<p>I can’t speak for H or P, but the year my Dd was a freshman at Yale, she gave informal tours to the only three kids from her HS (very small private) who were accepted the year after she was. All three were Asian boys- two Chinese Americans, one, Japanese American. One of the boys went to Stanford, the others matriculated at Yale. My daughter went to senior prom with a Korean American, who went to Princeton.</p>
<p>The year my son graduated HS, one of two accepted at Yale was Vietnamese. </p>
<p>At some of the selective east coast LACs, there may actually be a kind of preference for Asian kids because they don’t get as many applicants as the ivies, or at least don’t get the stars as often.
During my daughter’s application process, I remember that Amherst, Dartmouth and Middlebury regularly scooped up our HS’s Asian kids, but they didn’t always get them. Their parents often preferred their kids go to Berkeley or UCLA if they didn’t get into HYPSM.</p>
<p>I realize that anecdotes don’t mean much. It will be interesting to see what develops with the case against H and P. Maybe it will make admissions a little more transparent, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, imo.</p>
<p>It certainly can’t be an easy process to decide who gets admitted, especially when faced with a slew of amazing kids. Comparison to 20 or 30 years ago, these are super students in terms of their grades, EC’s and their commitment. </p>
<p>We went through a similar vetting process when D applied for private high school. She has a classmate who speaks 4 languages, plays 6 instruments, runs track and has a high GPA. And he’s 16 years old.</p>
<p>ECs are valued because there is a direct and proven correlation between involvement in ECs and success in life.</p>
<p>I once attended a school review on the standardized test results. It was the usual explantion of how testing works, margins of error, percentiles, etc. And then one parent asked the expert about correlation between standardized test results and life success, and the expert revealed the most fascinating point of the night: while educators would love to believe there’s a direct correlation, countless research studies have not been able to find a direct correlation between standardized test scores and life success. There are plenty of people who get outstanding scores and don’t achieve much. There are people who get dismal scores and out achieve most. The one thing that does consistently correlate with life success is involvement in ECs. You will find plenty of research papers on-line that prove these points.</p>
<p>There is a correlation between standardized test scores and college grades so colleges want the test scores too, but great test scores alone don’t predict life success.</p>
<p>Now…how one defines “life success” is also an interesting question, but that would be a whole other thread!</p>
<p>I actually hate the concept of an ‘EC’. When I was involved in things in high school (many years ago), I didn’t even know about an EC. I did things because I like to be involved, and had no clue that it was something that I would later put on a college app. </p>
<p>These days our kids get involved knowing full well what it means down the line. Everyone talks about it, and kids feel bad that they aren’t involved outside of class. People may say that they are doing fifty million things for the love of it, and we should just admit that’s an absolute lie. They may like doing 1-2 things, and the rest are for the app.</p>
<p>I think we are just creating a generation of over-worked, stressed out people, by the time they are 18! I just cringe, and my heart breaks when I see all the posts here from kids and they are asking if they will be admitted to such and such school, and their list of accomplishments and activities is pages long! And they feel like a failure if their list isn’t as long as the next kid’s list.</p>
<p>What if a school actually said that they would prioritize students that had 1-2 ECs over those that had 20? What if we allowed our kids to be kids, rather than miniature versions of us? </p>
<p>^^^Maybe I’m misinformed, but I do think that most colleges prefer to see 1-3 activities where the kids are very involved rather than a lot of scattered involvement. My Dd basically had Newspaper EIC, some writing awards and her sport, and did very well in admissions. Ds had Scouts, a lot of outdoor leadership, school leadership and work experience, and also did well. Neither kid participated in anything (except chores at home) that they weren’t interested in doing for its own sake. Dd was “passionate” about her sport and writing. Ds was a very cool character- I wouldn’t describe him as the passionate type, but still very dedicated to his interests.</p>
<p>I wholeheartedly agree Crizello. When D began her sport at age 5 it wasn’t to put on her college app. Neither was her involvement in 4-H, her other sport or the physics club she started. She does this because she loves it. She loves being busy and over scheduled.</p>
<p>Ds plays 3 sports is also in 4-H and has a small business selling eggs. He’s not really interested in other EC’s. I hate the thought that he’s going to have to “find” something more. </p>
<p>We want our kids to be successful but we also want them to be healthy, well adjusted adults. It’s a crazy world.</p>
<p>Agentninetynine- It doesn’t sound like you have anything to worry about. Your son doesn’t have to find something more. 3 sports, 4H and a business is already a pretty full plate.</p>
<p>I don’t think that the private schools have a pecking order or rating. They are looking for diversity, to some extent.
