If every kid is doing the same damn EC

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are tons of kids who get into top colleges with the formula of:

Top grades in hardest tracks
Tippy top test scores
Enough ECs to pass muster as well rounded

This was me and most of my friends, who were all top 25% (and usually top 10%) at Ivy graduation.

Unless you and most of your friends went to ivies within the last 2 (maybe 3) years, your experience is not relevant to how college admissions is now.

Exactly. This forum of OLD parents talking of their experience from 35+ years ago. One can hardly get into a community college these days (yes, know what a community college is!)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are tons of kids who get into top colleges with the formula of:

Top grades in hardest tracks
Tippy top test scores
Enough ECs to pass muster as well rounded

This was me and most of my friends, who were all top 25% (and usually top 10%) at Ivy graduation.

Unless you and most of your friends went to ivies within the last 2 (maybe 3) years, your experience is not relevant to how college admissions is now.

Exactly. This forum of OLD parents talking of their experience from 35+ years ago. One can hardly get into a community college these days (yes, know what a community college is!)

This really just isn’t true. For this to be true, you’d need either a massively expanding population AND no comparable increase in university slots OR everyone magically gets smarter and harder working in a generation.

We have a moderately larger population but I’m skeptical that the pool of very qualified students (say, those who are ready to excel at college level work at top universities the moment they enter) is massively larger than it ever was. If anything, if you’re looking at the middle class, standards have probably slightly declined.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I long for the days when high schoolers joined clubs and played sports because they enjoyed them, not for how it would look on a college application to some random admissions officer.

Exactly. And then they want to talk about mental health. Please.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Which EC is everyone doing?

NP: varsity sports (non-recruit), club leader, Debate/Model UN, student gov, music/band, robotics/science fair, volunteering (animal shelters, church, or hospital)

yup. they're all literally doing this already.

This isn’t news to anyone is it? We are not where we were 25-30 years ago. Then, this combination would get a student into Ivies, Duke etc. totally different world.

No one cares in admission about varsity sports (if not recruited). They want to see how you help others, how you will fit in.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are tons of kids who get into top colleges with the formula of:

Top grades in hardest tracks
Tippy top test scores
Enough ECs to pass muster as well rounded

This was me and most of my friends, who were all top 25% (and usually top 10%) at Ivy graduation.

Unless you and most of your friends went to ivies within the last 2 (maybe 3) years, your experience is not relevant to how college admissions is now.

Exactly. This forum of OLD parents talking of their experience from 35+ years ago. One can hardly get into a community college these days (yes, know what a community college is!)

This really just isn’t true. For this to be true, you’d need either a massively expanding population AND no comparable increase in university slots OR everyone magically gets smarter and harder working in a generation.

We have a moderately larger population but I’m skeptical that the pool of very qualified students (say, those who are ready to excel at college level work at top universities the moment they enter) is massively larger than it ever was. If anything, if you’re looking at the middle class, standards have probably slightly declined.

It is, plus the competition from international students is fierce.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Which EC is everyone doing?

NP: varsity sports (non-recruit), club leader, Debate/Model UN, student gov, music/band, robotics/science fair, volunteering (animal shelters, church, or hospital)

None of those are impressive.
Kid at Ivy.

Please share your wisdom, O Anointed One.

Different poster: I agree and here is why. Think about how many schools there are in the country. Now how many have clubs and then how many have club leaders? Same for varsity sports, student gov, band, science fair, and volunteering. So while these are worthwhile activities, none of these will make your child stand out from the hundreds of thousands of kids just like this.

This is why everyone needs to understand why the "Top20" or whatever are bascially a lottery. If you have certain grades and scores and EC's, you are on a pool of "qualified" applicants. As the analogy goes, you are allowed into the stadium, but only the people on the field get to attend the school. How do you get on to the field? The orchestra needs a bassoonist and the applicant plays the bassoon. The basketball team needs a shooting guard, and the applicant is a shooting guard. The micro-physics department needs a new researcher and the applicant happened to do a high school thesis on the subject.

