Correction: This process is creating some/many students who spend their energy and creativity on how to get into the most “elite” (aka rejective) colleges in the U.S. For probably 90-95+% of students, this isn’t even a blip on their radar. 95% of students aren’t going for schools with acceptance rates below 40% (much less below 10%).
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Personally I do think students today are more engaged with the world and their local communities than my generation was. When I compare myself and my classmates to my daughter and her classmates, I absolutely believe this. I think part has to do with college admissions, but I also think part is the internet (it was way harder to find and organize opportunities without Google).
I have no idea. Someone would have to study that, and I expect someone has, although I am unfamiliar with the results. There are a lot of philanthropists who were “old school” Ivy graduates (I am actually a fundraiser by profession and quite a few of my org’s major donors are Ivy grads). So they are there, but I don’t know how this compares to other university alumni. Maybe no substantial difference. And of course I also think it’s all a lot more complicated than where someone went to college - there are many, many factors that lead people to philanthropy; alma mater, if a factor at all, is surely a very minor one. But Ivy grads are at least as community minded as anyone else - at least the generation that is currently middle aged and beyond.
Yes, of course this is absurd. But I don’t think the average high school student is doing anything so ridiculous. Some are, yes, we see them here on CC. But I don’t think the majority are - especially since more realize that this no longer tends to impress the AOs at selective schools who realize it’s often just a gimmick, not evidence of a substantial community commitment.
It was the gimmick that followed the charity trip to Africa gimmick, and another will surely follow. I think it is way more widespread than you believe, with a substantial number of hs students engaged in activities they don’t like because they hope it improves their college chances. They get stressed, and that stress passes along to those around them.
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yes, and same goes for sports, music and a bunch of other things that count for ECs. it is designed to favor students with access to these ECs and ability to game the system.
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Lots of kids genuinely enjoy sports. Hard for someone as unathletic as me to believe, but it’s true. Including my daughter who was a competitive athlete (including clubs and travel and all those things you seem to assume to be bogus) from the age of 7 on and yet…She truly loves her sport and has gotten so much out of the experience beyond athletics. She still participates in this sport in college (still with clubs and travel…in fact traveling to a competition this very weekend). Yup, hard to believe a kid could possibly - gasp - enjoy sports participation! And have it have NOTHING to do with college admissions!
Some do, but I haven’t personally seen evidence of a “substantial number.” You may be right, but I haven’t seen that evidence, so I remain skeptical. Some definitely do - that I know. But I do not know how widespread it is. The kids I’ve seen mostly seem to enjoy their activities - whether sports or music or robotics or whatever. But of course I can only see what’s around me and don’t know as much about the trends in other places.
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Yale will be making its decision on tests by the end of the month
this article talks about it
Simple solution- move to a less affluent town.
The kids in my neighborhood get jobs at the mall, hang out with their friends, set up small side hacks (teaching older folks how to use zoom to “see” their grandchildren, selling used clothes on Poshmark). The most exotic EC I’ve seen is a kid who is a talented ice skater (I have no idea what her aspirations are… but her parents sure spend a lot of time hauling around to meet coaches, compete, etc.)
The sheer affluence in some communities is a source of much of the “stress” y’all are referring to. There is a town near mine with one acre zoning. I promise you the “stress” to get into a highly rejective college is significantly more than in my town (apartments, condos, capes and ranches on 1/8 acre lots.)
Density can be your friend sometimes. I don’t know if the process is broken or not- but some parents are sure doing their best to make HS as unpleasant as possible for their kids. We see the kids posting here- they’re frantic because they’re “already” in the 9th grade and they don’t have a “research mentor”, or can’t find an internship in a lab. This isn’t a sign of a broken system, it’s a sign of runamuck affluence with nowhere to go. And the trips, oh god, so many trips. So much effort put into helping poor people. There are communities 15 minutes down the interstate highway that have SO MANY NEEDS! Habitat, go coach basketball or teach a girl scout troupe that lost it’s leader how to bake bread, chaperone a Boys Scout overnight. Must it involve air travel to “count” as helping people?
I’m skeptical that it’s the college admissions process which is broken- even after reading all these posts. Maybe it’s us who are broken.
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i didn’t say sports was bogus. students put their time into it. but many, if not all, do it because it counts in the ECs for college admissions. About Michael Lewis’ book “playing to win” from amazon:
"When New York Times best-selling author and journalist Michael Lewis got involved in his kids’ local softball league, it all seemed so wholesome and simple. Ten years later, his family looked back to find that they had spent thousands of dollars - not to mention hours - and traveled thousands of miles in the service of a single sport.
All over America, families are investing blood, sweat, tears, and retirement savings in their children’s sports careers, all with the ultimate goal of…what exactly? A college scholarship? A professional contract? Simply the taste of victory?
