> Not to mention that, but there were sports our school didn't participate in, but the richer kids had levels of access to that looked great on college applications - rowing and lacrosse specifically come to mind.

Exactly. I went to smallish rural school. We had soccer, basketball, baseball. Youth soccer in my area was a rigged game where only people who were enrolled in the coaches summer camp would make the varsity team. Basketball had 75 kids try out for 12 spots. Baseball is ruthlessly competitive, and while I was a really good little league player, I had no chance against kids who were in multiple travel leagues, etc. I probably played 50 baseball games from age 9-12. The best players played at least 500.

My cousins went to a fancy private school. Everyone played on a varsity team; it was how they did gym. My older cousin did fencing, the middle one did basketball, the younger twins played squash. The squash guys sold themselves as a package and ended up getting a couple of ivy league places fighting for them.

I think we have a similar outlook on this. For me, getting good SAT/ACT scores let me "punch higher", and got me into some really good schools that I would not have be admitted to. Ultimately, I went to a state school, but was able to parlay the competitive nature of things to get a better grant package.

> Baseball is ruthlessly competitive, and while I was a really good little league player, I had no chance against kids who were in multiple travel leagues, etc. I probably played 50 baseball games from age 9-12. The best players played at least 500.

Same thing drove me out of baseball after age 12 or so. I had more than a little natural talent and put in some time drilling with my parents, so I could keep up with the kids doing the traveling leagues and such until (a little before) then. After that it became clear that my parents and I were gonna have to devote hundreds more hours per year (plus not a small amount of money), realistically, for me to keep playing. The gap was just growing way too fast, otherwise. What was left were bad teams/leagues where few players were really trying, so that's no fun, and ones for which I couldn't make the cut. Someone who liked it but just wanted to put in a high-side-of-normal amount of time and effort for a youth sport, had no place.

As far as extra-curricular activities go, like sports, etc., those aren't really the point. The point is for the candidate to demonstrate that they can accomplish significant things other than academics.

This can be anything. For me, I didn't do sports, or any school extracurriculars. What I did do was run a small business (paper route), used the money to fund my hotrodding efforts, was an Eagle scout (back in the days when that was something), etc.

Basically, you just gotta find something non-trivial to do that demonstrates motivation.

I went to MIT 20 years ago. Plenty of people smarter than me failed out. MIT seems to do a pretty good job of screening out people who won't pick up the material fast enough. In my experience, the ones who failed out were the ones who were plenty smart but didn't adjust fast enough to having to work hard for the first time in their lives. If you get into MIT, you've probably gotten special treatment from teachers your whole life, and not really had to work hard before.

My high school had just shy of 4,000 students in 4 grades. My senior year, I took slightly over a "full course load" at the local state university, plus went to high school 1/4 time. Technically, that wasn't supposed to happen, but administrators look the other way for smart kids. I wasn't really competing against others in my grade. People asked if I was smarter than the girl a year ahead of me who went to Harvard. She was my competition. I'm sure something similar happened with a kid a year behind me.

I knew that at MIT, I'd probably just be an average student. However, I really underestimated how hard it is to learn to work hard when you've been able to coast through your first 18 years, despite taking honors courses at the nearby state university, etc. I think the SATs are probably generally pretty good at measuring how quickly students learn, but there's a certain grit it takes to succeed at MIT that the SATs don't cover at all.

Edit: I'm also an Eagle Scout, but I came through after it became significantly easier. It seemed to me that probably at least 10% of the men at MIT were Eagle Scouts. If nothing else, it shows an ability to stick with something for at least a few years, despite it being uncool for most of your peer group.

I, too, had a disastrous freshman year due to my attempts to laze through it like I had all through public school. Fortunately, I was able to change before I was forced out.

I also got my comeuppance about being "smart".

At the time, being an Eagle wasn't cool anymore, either, and I never talked about it. I was reluctant to even mention it here. Also, these days, it seems that being an Eagle is a project for dad, while the kid is along for the ride. My parents had zero involvement with scouting.

MIT has a ~95% graduation rate, so most students really do graduate. And for the 5% that don't it's unclear how many dropped out due to the workload vs dropped out to found a company, etc. MIT has tons of internal resources to help you if you're struggling.

The shock for entering freshman is very real. I really like the practice of making your first semester Pass/No Record so that there's less pressure to try and get an A, and if you do fail it won't even be on your transcript. Second semester still treats F as No Record as well.