If everyone plays piano and one kid plays the oboe, you can bet the oboe player will get a boost. I think that athleticism is appreciated at most schools, even if the kids aren’t stars. “Leadership” is big at the public colleges in California, and probably at some of the selective privates, too. What that means, exactly, isn’t always that apparent. I think that certain ECs can be “fashionable” in some years, and not in others. All of this is a very good reason NOT to worry about what the colleges think when helping your kids make choices. Let their choices be their own, and they will find a college that appreciates them for who they are.</p>
<p>criz you are not a lone voice at all, what you said is exactly my experience. It’s my hope that kids do ecs because they enjoy them, want to help others or need the $…full stop.</p>
<p>I know my kids would never do what they do for a college app entry.</p>
<p>The EC “arms race” isn’t lost on college admissions officers. They are fully cognizant about how students and families try to present themselves. The “laundry list” of clubs, the numbers of “founder of X club” is so tired and cliche it’s not even funny.</p>
<p>But students and parents still don’t realize how transparent the resume padder looks to colleges. </p>
<p>I’ve interviewed and recruited for my HYP alma mater for 20+ years. The typical applicant is very strong academically and has a what most people would consider a “good” list of ECs. But consistently, the ones who get offers – even among this amazing pool – are the jaw-dropping kids who at even 17 or 18 are the kind of kids, who if they submitted a resume to me, I would look to hire.</p>
<p>In 20 yrs, I’ve met a few. And the ironic thing? These kids are so accomplished,confident, inquisitive, intellectual-- that they are the ones who really don’t need the degree that my college would confer to them – I honestly feel that. They already are moving and shaking things around them. Their stop at my college is just one phase. My college isn’t going to make them. They are fully on the way already.</p>
<p>Perhaps some of you are the parents of one of these. If I may be so bold, probably many of your kids aren’t like this. But that’s 100% perfectly fine. One of my kids might be this. Maybe not. My other one, she’ll do fine but life will be grand w/o an Ivy degree. Either way, with either kid, I’ll be 100% fine as long as they grow into women of character – regardless of what name is printed on their college diploma one day.</p>
<p>For those of you who have kids who do ECs purely for their intrinsic value: Bravo. That’s what I’m trying to teach my girls. I’ve told them bluntly: if no one would ever know you did this, would you still do it?</p>
<p>That’s the standard that’s important for me.</p>
<p>At the most selective schools, it is sometimes thought that “common” ECs are not as advantageous as “uncommon” ECs to schools which want to build a “diverse” freshman class. A piano or violin playing applicant may not stand out as well as an <code>ukeke playing applicant at a school that gets thousands of piano or violin playing applicants but only a few</code>ukeke playing applicants.</p>
<p>The usual controversial claim is that there are too many Asian applicants and students (compared to the US population of 5%), so some schools try to keep the numbers down. Due to the opacity of admissions processes at the most selective schools, this cannot be proven or disproven from an outsider’s point of view, although many people firmly believe one way or the other and can detour a thread for hundreds of posts on the subject.</p>
<p>As for discrimination against Asians – how about this point? They discriminate against uninteresting applicants, Asian or not. </p>
<p>To counter the discrimination point, probably half of the kids who got acceptances from my alma mater were Asian that I’ve interviewed. But they were astounding. This year, one has already been admitted EA. He is astounding – scientist (national contest runner up), musician (Carnegie Hall gold medalist) & athlete (team captain). And Asian.</p>
<p>Me? Asian too. My main EC (beyond cranking on all my schools offerings and being a student leader at an urban HS) was to wash dishes. But I stood out. </p>
<p>I’ve learned this: not everyone can stand out. It’s like the Kathy Griffon joke: not every kid is “gifted”</p>
<p>oops. I’m guilty of turning the direction of this thread like ucbalumnus warned about. Sorry</p>
<p>The current approach to admissions in which grades and test scores are augmented by geographic distribution and extra-curricular activities as a way of judging candidates character and leadership abilities was instituted by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to reduce the percentage of Jews. As documented by Jerome Karabel, who had access to the schools’ archives, in a book called The Chosen, when explicit quotas became too politically incorrect, they found that accepting applicants just based on pure academic performance produced a much higher percentage of Jews than they found acceptable. So, they introduced geographic distribution (Jews lived in a limited number of urban areas, so increasing kids from Iowa and Arkansas increased the proportion of Christians); athletics (sports was thought to be a measure of Christian virtue); etc. Interestingly, as the book notes, when Fred Hargadon moved from Dean of Admissions at Stanford to the same position at Princeton, he strengthened reliance on the non-academic criteria to systematically reduce the percentage of Jews at Princeton.</p>
<p>Interestingly, we’ve all come to accept these criteria for admission as the norm, but they provide fairly arbitrary and opaque tools to discriminate against certain groups (like Asians – we don’t want too many violin players) and in favor of other groups. Sometimes discrimination will be intentional, as it was against Jews and as I suspect it is against Asians, and sometimes it will be unintentional, perhaps against kids who are poor (but not URMs) who need to care for siblings after school, for example, and don’t have time for ECs.</p>
<p>ECs are important because, more than grades, the skills developed and practiced are transferrable to the work world. There aren’t too many jobs out there whose requirements are “ability to study for exams,” “good at selecting the right multiple choice answer,” etc. </p>
<p>When kids focus on one or two ECs, in-depth, they learn leadership skills, people management, communication, time management, priority setting, etc. I think this is another reason why schools prefer a kid who was devoted to one or two activities and rose through the ranks, so to speak, and accomplished something, to a kid who joined 10 clubs and attended 10 meetings a week but accomplished nothing. </p>
<p>In fact, one piece of advice I heard back when my kid was applying to colleges is that they prefer ECs that are “real world” – working at a hospital, reporting for a newspaper, painting houses.</p>
<p>Like many other people posted, ECs are a way to differentiate between all of the perfect SAT scores and 4.0 kids. I have a friend whose child had perfect Math SATs and perfect SATIIs in science. He got 5’s on all of his AP tests- all Math and Science based. He had no ECs to speak of at all. He assumed he was a shoe in at MIT and several other top tier schools. He was rejected from all. He is attending a well respected school, but it was not his first choice. </p>
<p>My D, on the other hand, had decent SATs and a good class rank. She was highly involved with leadership positions in HS. She was accepted to all of her colleges. She is involved in a few ECs in college, and is doing well. Academically and socially.</p>
<p>Many colleges use the number of clubs as marketing tools “We have over 400 clubs for students”. Who would want to attend a college the advertised “We have Zero clubs, but all of our students study all the time.”</p>