Nicholas Fash was already an accomplished soccer and lacrosse player when he reached his freshman year at Greens Farms Academy in Connecticut. But that wasn’t enough for his father, Michael.
Determined to get his son into a top-ranked college, he taught Nicholas to play squash, figuring it was not only a fun game but “a very snooty sort of sport” that would impress prestigious schools. The plan worked: “Almost within a year, I had him ranked,” says the senior Fash, a film director. Nicholas is now a junior at Cornell, one of the eight Ivy League colleges.
So much for letting kids find themselves. As if there weren’t already enough stress to the college-admissions game, the rules have changed. After decades of looking for well-rounded “Renaissance kids,” competitive colleges are clamoring for something different: passion for a single pursuit. That means no more loading up on bogus activities during senior year. And it means big consequences flow from what your kids do after school, sometimes even before they are teenagers.
The change comes as extracurricular activities are already playing a growing role in both the admissions process and the awarding of scholarships. In an era of rampant grade inflation and standardized-test tutoring, colleges say it’s getting harder to pinpoint superstars based on grades and scores alone.
So extracurricular activities are a bigger factor than ever in deciding who gets the celebrated thick envelope and who gets the disappointing thin one. Indeed, Harvard last year turned down more than half its applicants with perfect SAT scores and 80 percent who were valedictorians.
“We realized one of the better predictors of success is the ability to dedicate oneself to a task and do it well,” says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at Penn.
Although admissions committees are notoriously secretive about such matters, Weekend Journal set out to crack the code. Three top schools–Georgetown, Penn and Swarthmore–made up to 10 years of background data on applicants available. Dozens of guidance counselors and college admissions officers also were interviewed.
It turns out that not all extracurricular activies are created equal, and the data revealed some eye-opening patterns. Across the board, being a student leader, a team captain or a publication editor is a huge plus. While that’s always been true to some extent, leadership is even more important these days because it clearly signifies commitment.
Kids with musical backgrounds consistently beat the numbers at all three schools, though some instruments did much better than others. While less than one-fifth of the general-applicant pool got into Swarthmore, the rate jumped to 33 percent for trumpeters and 24 percent for clarinetists.
By contrast, applicants who played more common instruments such as guitar and piano did only slightly above average. Swarthmore says any variations are simply coincidence. What counts, says dean of admissions Robin Mamlet, is how committed students are to an activity.
One big surprise came from three mainstays of high-school athletics: soccer, basketball and baseball. Those sports did absolutely nothing for applicants to Georgetown. Yet, three less common sports–squash, cross-country and crew–sharply boosted the odds. In fact, squash players had more success than any other group at Georgetown last year.
Does that mean kids should go for uncommon activities, where they have a better shot at being standouts? Perhaps, but only to a point. “Clearly, we take notice if students play instruments we don’t see very often,” says Janet Lavin Rapelye, dean of admission at Wellesley. “We’re always looking for oboes.”
To be sure, the variation in admissions rates isn’t just a function of colleges’ attitudes toward the activities themselves. Applicants who excel in certain activities often have other traits that colleges like, such as personal discipline or even wealth.
For example, Charles Deacon, Georgetown’s dean of undergraduate admissions, thinks runners do well there because they “tend to have more tenacity, which can correlate with more success in the classroom.”
Similarly, squash players are often prep school kids who have been given a lot of advantages. “Squash players are low-risk kids,” says Doron Morford, college counselor at Greens Farms Academy, the school Fash attended. “They don’t drop out and they pay their own freight.”
Certainly, our sampling is based on applicants to only three colleges, and the odds vary from school to school and from year to year. For instance, kids who participated in crew performed well above average at Georgetown, where there is a crew team, but worse than average at Swarthmore, where there isn’t.
Many colleges beg parents not to play this game, insisting that it’s impossible to manipulate the system because there is no system. But colleges clearly have their biases. Most will take a second look at football players, and they acknowledge that they are sometimes on the lookout for students who can fill other particular needs on campus.
For example, Penn and Georgetown showed higher-than-normal acceptance rates for students who listed drama or debate. Both schools suggest that dramatists and debaters may be more poised and articulate than some other candidates, making a better impression on interviewers.
In addition, although community service has been widely touted over the past decade as crucial to college admissions, our numbers suggest it matters much less than you might expect. The reason is that colleges, aware that students think community work looks good on an application, closely scrutinize such activities.
The data indicate that students needn’t worry about taking on activities perceived as retro. One example is scouting: Scouts had bad luck at Penn a decade ago, but last year their odds improved considerably. Stetson says students who pursue scouting today tend to pour themselves into it.
We also found some surprising news on the tuition front. While even parents of infants know to sock away money for tuition, many families don’t realize how much early extracurricular planning can help with the bills. Over the past five years, there has been at least a 25 percent jump in the number of scholarships based on factors other than academics and financial need, says William Nelsen, president of Citizens’ Scholarship Foundation of America, which administers corporate scholarships.
The best sources for this information are two Web sites: fastWEB (www.fastweb.com), which asks applicants questions to assess their eligibility for more than 400,000 scholarships, and Finaid (www.finaid.org), which provides links to scholarship sites and helps calculate how much need-based aid users can get.
Nelsen says the biggest increase has been in funding for students involved in community service, estimating that there are five times more such scholarships now than five years ago.
Before you start overhauling your child’s after-school schedule, however, keep in mind a few basic principles. First of all, calm down. The admissions process is ultimately about the kid, not you, and admissions officers are brimming with horror stories about parents who hound them too much. Parents who get overly involved “can actually do damage,” says Kathryn Forte, a counselor at the Chadwick School outside Los Angeles.
This goes double for a particularly angst-ridden breed of parent: the ones who want their child admitted to the alma mater. Colleges concede that alumni children have an edge. But playing the alumni card too forcefully is usually a mistake. “Even though the parents may be wonderful people, sometimes that trait skips a generation,” says R. Russell Shunk, dean of admissions at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.
