much more in Ivy-League schools? I wonder what could be done to combat the motivations these student have? It would't be enough to only ban the prescription of these medications, because the reasons they are used will still be there. Students will always find other escape routes to make their paths easier if they aren't provided adequate skills to reach their goals.