Long ago, the valedictorian of my high school class (white, female), did not get into Brown, Harvard, MIT or Cornell, despite a stellar academic record and near-perfect SAT scores. She wound up going to a state school. Another white female in my class got into three of those places, despite being below the top 10%. Ivy admissions are entirely mysterious to me.
The number of people with good academic records and top SAT scores outnumber the total seats available at top schools. They also take into account extra-circulars, leadership experience, and other activities. This prevents people from just studying for tests and thinking they have an automatic admission. Personally, I'm glad they do or I imagine it would be a very dull environment if there was nothing but people with their head in the books all the time.
It's not that, it's that those with perfect scores appear to be wasting their talent on test taking. They'd prefer students who studied hard enough to get into the 95% percentile, and then devoted the remainder of their efforts elsewhere. If you can do both, fine, but don't sacrifice everything for a few more points on the SAT.
I hear there are extracurriculars involved, like a decade of aspirational music training, leadership in high school sports, and civic engagement. I suppose someone else can weigh in with clues.
Of course. But how does National Merit Scholar compare vs. 4-H club president, or 6 years of piano vs. 4 years of community theater musicals, or civilian parents vs. military parents, or 3 years of Japanese vs. 3 years of fine art instruction? A series of state academic decathlon medals vs. a prominent role in the state model legislature?. I knew both of these women very well, and they both have had fine lives so far, but I couldn't figure out what made one so much more desirable than the other. On paper, they look almost equivalent, except one had better grades. Maybe she was just a better interviewer.
I guess my point is that it is impossible for me to say if there is real prejudice in Ivy admissions, or if their processes are just nearly unfathomable to the outsider.
4-H Club president hurts your chances of admission, just like being involved in JROTC or anything else that has the faintest whiff of social conservatism.
But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."
Helicopter parents everywhere I'm sure have taken this tip and shared it virally. Expect a sudden drop in participation over the next 10 years as a result! But on the flip side, expect creations of extracurricular civic groups that are "college approved".
