I just came across below post by @BKSquared
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/20735670/#Comment_20735670
This is something I have been reading contradicting posts on this board. I just want to hear from experienced parents who went thru admission process. Care to comment on this?
For most applicants at most colleges, academic credentials are the main admission factors.
However, at those colleges that consider them, ECs, essays, recommendations, etc. are significant for those applicants in the border zone when it comes to academic credentials. For the super-selective colleges where even the top end of the range of academic credentials is the border zone, ECs, essays, recommendations, etc. are highly significant in distinguishing between the many applicants with top end academic credentials (but are unlikely to help applicants who are not already at the top end in academic credentials).
For most colleges, your scores and grades matter most. But for schools like Stanford or Harvard, where many, if not most, applicants have the academic qualifications to do well there, then ECs and essays are what will determine who gets in and who doesn’t.
For everyone, the real value in ECs is fleshing out your life and figuring out what you enjoy.
Definitely get other opinions from experienced parents. While I am relatively new to this site, FWIW, I have a daughter at a top LAC and my son was just accepted SCEA by Yale. I have also been interviewing for Yale for over 25 years. My comments on the relative importance of EC’s vs essays and LOR’s have been based on lengthy discussions with senior AO’s at Yale. My main point was on relative importance compared to other factors and that quality is vastly more important than quantity.
I don’t think there is a definitive answer to your question. It depends on the college. If you are talking about tippy tops, then the value of garden-variety ECs is probably overrated by students and parents who are new to the process. Quality is definitely more important than quantity, and ECs are not going to make up for stats that are on the low side, with some exceptions (athletes, legacy, URM, etc…). As the colleges get less selective, ECs are still important, but perhaps the “quality” of the ECs is a little less so.
As I freely admitted in my “average excellent” thread, my own daughter had pretty standard ECs. I do believe her ECs didn’t help her at two tippy top colleges she was denied from. She was WLed at three very selective LACs. Was it because of her ECs? I doubt it was just that, because her grades, while very good, were actually a tad on the low side for the top schools she applied to. However, she was admitted off the WL to two of those LACs. Maybe a combination? Who knows. She ended up being accepted to three very selective LACs in all, and I suspect it was in large part because she had good grades and excellent test scores. But I think she must have also had very good LORs, and she wrote a good essay and supplements. So I guess if you look at the whole package, then yes, perhaps ECs are overrated. But it’s like a jigsaw puzzle and without the ECs, it’s an incomplete jigsaw. For holistic admissions, you need to send a puzzle with all the pieces.
Of course some colleges don’t care about ECs at all. Overall, I think other things are more important than ECs, but for students applying to colleges that practice holistic admissions, they should be striving to participate in things that are almost an extension of who they are. Whether that is a job, a long-term volunteer position, or a sport, it should be something a student is really committed to because it’s necessary to their well-being. And for the student that HAS to have an EC that is a job or looking after siblings, family members, or similar, that student should ask their guidance counselor to note the circumstances in the letter of rec. Not all strong students have the luxury of doing things they enjoy outside of school.
I also agree about SCEA and ED. At the most selective colleges, if you don’t already have what they want, it won’t be an advantage. However, as a college gets less selective, ED can definitely be a boost.
@ArdenNJ ETA: Perhaps another good question would be “Do students underestimate how important it can be to have interesting ECs that help a college understand who you are?” When 10 kids with great stats send in apps that have a sport, student government, and Model UN, and 1 kid with great stats sends in an app that highlights his beekeeping skills and how he bottles and sells his honey, which app just might get more attention? Not that everyone needs to start keeping bees of course, and plenty of students who do sport, student gov and Model UN are accepted to Harvard and the like every year. But I would put my money on the beekeeper.
Thanks BKSquared.
Your post brought my wife and I a different perspective.Wanted to hear from others.
ECs can get you noticed or remembered by an admissions officer, or give you a talking point in an interview. A kid with perfect test scores and grades didn’t get into MIT because he is just not an interesting person. You’re the kid from N.M. who designs jewelry? You taught horseback riding to city kids? You loved Model UN and want to study IB? They’ll remember you.
I don’t think most schools care about ECs very much, just want you to have been engaged and involved in something.
I definitely agree with quality over quantity. I yawn whenever I see a long list of ECs as I can’t help but read desperation into those lists. Our son had one varsity sport and two very deep ECs making for very compact-looking applications. He had great college choices (based on CC standards).
In general points, I fully concur with @BKSquared on the relative importance of EC’s. For most of schools, e.g., state schools, EC’s don’t matter much. For private schools with 30%+ admittance rate, EC’s don’t matter much. For tippy tops, I’ve seen applicants with garden variety standard EC’s but with outstanding academic qualifications being admitted, as well as less qualified applicants with outstanding EC’s being admitted. A “right” set of EC’s can serve as a tie-breaker, can help to build a particular class and a way to stand out among thousands of “all-too-familiar” applicants.
