(Welcome to Suburban Legends, an examination of the “truths” about college admission heard in the checkout line at the grocery store, in the stands at high school sporting events, and at any social gathering of parents with children about to apply to college. Unlike myths, Suburban Legends are plausible, and some may even be true. They are most likely to be believed by those who are educated and affluent, and they are always passed on by someone you trust but never happen to anyone you know.)
Last week I watched an episode of the old Gilmore Girls television series. It’s a show I never watched (and in fact was barely aware of) during its original run, but I have been watching it as part of my research for Hollywood Applies to College, analyzing depictions of college admission in popular entertainment.
Rory Gilmore, the daughter, is a freshman in high school when the show begins, and as a result concern for college, and especially Harvard, is a recurring plotline. Stay tuned for a future post devoted to the show.
In the episode I watched, Rory, who in the series premiere transferred to an exclusive prep school, discovers that she is “ten years behind on my extracurriculars” compared with her classmates. She panics, joining a Habitat for Humanity-like build project because “it looks good on your college transcript” and either exclaims or complains that “I need to find a retarded kid and teach him how to play softball.” The latter statement is a glimpse into how much our culture has changed in the 20 years since the show first aired. Today no one would dare use the “R word” on television unless they were the President of the United States. Make America hate again.
What hasn’t changed is the frenzy and confusion over the role that extracurricular activities play in college admission, especially at highly-selective colleges and universities. A number of years ago, an NPR story included the claim that “extracurriculars are just as important as academics.” And just last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article reporting that the pressure on teenagers to spend their summers on “resume-polishing summer activities” has gotten “even worse.”
The need to “polish” a resume, and to spend your summers doing it, is a perfect example of a Suburban Legend. It’s widely-believed and accepted uncritically, it’s plausible, and if both NPR and the WSJ are reporting it, it must be true.
But is it? Is curating a list of activities as part of one’s “personal narrative” or “brand” necessary for admission to what people used to refer to as “elite” colleges (before Doug Lederman’s op-ed for Inside Higher Ed last week calling for the end of that terminology)? There are a lot of reasons to subject the belief in the importance of resume polishing to stricter scrutiny.
Let’s consider the idea that extracurricular activities are just as important as academics. In my experience “transcript, transcript, transcript” is as foundational for college admission as “location, location, location” is for real estate. The first consideration in evaluating applicants is always academic, including both strength of schedule and grades. I can think of one instance years ago when a college announced that they were transcript-optional, allowing applicants to submit a video rather than a high school transcript, but it was a gimmick cooked up by a new president looking for a way to distinguish the college from lots of other liberal-arts colleges.
That doesn’t mean that extracurricular activities are unimportant. Your activities outside of class can be a way of demonstrating qualities like commitment and leadership, and many of the nation’s most selective colleges and universities assign applicants a rating for extracurricular activities as well as for academics. But that does not mean that activities are just as important as academics. If a student is not competitive academically, it would take an exceptional extracurricular accomplishment to compensate, something like being a blue-chip athlete, teenage Nobel Prize winner, or Disney Channel star.
The great debate with regard to activities is quality vs. quantity. The Common Application has space to list up to ten activities, but that doesn’t mean you need to fill up every space. You don’t get points deducted for not having ten, and you don’t get extra credit for having more than ten. I had a student a few years back who wanted to list 18 activities. I advised him that he needed to narrow the list down. After consulting with his mother, he brought back a new list–with 25 activities. It sent a message, just not the message he thought. He looked like someone with too much breadth and not enough depth, or someone who lacked the ability to prioritize what was important.
One or two serious and meaningful commitments is better than ten things that merely fill up time. How do you determine what belongs and what doesn’t? Create your activity list in descending order of importance to you. List what you care about first, then what’s next, and so on. You will eventually arrive at a line where everything above is meaningful and everything below is filler. Get rid of the filler.
The Common App activities section also asks about the amount of time you spend weekly on each activity. If your activities add up to more than 168 hours per week, admission officers know that you are exaggerating. On that note, admission officers read lots of applications and are generally pretty savvy about evaluating activities. A number of years ago one of my students described a community service opportunity that he had done during the school’s two-week inter-session as the most meaningful thing he had ever done. He may have been right, but the first question an application reader would have asked was, “If the activity was so meaningful, how come you stopped after two weeks?”
That leads us to the Wall Street Journal article. The first couple of sentences in that story state that crafting a “smorgasbord of resume-building summer activities” is no longer enough, that ambitious students now have to “fret over crafting their ‘summer story.’”
Several parts of those statements deserve parsing. The first is the idea that students need to pursue a “smorgasbord” of activities to impress admission officers. The second is that summer is primarily a time to “burnish” summer portfolios. And the third is that students must convey a “cohesive narrative” through their summer activities. None of those are necessarily wrong, but they also miss the point.
The point is that students should pursue activities not because they want to impress admission officers, but because they find those activities genuinely fulfilling. The question is not “What looks good?” but “What do I truly care about?” What is genuine also happens to be what impresses.
Is the article right that the pressure to fill the summer with activities has gotten worse? Summer programs for high school students have always used college admission as a marketing carrot (and maybe a stick). For a number of years I worked in a summer program devoted to college admission run by an entrepreneurial dean. Students signed up thinking it would give them an admission edge, which it didn’t. Colleges offered summer programs as ways to use campus facilities and generate revenue. But the University of Chicago is apparently now offering an early decision option for students who attend certain summer programs on its campus.
I also wonder about the idea that a student’s choices have to be tied together in a “cohesive narrative.” Certainly every application tells a story, and there should be integrity to that story. The WSJ story quotes a Stanford student whose four summers consisted of an internship, research on a college campus, volunteering at a local hospital, and running a nonprofit. Those might all be meaningful, but they are all things I would expect to find on my bingo card of summer activities designed to impress college admission officers. Can admission officers detect the difference between substance and the illusion of substance?
The article left me with more questions than answers. Is the Wall Street Journal reporting news or making news, reporting on a phenomenon or creating a phenomenon? What messages does it send, and are those messages healthy? We are already seeing a huge increase in mental health issues among young people. Is the college admission process a contagion?
The article quotes an independent educational consultant who talks about having students narrow their focus to one or two “passions.” But how many high school students have a true passion, much less two? College is supposed to be the time when you figure out who you are, but you can’t get into college unless you already know?
I also think it’s interesting that the article contains no quotes from admission officers. Do they value and reward students who are resume polishers? If not, why aren’t they speaking out? Silence is assent. What is the impact on a college or university of having a student body full of students who are good at playing the resume-polishng game?
Admission offices could help solve this problem by being transparent about what they want–and don’t want–with regard to extracurricular choices. Students are strategic thinkers who will figure out how to game whatever system is in place. What about asking for three activities instead of ten, sending a message that quality counts? Or how about ignoring summer activities altogether, or making it clear that intellectual curiosity and making a difference are preferable to a polished resume?
Alice Cooper sang “School’s out for summer.” Even professional athletes have an off-season to relax, rejuvenate, and refresh. Shouldn’t high school students have the same gift?