Through the lens of the highly competitive world of girls’ softball, Lewis reveals the youth sports industrial complex that has arisen to aggressively monetize after-school pastimes. The major players aren’t the ones on the field - they’re the ones stripping the pockets of unwitting parents to the tune of billions of dollars a year, creating an arms race of amateur athletics and enabling the Varsity Blues scandal. So what’s in it for the parents - or, for that matter, the kids themselves? This from-the-bleachers portrait of our national obsession with youth sports explores the consequences of high-stakes play for families, communities, and the kids in the game."
Essentially, if we get rid of sports as EC in the college admission and sports based admission, then we can get rid of this racket.
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I disagree. Some do, I’m sure. I do not believe most do, and I certainly do believe all do. My daughter has been involved in her sport since the age of 7. She does it for love of sport - she definitely wasn’t thinking about college when she started competing. She grew up in the sport, most of her friends were from her sport - not a single one I can think of was doing it for college admissions. That’s not to say that not a single one was, but it certainly was not a common theme. One of her friends actually made the US Olympic team a few years back and competed in Beijing. Even she wasn’t doing it for college admissions 
(Will also add that the sport in question is a club sport; it is not a sport that colleges recruit for, so no one is doing it for that reason, unless they are grossly misinformed about the sport, college admissions, or both.)
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i agree with a lot of what you are saying. but college admission process is absolutely adding to the stress of young people and their parents. on the side though it has created a racket of admission consulting, club sports, music clubs, community service etc. it is a sizable economy though. it is also corrupting young people’s minds.
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I have to admit that one of the main reasons why I wanted my older kids to go to boarding school was so that I could stop schlepping them to practices, lessons, and rehearsals, and stop sitting through their long (boring) games. I mean that I love to watch my kids as much as the next mom, but they stubbornly stuck with some activities when I was secretly hoping that they’d quit a few (particularly during the years that we did a lot of it via public transportation. I am a big fan of carpools, but I couldn’t always find them). The beauty of BS became that they could still do the same fun activities without involving me as much or adding a commute.
That said, I know some kids who got pushed into activities initially to either stoke their parents’ egos or because the parents believed that the activity will help with college admissions. I’ve tried to listen to my kids and check in with myself about that sort of stuff because I do think it is easy for extracurricular activities to become more performative than pleasurable and there have been times that I have been more interested in a particular activity than my kid has been. Sometimes kids are conflicted and they don’t want to quit some activities or they feel like they must pursue others to avoid disappointing their parents or teachers who have invested a lot in them even after they’ve stopped enjoying themselves.
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congratulations! you have a great daughter! you are rightly proud of her! we are happy for you!
i can’t do a better job describing what happens in high school sports than Michael Lewis: He has personal experience with it: https://www.amazon.com/Playing-to-Win/dp/B08DL7ZJDX
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Clubs, travel teams only matter with respect to true athletic recruits. If you are not an athletic recruit, what AO’s are looking at are indicias of dedication, persistence, teamwork/empathy and leadership, which could apply to any EC, not boxes to check.
IMO, creating “do gooders” is merely a by product of certain traits that holistic universities are looking for that contribute to the university community. The ability to be empathetic, to be a team player, to not be selfish, to be willing to proactively interact in a community are not unique to "do gooders ". You see these traits across successful people across every industry/career, including the high paying careers you listed.
I actually know Michael Lewis through a friend. Nice guy, love his books, but he is a story teller of interesting topics and his goal is to sell books, not engage in real research. Definitely learned something about bond trading, baseball drafting/trading, the mortgage collapse, but mostly I was entertained. I would not rely on his books as being the defining authoritative source of any topic. I have not read this book, but I will likely buy it because we travelled a similar journey with our daughter for competitive softball. I agree with the observations listed in the summary btw.
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But his experience is not everyone’s experience. It may or may not even be a typical experience. It is his experience. Just as my experience is my experience. But you see the two experiences are entirely different, which means there is variable experience. Which one is typical and which one is atypical? I have no idea. But obviously both experiences exist. It is not one or the other. His experience does not negate my experience. (Nor does mine his, obviously.) So I do not consider it valid or justified to paint all youth sports with this kind of broad brush that everyone is just doing it for college admissions. That simply isn’t true.
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One of the latest gimmicks is pay-for-play research publishing. By paying 5k–15k depending on the program and consultation fee, a high school student gets 10–30 hours of 1-on-1 time with a “world-class expert” to do “cutting-edge research” for 3 months to a year, leading to a 15-page research paper (cheapest program, publication venue not mentioned) or a paper published in a college-level journal or at a prestigious competition/conference (most expensive program).
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this one is really shameful. how come experts/professors are agreeing to do this nonsense?
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And this is part of the reason that I do not believe this is very widespread, if only because the average student could not afford such a fee. It is a relatively small minority of affluent families that could afford the $10K for such a program and then an even smaller subset of those who will actually decide to do it. I don’t see how this could be some huge number of students - and definitely not the average US high school student (whose family is already living paycheck to paycheck).
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There are a lot of equivalent scams that are EC bloating and free. Sports is not the scam if actually time consuming commitment and real.
I suspect the experts/professors are not listed as co-authors, so their names are not dragged through the mud.
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