<p>NYmom, an athletic team or musical will not be any less time-consuming at the independent schools your son is applying to (I am familiar with all 3 of them). The difference I’ve seen between the kids at our local public high school and the kids at my sons’ private school is that the private school kids tend to take on far fewer EC’s. I’m amazed by the list of EC’s I’ve seen here on CC - there is no way my sons could have done all those activities and handled their academic workload. Instead the private school kids focus on just a couple of EC’s - this is the norm at their school and colleges seem to be fine with this.</p>
<p>I agree with lefthandofdog above - I don’t think my son would say that college is easier than his rigorous private high school. He does think that he has far more free time now that he isn’t playing 3 varsity sports, and of course in college you spend far less time in the classroom than the 7 hours of high school each day, and he is taking 4 classes instead of 5 or 6 plus “extras” like art or music. So he has lots of extra hours in the day. But the academics are intellectually more demanding than a high school AP class.</p>