Any of the variables can be true of any school on any given year, but likely not every year. And there is no way of gaming the system to "get an advantage" - it is who happened to apply to what school when something in a particular community is needed"

So to the applicants, live your best lives, enjoy the academics and extracurriculars because you enjoy them, not because they are giving you "an edge" in the application process. Pick a variety of schools you are happy to attend and let the chips fall where they will. Where you go to college is not going to make or break your life.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My oldest kid is applying this cycle so take this as an inexperienced view:

I wonder if there is so much emphasis on extra curriculars bc it’s the piece of the puzzle that is more easily controllable by us parents. Grades and ability to succeed in harder class are on our kids. Other factors that colleges use like need to fill band seats, geographic diversity, full pay is out of our control. But extra curricular choices we can suggest and push for.

If I had to guess it really doesn’t matter much. I think colleges want to see a kid with more going on than just school. But I suspect that grades on classes with rigor, test scores matter much more. I also suspect that many schools are using an AI that helps the score the kid and predict outcome at the score based on previous profiles. Much more is out of our control than we think. Honestly, that has made me (and my kid) much more relaxed about applications.

Colleges are communities with a lot of different clubs and activities that contribute to the life of the college. A lot of kids can have high test scores and grades, but what are they doing when not in class? Most schools do not want kids who are only going to be in the library for the other 10 hours every day. They want kids who will help build theater sets, or participate on club/intramural sports or local volunteering on or off campus, tutoring local neighborhood kids, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are tons of kids who get into top colleges with the formula of:

Top grades in hardest tracks
Tippy top test scores
Enough ECs to pass muster as well rounded

This was me and most of my friends, who were all top 25% (and usually top 10%) at Ivy graduation.

Unless you and most of your friends went to ivies within the last 2 (maybe 3) years, your experience is not relevant to how college admissions is now.

Exactly. This forum of OLD parents talking of their experience from 35+ years ago. One can hardly get into a community college these days (yes, know what a community college is!)

This really just isn’t true. For this to be true, you’d need either a massively expanding population AND no comparable increase in university slots OR everyone magically gets smarter and harder working in a generation.

We have a moderately larger population but I’m skeptical that the pool of very qualified students (say, those who are ready to excel at college level work at top universities the moment they enter) is massively larger than it ever was. If anything, if you’re looking at the middle class, standards have probably slightly declined.

Some high schools have 300 Valedictorians; many schools have >30% of the class graduating with an UW4.0. Was that true back in your day? The first 1600 SAT didn't happen until the mid 1960s, and before 1994, only 7 to 10 people scored perfect scores per year; now about .07% of test takers, nearly 1000, have superscored 1600 per year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are tons of kids who get into top colleges with the formula of:

Top grades in hardest tracks
Tippy top test scores
Enough ECs to pass muster as well rounded

This was me and most of my friends, who were all top 25% (and usually top 10%) at Ivy graduation.

Unless you and most of your friends went to ivies within the last 2 (maybe 3) years, your experience is not relevant to how college admissions is now.

Maybe. But honestly someone who has a top 1% IQ and a top, say, 5% IQ is still going to do awesome at life if they end up at Vanderbilt or Boston College instead of Columbia or whatever.

You can train your kid to become a national fiddling champion to try to get some perceived advantage but in the end talent + discipline + EQ will result in positive life outcomes.

Anyway this is a temporary squeeze birth rates are declining so for those with young kids, it’s going to go back to being like the 90s and 00s again in another decade or so.

I agree with everything except that admissions will become easier again at some point. No, that’s a fantasy that people are clinging to but for top 25-50 schools, globalization means that any delta that might have been created by declining birth rates will be eliminated by increased international applications and acceptance rates.

Some schools are really transparent about how they have increased their proportion of international students over time- Yale has tons of public data about this, for example. It’s more than doubled since the late 90s.

I don’t see schools reducing their population or international students unless they’re a state school and it’s mandated by their legislature.

Ok, I thought this would come up. It’s a good point.

Look, the number of smart, hard working people on earth is not magically exploding. It’s still increasing because population generally is and, in some places like India, lots of poor people are gaining access to basic sanitation and proper childhood nutrition, which are some of the very few things that can actually increase intelligence if available at the right age (below about 3-6).

But birth rates are declining globally AND it’s all still a moot point because economic opportunity is expanding even faster. It’s easier for a top 1% person to become a doctor or lawyer or whatever than ever before because economic growth means there are more of these positions. And jobs like computer scientist simply didn’t exist in large numbers until recently. And yes Americans are facing more direct international competition, but we’re also richer and have more opportunities to benefit from smart foreigners.

