How to Use Extracurriculars to Stand Out in College Admissions

These days it’s hard not to get discouraged when reading about the ultra-competitive college admissions process. Admissions percentages are at all time lows, and applicant numbers at all time highs. To make matters worse, college admissions officers are extremely reluctant to opine on the characteristics that make up a great applicant beyond statements that are so general as to be completely unhelpful.

As a parent of an ambitious, hard working high schooler this can be both stressful and discouraging. We all want to help cultivate motivated, goal-oriented and well-balanced kids. But the feedback loop from the college admissions process seems to suggest that the majority of kids who gain admission to top colleges have been extremely strategic at each turn in their high school lives. Do parents have to choose between letting their children explore, stumble and evolve on the one hand, and entering high school on Day 1 with a long term plan on the other? I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, and I think we can do both.

Before continuing any further I’d like to address the elephant in the room. It is stressful and unfair and awful that we don’t live in a world that is not a pure meritocracy. It is pathetic that kids today start thinking about college admissions in middle, or even elementary, school. But no amount of hand-wringing by the purists among us can change the fact that the system is what it is for our kids. So we can either reject it and roll the dice. Or we can empower our kids to spend a little bit more time thinking about the big picture than we did 30 years ago. And, hopefully, in the process, we can help our kids develop interests that are deeper, broader and more attuned to their strengths than they might have otherwise.

Returning to the main topic, what do we know for certain about what a student needs to be a good candidate for admission to an elite college? The absolute minimum is clearly great grades and top board scores. Setting aside a very small handful of outliers, it is not even worth applying to a top school unless you have very strong grades. What else? From what we can glean, most schools are also very interested in extracurriculars. Most candidates to top schools will pursue sports, student government, yearbook, speech and debate and a handful of clubs that are offered at the majority of high schools across the U.S. Colleges say they want to see depth, leadership and engagement.

This is where it starts to get tricky. Most candidates to elite colleges will have great grades and board scores and a combination of the same school-based extracurriculars. The profile is not problematic per se, and I think most adults including college admissions officers would be challenged to sustain the level of involvement and intensity as the average kid today. But it does make a lot of kids look very very similar. Applicants are lucky to get 5-7 minutes of attention from the person reviewing their applications. And if nothing really jumps out, it’s like playing the lottery to try to get a spot.

So what can a high schooler do to improve these odds? It certainly helps to have extracurriculars that are unique and different, on top of the standard ones offered at school. Ideally, these activities fit into an overarching theme that unites extracurricular choices with academic interests and strengths. We call this a “narrative arc”. In addition, it’s helpful for a high school to be able to point to a self-directed community impact project that illustrates what he contributed to his home community and sheds light on what he will bring to the college campus.

Let’s talk about a hypothetical candidate that encompasses these characteristics. She has great grades, and a professed interest in history and current events. She plays a varsity sport for her high school team and has been a student government officer since freshman year. In sophomore year, she discovered a deep interest in Civil War history. After some research, she linked up with an organization that enlists citizens to transcribe letters written by escaped slaves during the Civil War era. These transcriptions became part of an archive. She then used some of the transcribed letters and others available through the archive as part of her National History Day project. For a summer job, she worked in the town hall of her community helping the local archivist digitize original records dating back to the 19th century. In lieu of traditional community service she conducted interviews of residents of a nearby retirement home using the StoryCorps app. She then created a website with links to each of the StoryCorps stories and returned to the retirement home for a great unveiling. The stories of retirees who were once residents of her town are also posted through a link on her town website.

In the abstract this may sound overly ambitious, intimidating or even impossible. It’s hard to imagine a high achieving high schooler today having any spare time to devote to such pursuits. Arguably, however, a teen is far better off from an admissions perspective dropping a school-based extracurricular that doesn’t ignite or deepen a passion or link into a specific academic strength in favor of one outside of the school that does. There are thousands of such programs available, including unique organizations, under the radar competitions, challenging and expansive summer programs and even online courses. There are also infinite permutations for community-based impact projects that start with a teen thinking about a problem in his community and then implementing a solution.

There’s no question that it’s asking a lot for teens to start thinking hard about their interests and intellectual strengths years before they fill out college applications. We also don’t want to chill experimentation with different courses and extracurriculars. But there’s a lot to be said for a pragmatic approach to building a high school resume. If your teen is going to spend 10 hours a week on extracurriculars, why not encourage him to spend half of that time on an activity that links in to a broader narrative arc. At the risk of sounding overly parental, someday you’ll thank me for this advice.