University Admissions

I don’t think people realize just how many extracurriculars are bullshit. There’s no accountability or verification.

Joe Nobody can’t get cushy big-ticket charity gigs, but Jill Daddyknowstheboard can be Executive Planner who coordinates a citywide homelessness initiative.

My theory, and I realize this smacks of crazy, but hear me out:

The whole well-rounded extracurricular focus thing was a reaction by connected upper class whites to keep their stupid kids flowing into good schools without it looking like racism. Affirmative action and increased emphasis on standardized testing was leaving those kids out in the cold.

The exam-based system is unfair, but it’s unfair in a predictable and controllable way. Poor kids can’t bother with being charitable when they need charity themselves.

“Legacy” is far more successful at that. A lot of the kids at the Ivies would have a tough time getting into Rutgers or Texas were they not from the right vagina. While there, grade inflation keeps their parents happy. And then they get cushy jobs with their dad’s friend’s firm and coast out the rest of their days, maybe with a quick stop at the presidency or something.

And then they get cushy jobs with their dad’s friend’s firm and coast out the rest of their days, maybe with a quick stop at the presidency or something.

Man, fuck the world.

Based on personal experience, I can tell you that most “elite” U.S. institutions would value a poorer student who worked part-time during high school far more than a richer student who had no job, but did a large number of extra-curricular activities. All other factors being equal, poorer applicants tend to have a large advantage over wealthy applicants. Of course, all things aren’t equal, and you can make a solid argument that the advantages poorer students receive in the admissions process fail to adequately level the playing field. But the problem there has almost nothing to do with the mere fact that admissions offices value extracurricular activities.

Imagine two students, both with high incomes, 4.0 GPAs, and 1600 SATs. One of them did community service work, worked for the paper, and played a varsity sport. The other one’s “Activities” box is completely blank, and their essay doesn’t provide a good explanation for that omission. Do you really think those applicants should be treated equally?

Who are you and what have you done with Ben?

Spoken like somebody who knows nothing about the topic. There’s a pretty wide body of research, considering how new Extracurricular Activities and their impact on character and talent develoment is as a field of serious academic research. If you took the time to read the studies (or, at the very least, the abstracts) you’d find a strong correlation between extracurriculars and collegiate success.

Also, If Jill D. is actually an Executive Planner of a citywide service project of any kind whatsoever, you can bet she’s done a hell of a lot of work and has learned a bunch about management, delegation, communication, and planning… all things a right-headed admissions officer would want to see in a prospective student.

Extracurricular activity is a valid way to measure the quality of university applicants and have been proven even more powerful in helping students from low-income areas… especially urban ones. So before you start ranting about something you clearly don’t understand, try learning a bit first. You might even learn that the very population you claim to champion stands to gain the most from universities encouraging extracurricular involvement for its applicants.

edit my google skills suck… can’t seem to find an online copy of the article right now, but here’s a good starting place for anybody interested in the field:

“Ethnicity, Gender and Age: Predicting Resilience and Academic Achievement Amoung Urban High School Students” by Teresa Wasonga, Dana Christman, Lloyd Kilmer in American Secondary Education Fall 2003

Here’s another one… I didn’t bother looking for it online, but I’m sure it’s available too, especially if you use ProQuest or ERIC or somesuch…

“The Role of Participation in In-School and Outside-of-School Activities in the Talent Development of Gifted Students” by Paula Olszewski-Kubilius and Seon-young Lee in The Journal of Secondary Gifted Education Spring 2004

I didn’t feel like putting them in APA format, but if anybody cares to find the articles, it’s enough to find them.

I’ll bet. Kind of like how being in a frat helps too.

You’re kidding, right? Oh yeah, I forgot… this is P&R where meaningless one-liners and logical fallacies reign supreme…

What? Being smarter is unfair to you? Or are you suggesting being good at taking tests is a bad way to measure knowledge? If so, could you provide a better way?

Robert, I think Jason is arguing from the perspective that standardized tests are biased because of the way they are written. It’s not an unheard of position… it’s basically that while it’s obvious the tests measure skills and knoweldge, some argue that the skills and knowledge the tests measure are not fair because students from certain cultural backgrounds lack the same frames of reference as your typical WASP kid.

I’ve just come to the opinion - from Mickey Kaus, of all people - that taking tests is a ridiculous measure of how good you’re going to be at something. At least the apprentice/guild system had logic going for it - you had to show you could hack it.

Instead, we have a system assessing your ability to rephrase (arts), memorize (math and the like), and get in good with the upper classes (extracirriculars and fraternaties).

Ironically out of that list the ability to form social networks is probably the most important, and none of them hurt, but they all seem at best somewhat relevant to the ability to get things done.

Ah, gotcha.

You’re kidding, right? Oh yeah, I forgot… this is P&R where meaningless one-liners and logical fallacies reign supreme…

What fallacies did Jason commit?

Oh good lord.

Per what Ryan A said, there are significant correlations between extracurricular activity and success after college. Malcolm Gladwell covered this in the New Yorker, and references what Ryan A was talking about. Ivy Leagues are invested in getting students who will be succesful in the future because it makes them look good, and helps grow their endowment.

Yeah, that’s a pretty good case of confusing causes and effects.

Here, let me lay it out for you:

  1. Rich kids have time and connections to get primo extracurriculars
  2. Rich kids get into frats
  3. Rich kids get jobs from their father’s yachting buddys
    =
    OMG BEING ACTIVE MAKES YOU SUCCESSFUL!

Ben, try reading the Gladwell article Mike linked, since it’s obviously too much work for you to go find the scholarly articles I referenced. You’ll find that reality is quite the opposite of your irrational rantings.

I did and it made me angrier about the bullshit networking aristocracy that runs higher education, not less.

I’d note that my theory that I came up with off the top of my head was actually true(extracurriculars being an attempt to keep shoveling stupid rich kids into good schools). In short, Ryan, I’m guessing you are either employed in education or come from a wealthy family.

Here’s the part you obviously missed in the Gladwell article, Ben:

In the 2001 book “The Game of Life,” James L. Shulman and William Bowen (a former president of Princeton) conducted an enormous statistical analysis on an issue that has become one of the most contentious in admissions: the special preferences given to recruited athletes at selective universities. Athletes, Shulman and Bowen demonstrate, have a large and growing advantage in admission over everyone else. At the same time, they have markedly lower G.P.A.s and S.A.T. scores than their peers. Over the past twenty years, their class rankings have steadily dropped, and they tend to segregate themselves in an “athletic culture” different from the culture of the rest of the college. Shulman and Bowen think the preference given to athletes by the Ivy League is shameful.

Halfway through the book, however, Shulman and Bowen present “” finding. Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers. Apparently, athletes are far more likely to go into the high-paying financial-services sector, where they succeed because of their personality and psychological makeup.

Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers. Apparently, athletes are far more likely to go into the high-paying financial-services sector, where they succeed because of their deeply influential social networks and prestige among same.

FYP…