<p>On a percentage scale, how important are extracurricular activities to Harvard admissions officers? This thread is to prove to my mother that such things are important for college applications. My mother believes that as long as you have great academics, you should be fine. </p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>Applications are reviewed holistically, so it’s all about the big picture. Thus, it’s hard to determine a numerical value since it plays a different role for each applicant. With that said, when admissions officers are reviewing application, the three main categories they review are: academics, personal qualities, and extracurriculars. So, it generally plays a very relevant role.</p>
<p>Extracurricular activities are pretty important. You don’t have to be a part of every club but at least a few, and you need leadership positions in them as well. Academics is just one part of the application; they also look at what you do for your community.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t take any of the advice on this site as “proof” of anything, but for what it’s worth, extracurriculars are very important. The majority of Harvard applicants have “great academics” but they get rejected nonetheless.</p>
<p>There is a former Dartmouth admissions officer, Michele Hernandez, who says in “acing the college application”, applicants are 60-70% academics and 30-40% extracurriculars. It is impossible to really quantify this, but any applicant with just good grades lacks activities to be examples of character and passions.
But admissions officers are accepting people, not standardized test scores and varsity letters: extracurriculars and grades must portray you as a unique person who could be an asset to the College.
If you just have strong academics and little-to-no activities you still have a shot at LACs.
Hope this helps</p>
<p>Everything - objective and subjective criteria - is very important for Harvard.</p>
<p>If you have academics (grades/test scores) good enough to be admitted, three things will then make the difference. They are teacher and counselor recommendations, essays, and extracurriculars. I doubt anyone gets in if either of the first two components are terrible or if the third is nonexistent.</p>
<p>The percentages of “importance,” however, will vary from application to application. The only kid I personally know admitted early to Harvard this year was, um, a puzzle to me based on his resume, so he must have been admitted with more weight given to his recommendations and essays, maybe only “20%” on his extracurriculars. (He was pretty good, but not that good.) On way the other end of the spectrum, the Top Recruits and Nationally Famous Applicants who have sufficient academics for admission (if Gabby Douglas has good grades, SATs, and wants to apply here, say, or Natalie Portman when she came) could probably be admitted, probably, based 70-80% on their resumes. </p>
<p>My case can be illustrative of how it depends, too. While I was former-national-champion-good at one of my high school activities—a really obscure activity, so it wasn’t necessarily any more impressive than many of the accomplishments of my peers who didn’t win any national or state championships because the fields where they excelled didn’t give such prizes—I fell to 3rd/4th in sophomore and junior years. The friend who got first place then not only beat me, but swept the floor with me. She was rejected from Harvard. (She’s now at Brown, so still a happy ending for her.) So obviously there was more going on with us two than just our resumes, since her resume was stronger than mine. </p>
<p>HOWEVER, nobody—who is not Jordanian royalty loudly contemplating a $30 million dollar donation—is admitted to Harvard without extracurriculars at all, which you can tell your mother. (And those $$$$ applicants probably do have very good extracurriculars, just for the record, if not absolutely stellar ones.) Academic/semi-academic extracurriculars, like scientific research or interning for a local museum, are often just as good as being on the football team or working for a charity, but extracurriculars are a must.</p>
<p>See: [Guidance</a> Office: Answers From Harvard’s Dean, Part 3 - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/harvarddean-part3/]Guidance”>Guidance Office: Answers From Harvard's Dean, Part 3 - The New York Times)</p>
<p>"The term “extracurricular activities” covers an enormous amount of ground. We are interested in whatever a student does: in addition to school extracurricular activities and athletics, students can tell us of significant community, employment, or family commitments. There are many who spend a great deal of time helping to run their household, preparing meals and caring for siblings or making money with a part-time job to help the household meet expenses.</p>
<p>Unfortunately many schools have had to curtail or eliminate extracurricular activities and athletics, or they charge fees for participation. In addition, many students cannot afford expensive musical instruments or athletic equipment — or have families without the resources to pay for lessons, summer programs and the transportation networks necessary to support such activities.</p>
<p>Admissions Committees keep these factors in mind as they review applications, and are concerned most of all to know how well students used the resources available to them. Extracurricular activities need not be exotic — most are not — and substance is far more important. A student who has made the most of opportunities day-to-day during secondary school is much more likely to do so during college and beyond. This applies to academic life as well as extracurricular activities."</p>
<p>Out of its 40,000 or so applicants, Harvard may admit 200 or 300 solely based on academic criteria, although those would likely include non-classroom academic competitions like AIME or Intel. It probably admits a similar number of students almost entirely based on their extracurricular activities, although their academics have to be strong enough to show they can thrive at Harvard. Those are mainly athletes, but also include very talented people in the arts (for example, Natalie Portman, Yo-Yo Ma, Stefan Jackiw), and sometimes people with extraordinary accomplishments in their communities. For everyone else, it’s a mixture of everything. Harvard has so many strong applicants, and so few slots to fill, that it can effectively require that the students it admits show great strength in several areas, not just one.</p>
<p>*That’s a good point to draw out from Gibby’s quote. Jobs and babysitting are as valid extracurricular activities as any, if your mom’s concern is the amount of money and time that becoming a pro ice skater or what have you would entail.</p>
<p>Curly: </p>
<p>Ask your mother what she would do with 28,000 near perfect GPAs and 98th percentile ACT or SAT scores. After that, what would be her next evaluation criteria to fill the ~2200 admissions slots. Maybe that will inform her a bit.</p>
<p>I believe on a site I read somewhere, where different things are categorized like SAT scores and extracurriculars, some schools like Penn value standardized testing as “very important” whereas Harvard says “considered” for everything.</p>
<p>Depends on the total package but generally important, unless you’re in a situation where financially or logistically your EC options were limited</p>
<p>You can go to each school’s website and search “Common Data Set” which will tell you how many applicants, how many accepted, and how they weight each piece of criteria (but that may change per year). All of the categories for Harvard are “considered” because of the holistic admissions that others have mentioned.</p>