I hear all over the forums that around 95 percent or more universities look more at your stats (GPA, SAT/ACT scores) than anything else on your application. Is that true? If not, then what schools look for your EC’s?
The most selective schools (top 40) will weight your EC’s and recs heavily. The further down the list you go the less weight they will carry. Even at lower ranked schools EC’s may increase the likelihood of getting merit aid.
If the college is just looking for warm tuition paying bodies, EC’s won’t matter.
Google the college’s “Common Data Set” and look at section C. There, the college informs you what they weigh most. Simple.
By and large, most students seriously over estimate the importance of the EC and volunteer hours. The way most HS kids act, you’d think they were auditioning to be summer camp directors vs. going to an institution of higher learning.
Good ECs won’t make up for stats that don’t fit the school’s profile. However, a lack of ECs can hurt you, especially with smaller and highly competitive schools.
It depends. Colleges with acceptance rates over 50% usually don’t care much about your extracurriculars. They mainly judge you on test scores and your transcript. But for selective colleges, extracurriculars matter a lot.
Ditto what @T26E4 said.
Ivies, yes. Other top top schools, yes.
Average state school - well, they’d want to see some kind of ECs, but they wouldn’t care too much what they are.
Acceptance rates of 20% or less, ECs and essays matter more usually. Acceptance rates over 50%, as noted above, if you are breathing and pay the application fee, you’re most of the way there.
If for example you are looking at MIT, they aren’t going to care if you volunteered 1,000 hours at an animal shelter. But they will care if you went to a summer camp to build robots or volunteered at an engineering firm.
The competition and how many places are available are what make ECs matter.
Theres no need to overload your app with 30 random ec’s you had barely any interest in, 4 or 5 you are passionate about and invested time in will suffice.
Even 4 or 5 is unnecessary. 2 or 3 is a lot, especially if you are really doing something important and time-consuming in any one of them. How many chunks of 10+ hr/week does anyone have if they are also carrying a rigorous academic schedule?