That kid is a hard STEM kid. He has also done well on the non-STEM side. But it is surprising to me how much difference I suspect the reading habit made in the facility he has in STEM. This is based on some 17 years of observation.
Hmmmm…
we know many who have ALL of the above… juggling academics, ECs, soccer, LaX, etc… still not enough for many AOs… and, may I also add that soccer is obviously the best game 
Seriously though, the applicants are so good and qualified – it is so hard!
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Nobody is arguing that music conservatories should admit based on SAT scores. But the so called “rack and stack crowd” also knows that audition results vary depending on method. A “holistic” assessment where musicians are watched while playing their instrument and where their names were known, leads to a different outcome than blind protocols where the applicants play behind a screen.
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I think that there are very few “boring” people in the world. If you dig enough, you will find things of interest. Perhaps it’s their sense of humor, or their great attitude while playing intramurals, or a mutual interest in board games. People can connect in a number of ways. But, in the U.S., there will probably be a large number of 18-22 year olds who like sports, video games, Tik Tok/Instagram/whatever social media is currently popular, Marvel movies, etc. These people are all interesting, and none of the above might be apparent in a list of ECs (or lack thereof).
But if you have a whole bunch of students with the above interests, it’s nice to add variety. Variety is where holistic admissions comes in. It helps you find the juggler, and bassoon player, and ballet dancer, and the kid who had to work at the local grocery to help the family pay the bills, and the kid who didn’t work outside the home or have any ECs because s/he had to take care of younger siblings while the adults were working. If the vast majority of your student body watches every episode of The Big Bang Theory, Jeopardy!, and plays e-sports, then the exposure to students of different types is less. Or if every student is driven, seeking the approval of the “best” professor in their field to assist in future endeavors, and trying to join the “right” clubs, etc, then there’s a definite benefit of having people with a different mindset (either a “que sera, sera” attitude or one focused on altruism, etc).
There would likely be more tribalism at universities that were only interested in stats as people will be in their “bubble” of people who think like them and have the same interests as them, and there’s very little likelihood of having numerous people around who can help pop that bubble. Thus, not only is holistic admissions a benefit to the university community, but it’s also a benefit to society at large. Many people believe what they do because they don’t encounter people who have other experiences. Thus, they believe whatever their media is telling them about “other” people.
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In our litigious society there is no way that will ever, ever happen.
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Unfortunately, that is most accurate. The AOs are not staffed or do not have the time for it, either (and in all honesty, they cannot articulate why one applicant is in whereas the other is not).
College admissions were holistic for generations before standarized tests. Factors like your family’s wealth, your father’s profession, your religion, your prep school, your membership in various country clubs-all were considered to form an interesting and socially pleasant class and plenty of future leaders. Schools now just tweak which holistic factors they wish to consider for modern sensibilities.
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You’ll be surprised how many surprise winners in the “Mystery Masked Singer” contest. The key word is “Masked”
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Indeed, this is accurate. However, I would venture to say that we do not know what “modern sensibilities” are or exactly mean for different colleges and AOs… and, I think it is highly doubtful that these are applied consistently and with some level of transparency.
Holistic approach is OK and understood. It is still not great/fair and leads to random outcomes. Maybe, that is just fine, too (other than the anxiety it creates).
I agree completely. It causes great anxiety and unnecessary work for many students, and the selection of this year’s random holistic factors may or may not match those used in 5 years. The whole purpose of standardized testing was to decrease the arbitrary use of assorted holistic factors, but that appears largely abandoned.
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I’m going to quote myself from What is the impact of kids applying to so many schools? - #313 by AustenNut. Although I wrote it about the impact of kids applying to many schools, I think it also pertains to people’s feelings about holistic admissions.
I think this conversation is only relevant to a small portion of high school students and their families; the type of students who are hanging out here on CC. Only when students are mostly applying to schools with acceptance rates below 20% does this really become an issue. The vast majority of universities accept much larger percentages of students; many accept the majority of applicants. If students create a balanced list of schools where they are happy to attend any one of them, then the whole exercise in trying to maximize your chances at highly rejective schools is moot.
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Usually a great many kids in the class participate in extra curriculars at our school. But interestingly, the leadership positions in most of these extra curriculars are dominated by kids that are generally in the top 20% of the school in academics. I suspect it is these kids that have the bandwidth to devote time.
Top 20% in GPA perhaps. Certainly not in test scores in my experience.