The relative importance of EC’s, however, should be discussed within the context of other, even more significant (agreed or not) factors since these make up, according to Robert J. Birgeneau, a former chancellor of Cal-Berkeley, about 60% of enrolled students at tippy top schools each year: legacies, development cases, recruited athletes, URM’s, faculty/adm children, political/celebrity children and other well connected hooks. The importance of EC’s for the rest 40% does not take precedence over these, for sure.
One exception is that playing a sport to a high enough level to be recruited is an example of an EC being highly significant. However, “ordinarily” ECs and levels of achievement in them are pretty common and will not distinguish an applicant among many others with similar ECs and levels of achievement in them.
Except for the recruited athletes, all of the “hooks” mentioned above are unearned by the applicant. Except for URM (which is a relatively weak one, along with legacy, compared to the others), all of the “hooks” mentioned above correlate to advantaged family background (although many advantaged families are not able to give their children such “hooks”).
For applicants without any of the big “hooks”, ECs and other parts of the application must be exceptional within the applicant pool (not just within the applicant’s high school). The same applies to those with the smaller “hooks” (legacy and URM at colleges which consider them), although they may need to be slightly less exceptional.
My thoughts are very much in line with @lindagaf. In the conversations that I’ve had with people who have worked in college admissions offices (AO, DA) at very selective schools, they have indicated that they receive high stats applications in numbers that are MULTIPLES of the number of seats they have in their classes. They need a way to differentiate among all these strong applicants, and one way to do this is to be “nationally, or even internationally recognized” in some way. As one DA put it “When you were in school, to have been a varsity starter in a sport – or better yet, two – would have been enough. What stands out now is the applicant who was on a national team!” So yes, an EC at that level – which includes Intel awards, etc. – is really helpful because it allows your application to be easily differentiated from the others.
Most of us, though, aren’t quite that “special”. The garden variety of ECs – MUN, JSA, varsity (non-recruited) athlete, volunteer – are more like the high stats in that they are expected (but probably not in the quantity that most of the people who post “chance me” requests imagine). Top schools want to see kids who can engage outside the classroom and ANY kind of EC shows that. They also offer experiential learning. Few ECs probably allow the application to quickly separate itself from the rest of the pile but they can provide a backdrop for explaining who you are.
Personally, I think that the kid who can tell a good story about who he/she is – and this is done primarily through the essays, the LORs, the interviews, AND ECs –the one who can “come to life”, is the one who stands the best chance of being admitted. After applicants have jumped the various hurdles (stats, scores, some level of involvement) for whatever “bucket” they are filling (gender, geography, etc.), the one that the reader can most easily advocate for in committee will be the one who gets in. And it’s easier to advocate for a person than a package of stats. I HATED how often on tours and info sessions someone would prattle on about how they wanted to see “passion”. While some kids have found their “thing” by 17, plenty have not and need/want college to help them do that. But to the extent that “passion” lends consistency to the picture, it helps. The kid who volunteers at the animal shelter, trains agility dogs, has a summer job with a groomer, and wants to be a vet is easy (at least for me) to envision as a person. (The theme doesn’t have to be this explicit, but you see what I’m getting at.) I don’t know that it has to be something terribly unusual, but it helps if it all hangs together.
A DA of one of top programs said that one of the things that she always looked for was whether the whole application “came together.” If a kid goes on about how he’s a team player and the LOR talks about how the kid has solved amazing problems alone, that could be a red flag. ECs are important in that they can further “reflect” who the kid says he/she is. The kid who is the team captain – having been elected by peers specifically to provide leadership to the rest of the group – implies certain traits. IF these are consistent with the rest of the app – ability to relate to and inspire others, willingness to work hard against the odds, etc., I’d guess it would help.
So to answer the question, yes, they are important in showing that you have a life outside of academics and they add color to the application. That is why it’s important to do things that interest you rather than things that you think will look good. You’ll be able to explain them without too much thought.
For students applying to LACs, where everyone is expected to fill a couple of roles to both knit the community together and to ensure that sports teams and the orchestra both have full rosters, ECs will show that you can be that person and they can be important in that regard – but again, in showing who you are.
For the tippy top schools that do heuristic admissions processing, I think ECs rank so far down the list of importance as to be more noise than signal. ECs that result in achievement (e.g., recruitable athlete, author with book published by a legitimate house, Intel finalist, media star) are in a different category: accomplishments, not ECs.
Maybe I’m too cynical, but perhaps ECs are there to hold out hope for those who really aren’t likely candidates otherwise.
The more time that I spend around CC and see my kids’ friends’ results in admissions decisions, the more I believe that carefully read LoRs, especially by savvy GCs, and essays are what separates the high scoring wheat from the high scoring chaff.
Based on a handwritten note on my D’s acceptance letter from a Top 10 school, yeah, I think ECs can make a difference. D did not have garden variety ECs, and her commitment to one thing in particular was noted. I also think they helped her get merit from other schools where the ECs really didn’t factor into admission.
@SuburbMom , I was taken with the handwritten note on my S’s acceptance letter. A few years later, I haven’t met anyone from that school that didn’t have a handwritten note. Was the AO officer going to write “wonderful SATs, kid?”
