Dan Edmonds writing for Forbes reports that the “Making Caring Common Project, of Harvard’s education school, recently released a report that has received nearly universal praise among professionals in the world of college admissions. And with good reason. The report calls for a de-emphasis of the sheer quantity of academic and extracurricular achievement, and makes explicit what top guidance and independent counselors have been telling their students for years — that it is better to pursue a few interests deeply than to have a laundry list of achievements accomplished for the sole purpose of impressing colleges.
The report also emphasizes the importance of understanding that students from different circumstances may have to pursue interests differently — for instance, that a student who works 20 hours a week to provide additional income for her cash-strapped family deserves as much “credit” as a more affluent student who spends spare time volunteering for a philanthropic organization or pursuing a personal interest.
And finally, the report issues yet another call for less emphasis on standardized testing in college admissions.
The report has led some schools to reflect on even the subtle cues that they give, such as the amount of space students have to list honors and extracurricular activities. Yale, for example, plans to “advocate for more flexibility in the extracurricular sections on both the Common Application and Coalition Application, so that colleges can more easily control how they ask students to list and reflect on their extracurricular involvement.”
These suggested changes in emphasis are welcome. But it would be naive to suppose that they will lead to a radical change in admissions at highly selective schools unless there are deeper changes to other factors that affect those schools’ admissions decisions, namely the preferential treatment given to legacy applicants and recruited athletes, the outsized influence U.S. News rankings have on college behavior (and public perception of top schools), and the growing focus that school presidents and boards of trustees have on school endowments, which are largely driven by donations from monied alumni.”
