What's the point of EC's?

Northstarmom
Sun, 09 Jul 2006 10:11:48 +0000

"The main goal for a College is to churn out people who are MAINLY passionate about their field. "

Actually, that’s more the mission of technical schools, which are designed to give people the skills to get a job in a specific field.

The role of colleges is to transform uneducated people into educated people who have an awareness of various types of knowledge, can contribute to their communities, have an openness to learning, and who are having fulfilling lives including in their extracurricular pursuits.

Most people who go to college end up working in fields that aren’t directly related to their majors, and the world also is changing so much that the jobs that many college students will eventually hold haven’t even been created yet. Consequently, if colleges only trained people to be passionate about their fields, they’d be training them for obsolescence and unemployment.

Meanwhile, most colleges don’t admit students based on ECs, but only on stats. It’s only the very top colleges that include ECs in the mix, and that’s because they have such an overabundance of high stat, highly qualified applicants that those colleges can afford to make admissions decisions on the basis of creating well rounded classes.