<p>I always want to know why is it important to have extra curricular activities for college admissions.</p>
<p>Because colleges want to see somebody who can be active outside the classroom, somebody who would get involved on their campus. No extracurriculars most likely means you are a boring person with nothing to offer.</p>
<p>Thank you for your response.</p>
<p>Yep while grades/sat are judged the same for everyone, ec’s bring the personality to your app. Are you a sportsy person, a research person, or a world traveling volunteer person? Those are just random examples and the list of ec’s is virtually endless.</p>
<p>"why is it important to have extra curricular activities for college admissions. "</p>
<p>In general, they are not. ECs are important for selective colleges.</p>
<p>The bulk of colleges (which are not very selective) admit solely based on HS academic performance and potential (Transcript and test scores). For these it’s very formulaic and no ECs are considered whatsoever.</p>
<p>I agree with T26E4 - out of thousands of colleges in this country, there are fewer than one hundred that really care about ECs. Of course, these hundred schools dominate 90% of the discussions on CC, so it is easy to get a distorted picture of admissions.</p>
<p>At highly selective colleges however, it is difficult to differentiate between an applicant who has a GPA of 3.92 with an ACT of 33 and another applicant who has a GPA of 3.88 with an ACT of 34. EC’s are one tool for providing context for these numbers.</p>
<p>Small colleges also have objectives in terms of the kind of environment they want to create on campus. Most schools want a decent orchestra (or two), an active theater group, a school newspaper, some sports teams, etc…At a larger school, they can assume that if they admit enough students, there will always be someone to fill these roles. At a small school, they need to keep an eye on whether they have enough students to keep the violin section full or to field a soccer team. That’s where your ECs might be used to differentiate you from another academically comparable student.</p>