<p>..blows my mind.
Literally one of the least intelligent students at my school is signing with Stanford because he's a decent baseball player. The #3 and #4 in our class were declined EA. This kid isn't even top 25% out of 700 with a sub-2000 SAT. I just don't understand. At all. How does this happen.</p>
<p>He’s more than a decent player if Stanford took him. They, and all top colleges, value all kinds of achievement.</p>
<p>Yeah, I mean this is the way the world works to a point. There people who play sports for a living. I know that if I ever run a company and was hiring kids out of college, of course I would look at their GPA etc but I would also be very interested to see if they played sports. Someone who rowed at Harvard clearly knows about pain and has a very serious work ethic. It’s the way D1 colleges work.</p>
<p>It blows your mind because you think that Stanford’s only mission is to accept the most academically qualified applicants. This isn’t so with them nor most of the so-called “top” colleges.</p>
<p>One day you may be in the situation to review resumes for a job you’re hoping to fill. Sometimes the high GPA applicant from a top school might catch your attention. Another time, it may be the guy who did OK at a lesser college but has had glowing work reviews for many years that gets your attention. How about that? You need to think outside of just your high school universe.</p>
<p>if he’s in at Stanford, he’s not as dumb as you may think. but as an accomplished athelete he’s shown some things perhaps the more “intelligent” may have not: an ability to work cooperatively on a team, physical fitness, discipline, and motivation. Our head of school says the top colleges, once you’ve shown basic academic ability, will comb through your application looking for evidence of “agency” - the ability to make choices and impose those choices on the world. they want to produce alumni who are not just smart, but effective.</p>