There's a certain subtle ego disorder that creeps up on you slowly when you're used to regularly being introduced as the smartest person someone has met, and you let that slowly become part of your identity. The people I knew who failed out had too big of an ego to seek help, and even were afraid to work too hard, because that made them feel less smart. They didn't outright brag, but were used to others doing their bragging for them, and had a kind of false modesty about them.

> What I did do was run a small business (paper route), used the money to fund my hotrodding efforts, was an Eagle scout (back in the days when that was something), etc.

If I were a college admissions officer strapped for time, I'd let the app through on proof of "Eagle Scout" and ignore the other two.

The only easier bet would be seeing the words "I'm Hungarian" on an app for a secret world-saving advanced math project.

Intention is irrelevant, the outcome is the same. A parent driving a kid to lacrosse practice every Wednesdays and Fridays shows as much potential to accomplishments as a parent asking their kid to help them with their under the table car mechanic job every weekend. Yet I bet only the former is evaluated as significant. I wonder why that is.

> Yet I bet only the former is evaluated as significant.

Are you sure about that, especially for an engineering school like Caltech or MIT?

I didn't play lacrosse, football, row, track, baseball, swimming, yachting, nope nope nope.

And was your extra-curricular activity both broadly available to lower class students (in time, cost, culturally, etc.) and a significant contributor to your acceptance?

There was no cost to joining the Boy Scouts. All you had to do was show up. About half of the troop was poverty kids. You didn't have to buy the uniform, most of the scouts never bothered acquiring one.

Your bet is based on anything? The second story is a potential sob story that plays better, barring subjective classist biases counteracting. That only points to objective test scores being a better measure.

Nope, just a feeling which is further reinforced by other posts on this thread (i.e. confirmation bias) such as:

> Standardized testing was pretty much the only reason I and many other working class folks I know could get into good schools -- I was never going to do a million side activities, and my summers were spent working, not building my academic resume.

– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30833870

> I grew up as a low-income minority in a single-parent household and I ended up getting into good schools pretty much only due to my high test scores, which has been a life changer. Other than test scores, I couldn't afford to do any fancy extra-curriculars.

– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30835611

Of course this is (somewhat) testable. I could ask different collage admission boards to summarize anonymized admission records of students where extra-curricular actives was weighted favorably for admission. And then group these activities based on how accessible they are to various wealth classes before counting them up. I don’t know if that has been done, and I’m not in a position to do it my self... so the best I can do is make a bet.

It’s been done.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691141602/no...

Review of above book

https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/07/12/how_diversity_pu...

If I was in the admissions dept, I'd look favorably on an applicant who worked at a job.

I had a paper route, which was run as an independent business. I had a territory, I signed up people in it to subscribe, I delivered the papers, I collected the money, I paid for the newspapers the newspaper company dropped off. How much money I made was entirely up to how I operated. If I was sick or out of town, I had to find someone to cover for me.

There's also a lot of room to disagree as to whether playing sports counts as a meaningful accomplishment. Professional sports are pure entertainment, and succeeding even at that is extremely rare. The best argument for caring about it is that it's better than nothing, and it's something that ensures more average people have a chance to get to MIT too, even if they aren't all that intellectually minded.

Succeeding in sports means you have put out focused effort over a period of time to accomplish something that nobody made you do.

This is worth something.

I disagree completely. You could literally give zero effort, focused or not, and sit on the bench of a winning team. On top of that, your parents could have 100% made you do those things.

You could. You can just phone it in at work too, but most people don't. Sports are a place where kids figure out who they are. Not the only place, but an important one to many.

My son is 11 and loves baseball, I've coached a few times as well and it's been a great shared experience. There are definitely kids in Little League / Cal Ripkin who are there because mom & dad said so. But... I've gotten to see my son and a few of his teammates build friendships and mentor relationships with the kids ahead of and behind him that are difficult to do in a school setting.

It's a big deal. When a ten year old stops and is there to help teach an eight year old how to do something, etc those are valuable skills/processes/habits to build. They learn to lose and how to practice.

Part of the "package" a student brings to an application is how they apply those experiences. You can send a laundry list of things, or use your essay/interview to tie it together.

> something that nobody made you do

Uhh, that is definitely not a given

This rings true with my Gen Z high school experience as of ~7 years ago.