Reply to Why do colleges place such emphasis on “leadership”??

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Another way to look at it is that colleges want students who are independent critical thinkers.  If your child is heavily involved in an activity but you can’t find any way to spin that into an example of leadership, then they’re probably doing little more than simply showing up and doing what they’re told.  It’s your child is truly engaged/invested in an activity, surely at some point they’ve thought to themselves that X might be a better way to do something, or Y could be a great addition to what they’re already doing.  If your child isn’t even doing that, what are they going to contribute to the college community other than filling a seat?[/quote]

The problem with this argument is that it doesn't align with what we know about how
People make scientific and intellectual progress. There are 
Reasons why someone could be a math prodigy at
Age 10 but not a great legal scholar. In some disciplines people
Do their best work in their 50s so there is no reason to expect 
Everyone to speak at age 17 or 18 or 19. It would be like the
Army looking at 17 year old recruits and saying who is
Likely to become a general. You would get some of it right
But a lot of it wrong.
[/quote]

By that theory, we should do away with the admissions process completely and have every school do it by random lottery, because you never know who might be a genius in disguise.[/quote]

Not at all. This is where intellectual aptitude shows future potential. People just don't become critical thinkers in their later years. They were always critical thinkers - but achievement in many disciplines takes a long time (most people who go on to win Nobels did their seminal work in their 40s). As we all know - but some of us want to forget - it's aptitude tests that are the most reliable markers of critical thinking.

The rest of the world knows this. Thousands of years ago, Chinese scholars sat for days-long exams to be selected for the top administration jobs of the state. Every country in the world apart from the US selects its leaders and talent through exam scores. You might believe that because the USA was a superpower for a few years, its educational selection is the best. Actually, for most of its very short existence, it used the same selection methods as the rest of the world. You will find that this recent "holistic" experiment will die off as global competition for power becomes more competitive and Americans realize they need better people at the top in their influence wrangling against China, Europe and India.
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