It is GPA. Because by that point kids don’t know what their test scores are to make judgments on where to devote their time. After the fact, the test scores also line up. Test scores are highly correlated with GPA. The time commitment starts in 9th grade. Otherwise you won’t get to run the club by the 11th or 12th grade. The hardest working kids get these slots. Some are by selection, and some by election. There are usually no complaints. They are mostly well deserved. The average EC commitment for a top academic student runs 20-25 hours a week.
And this is where life gets interesting.
Kid is an Eagle Scout in a town two over from yours… nobody at his HS has any idea that his Eagle project completely revamped the supply chain of the county food pantry. Kid volunteers as an archivist for a historical society a train ride away- has been doing it since 9th grade, and has made several important discoveries by cataloguing the collection of ephemera that was slowly turning to dust. Kid created a recording program for the visually impaired at a local university which has allowed a dozen visually impaired students go on to graduate school in their chosen fields.
Etc. This competition of who is president of which club at your HS feeds the EC arms race (being president of one club is impressive, so being president of TWO is twice as impressive). Meanwhile there are kids who will NEVER run for class president or NEVER be captain of the debate team, but they are doing real, impactful work in a field or a cause they really care about. And it’s why 18 year olds don’t get to be adcom’s to choose who gets into which college. They see part of it- who is taking the hard classes. They don’t see the rest of it. And they certainly lack the discernment to understand what is a meaningful contribution and what is not.
And it’s also why so many of the teeth grinding on CC gets old real quick. This is a big country filled with talented people, millions of whom don’t attend your HS, live in your town, or obsess about what people in your community care about. No, the Adcom’s DON’T want to fill half their class with kids from Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto, no matter how special all these kids are. Because doing so means you aren’t adding the voices from St. Louis or Minneapolis or Tulsa or Philadelphia and all these other places which ALSO have special kids doing special things.
I personally found it exciting and humbling to get to college and to be surrounded by people who were good at things I’d never heard of, and were smarter than me (and better prepared) in many ways. Your kid going to find that disheartening? No problem, plenty of colleges where he or she can be at the top of the pack from day 1.
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I think there is an implicit assumption here that kids are doing this for college, and don’t love what they are doing. We really don’t know that. In fact if they don’t enjoy what they are doing, they won’t spend 20+ hours doing what they are doing? Have you ever managed to get a kid to spend a half hour on something they don’t want to do? On whatever inducement? I couldn’t get my kids to take one practice exam for the SAT. ostensibly for their own good. Maybe some kinds of extra curriculars are approved but others are not. I didn’t know that. Or maybe it is bad for kids to be competitive in high school.
Neela, that wasn’t my point. Yes the kid cares- fantastic. Kid loves what he or she is doing- great.
But there’s a whole world out there that is not about YOUR high school, and the faculty advisor to the yearbook or chess team. And the HS kids don’t see the contributions or the effort or the love that their fellow students are spending on things outside the HS construct. Yeah, occasionally the kid who was obsessed with dance gets cast in an important role with a regional ballet company and everyone nods and says “Oh, yeah, she loves dance, must be pretty good at it”. Nobody sees the 4 am wake up calls, or doing her homework balanced on her knees on the ride home from the studio at 9 pm. Or there’s an article in the local newspaper about the quiet guy in the back of the classroom who is presenting a paper at a scientific conference because he created an algorithm which is now being used by the CDC to predict flu peaks and valleys in the elderly (which was a better algorithm than the one previously in use, which did not distinguish between 65 year olds and 95 year olds).
That’s also an EC. And I bet that kid also loves what he’s doing. And these are the kids who benefit from holistic- along with the brilliant kids who have no EC’s because they work as assistant manager of a pizza shop to pay the electric bill at home.
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I agree all these are ECs. When did anyone say they are not? If a whole bunch of kids spend time at school, because they don’t have transportation to do anything outside, We have a tendency to write off the things they do as non interesting. vs something exotic.
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This is not at all true for a LOT of students.
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Every study I found talks about relationship between HS GPA and 1st year College GPA or ACT/SAT vs 1st year College GPA. The claim I made is that there is a high correlation between HS GPA and ACT/SAT based on my understanding of the kids at our school, anecodotally. Clearly this comparison doesn’t hold across schools because course rigor etc are all different. You need to compare within a school. After searching (rather than alluding to anecdotal evidence from our school which I can’t demonstrate to you), I found one study that compares HS GPA to ACT or SAT scores. https://zeescorrelationstudy.■■■■■■■■■■/ They observe a 78%. I would deem that to be high. The result is intuitive to me. I suspect SAT / ACT relate to ability, while GPA combines both ability and effort.