Good points made by @gardenstategal. I, too, hate the word “passion” thrown out at every turn with no meaningful context. Savvy adcoms aren’t looking for “passionate” applicants so much as “purposeful” applicants exhibiting consistency in personal developments over the years and evidenced further by LOR’s, essays, EC’s and other qualitative affirmations. EC’s as such are effective and do make a difference; not so much with the garden variety EC’s that thousands of others routinely present with no coherency.
subscribed for later reading
I would put recruited athletes in a different bucket and don’t consider their sport as an EC when discussing the general admissions process. They get their spots because of that talent, subject to meeting Academic Index (or equivalent banding) requirements set by the AO and not doing anything stupid. Same concept as to winners of national awards or recognition as @IxnayBob posts.
I would agree that doing something completely out of the norm, like the beekeeping example, would stand out. However, there is a big difference between Candidate 1 who has over time taken over the “business” from his/her grandparents, takes care of all aspects of the business and maybe has worked with a biology teacher (who is also an LoR writer) researching the difference in chemical properties of honey produced by bee’s that predominantly pollinate organic apple orchards vs. non-organic ones, compared to Candidate 2 who spends a couple of weeks each summer helping out his uncle and aunt part time harvesting honey from their beehives. Now let’s take Candidate 3. Captain of the debate team (quintessential EC). Freshmen year, the school team only had 3 members and was the district door mat. Candidate actively worked with the debate adviser (LoR writer) to make debating “cool” by inviting local university debate team to practice debates at school over fun/relevant topics. By end of junior year, debate team at 15 members and placed first in district. All else being equal, I would rank Candidate 1, first, Candidate 3, a very very close second, and Candidate 2, not in the same ballpark. I would also say that if Candidate 1 wrote a good but nothing special essay and/or the LoR’s were formulaic, Candidate 1 would rank behind candidates that wrote memorable essays and/or had highly personalized and insightful LoR’s even if they had garden variety EC’s. Let’s also remember, the Common App only allows 150 characters (call it 30 words) to describe each EC. Where the EC comes alive is in the context of an essay or LoR. Unique or fun EC’s might make good interview conversations, but that is another often overrated factor that creates too much anxiety on one side and false hope on the other.
I do agree that all of the components are part of an overall puzzle, and that the subjective gets more important the more selective the school because there are less differences in objectives between viable candidates. But quality always over quantity, and candidates (and parents) tend to think their EC’s are more stupendous bigly than they really are, and worse, that they make up for objective deficiencies or formulaic essays and LoR’s.
Note that the subjectively graded aspects (ECs, essays, recommendations) are not things that outsiders can easily estimate the quality of compared to the college’s entire applicant pool. In some cases, they may not even be very observable or bring in variances other than those relating to the student (e.g. recommendations).
So it is not surprising that outsiders may significantly overrate the quality of their subjectively graded aspects, perhaps based on limited observation of such being good in the context of their high schools, even if they are quite ordinary in the context of a highly selective college’s applicant pool. With ECs, at least there is some observability if one gets a state or national level award or recognition (as opposed to high school or local recognition), or is a recruited athlete; such observability is even less with essays and recommendations.
Agreeing with others, ECs paint a picture of who you are when you aren’t in class…what you do during the 5-6 hours or so each day of high school when you aren’t in school, sleeping or studying. Given that there is a limit to how many hours any teenager has when the teen is not sleeping or going to classes or studying so it’s not logical to have a laundry list of “stuff” so long a rational person scratches there head and wonders if it’s all for real. So if you participate in one or two sports you might have time for a club or two or something. If you don’t play a sport maybe you play in a band outside of school, or you work at a job, or you volunteer somewhere, or are active in your church youth group, or you rebuild computers, or babysit, or walk dogs…the point is they just want to know you aren’t holed up alone in your bedroom at your parents house watching streaming videos or addicted to video games.
Passion is an overused and overblown word but typically by late teens they have latched on something they really enjoy doing and will continue doing for years to come It could be disk golf. It could be playing the piano. It could be quilt making…not difficult to understand. This has never changed over time. Back in the old days I was able to apply and say I planned on continuing in my sport, continue playing my instrument and continue dancing. Now they knew who I was and what interested me.
Schools generally want students who can handle the work, who will fit in to the campus culture, and who bring different interests, enthusiasms and skills to round out a student body. The first is generally the most essential. The problem that the most “selective” and prestigious schools have is that they are inundated by applications, and there is considerable “bunching” of the majority of applicants, so it is hard to separate most of them. This is made harder by grade inflation, over-abundance of AP classes, standardized test preparation, test superscoring, the use of admissions consultants, and buffing and polishing of applicants. It can be hard to tell what is real from what isn’t, especially when the massive volume of applications makes it difficult to go into depth.
ECs can be one small area where applicants can be differentiated, along with essays and letters of recommendation. If they all fit together well, they can give Adcoms a fairly good sense of who an applicant is, which is a major advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd. Making an impression is huge. Garden variety ECs without significant achievement probably don’t add much, however.