As the smart fraction increases, the number of universities known for having seriously smart students will grow. Think of the rise of Northeastern for example. Similarly, if standards decline the reputation of universities will fall accordingly. Frankly, this recent crop of Columbia students seems from afar a lot less impressive than those graduating 20 years ago.

My point was that if you get the inputs right, things will work out. At a minimum, in my experience students selected for academics are much more likely to end up in the top 10% at their school than those selected for some obscure talent.

I will continue to focus on the basics and most important things for my kids. If they have an obscure passion, sure I’ll facilitate, but I’m going to lose zero sleep about whether more standard ECs are going to have an impact on college admissions. I’m playing a longer game than that.

Disagree with one point- it’s actually harder to become a doctor or lawyer as population grows, because access to those professions is controlled by the availability of graduate school programs and medical residency slots. Our supply of doctors is especially constrained because of how limited medical school and residency growth has been compared to the overall growth of the U.S. population.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A kid I know that just got into Princeton is a fisherman.

Interesting. Are they from Alaska?

NJ actually

[Anonymous]

They don’t want you to stand out so they can pick their preferred students not based on merit. This is the foundational scheme of the left.

[Anonymous]

Honestly, I feel like the kids all do the same ECs because parents push them there and because of their own anxiety do not let their kids pursue their own interests. My DD had a friend who wrote songs in mandolin. His parent forbade it and told him he was wasting his time and needed to be practicing violin. A score on the violin exams that was good but similar to everyone else, stands out way less than a kid who writes his own songs. The parents were fools. My kid had several unusual interests and had won an award for a documentary film she had made. She did not do traditional school ECs but pulled out samples on her phone of a graphic novel she was writing when the subject came up at an interview. It worked for her.

Model UN is fine if that is what your kid loves and they can excel, but otherwise, find something they think is fun where they can excel.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, I feel like the kids all do the same ECs because parents push them there and because of their own anxiety do not let their kids pursue their own interests. My DD had a friend who wrote songs in mandolin. His parent forbade it and told him he was wasting his time and needed to be practicing violin. A score on the violin exams that was good but similar to everyone else, stands out way less than a kid who writes his own songs. The parents were fools. My kid had several unusual interests and had won an award for a documentary film she had made. She did not do traditional school ECs but pulled out samples on her phone of a graphic novel she was writing when the subject came up at an interview. It worked for her.

Model UN is fine if that is what your kid loves and they can excel, but otherwise, find something they think is fun where they can excel.

On the mandolin (in case that was unclear)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are tons of kids who get into top colleges with the formula of:

Top grades in hardest tracks
Tippy top test scores
Enough ECs to pass muster as well rounded

This was me and most of my friends, who were all top 25% (and usually top 10%) at Ivy graduation.

Unless you and most of your friends went to ivies within the last 2 (maybe 3) years, your experience is not relevant to how college admissions is now.

That is hysterical! Pray tell, what year did you graduate? (Stifles giggles) (Pass muster) (I bet it starts with 199….)

In 2006, the acceptance rate at Yale was 17.7%. In 2010, the acceptance rate for UPenn was also 17.7%. In 2023, UVA's acceptance rate was 18.7%. This is why it is stupid when people say, "signed, an Ivy grad" or "When I applied, I was admitted into three ivies." When you're ready to stop being silly, go ahead and pull your head out of the sand.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are tons of kids who get into top colleges with the formula of:

Top grades in hardest tracks
Tippy top test scores
Enough ECs to pass muster as well rounded

This was me and most of my friends, who were all top 25% (and usually top 10%) at Ivy graduation.

Unless you and most of your friends went to ivies within the last 2 (maybe 3) years, your experience is not relevant to how college admissions is now.

Exactly. This forum of OLD parents talking of their experience from 35+ years ago. One can hardly get into a community college these days (yes, know what a community college is!)

This really just isn’t true. For this to be true, you’d need either a massively expanding population AND no comparable increase in university slots OR everyone magically gets smarter and harder working in a generation.

We have a moderately larger population but I’m skeptical that the pool of very qualified students (say, those who are ready to excel at college level work at top universities the moment they enter) is massively larger than it ever was. If anything, if you’re looking at the middle class, standards have probably slightly declined.

Thanks for your input, but you're wrong and it is true. I posted above some admissions rates and you can see that essentially UVA has the same admissions rate now as the ivy league used to have.