> Poor kids are getting 'well rounded' by spending summer break at work, saving enough money to survive the school year.

This is an interesting point: why shouldn't work count towards being well-rounded? If anything, work is much more grounded in reality, and a lot of kids who never had to work in high school and college would come off as out of touch (at least to me, as someone who did work thru high school and college). It would be nice if work experience (even if unrelated to a field) was valued as much as being part of a silly club.

It does. I've helped with college applications to Ivy League where the "volunteer opportunities" are "working summers for minimum wage, looking after my younger siblings and/or helping at the family convenience store".

Those kids got in.

I think the point is to show you offer something more than just being good at school. It doesn't have to be volunteer opportunities or something expensive.

Who says it isn't? Being in a silly club hasn't worked as well as people think it does for quite a while now. Admissions see tons of this bullshit and I bet their eyes glaze over.

I recently went through grad school applications and waded through dozens of sample essays and tips for writing a great “statement of purpose essay”.

Based on the admissions decisions the school made (as reported by Reddit) and the changes to content length made over the years, I suspect the school cares about precisely four things.

- Can your write a coherent essay?

- Can you clearly state what your qualifications to pursue the academic program are?

- Can you clearly articulate why you want to complete a 3 year program?

- If there is a problem in your background e.g. a low GPA, can you clearly state why you don’t think this will be a problem going forward?

I suspect everything else was entirely ignored.

Graduate admissions processes are very different from undergraduate admissions in exactly that way though. Undergraduate admissions are trying to select on a pretty wide definition of "successful", basically trying to find students likely to graduate then make the university look good. Graduate admissions care about one thing only: how good are you at generating published research in the department you're applying under. It's much more similar to a job application than an undergrad application.

If you get great test scores, and you go to a school that does not send many students to the ivy leagues et al, you will get noticed; this helps a lot of smart low SES urban or rural students gain entry.

> spending summer break at work, saving enough money

is going to count in your favor

if you go to a competitive high school that sends lots of kids to top universities, then you need to stack up your extra-curriculars to stand out wrt all the other kids in a similar position

In the U.S. public schools offer students all kinds of extracurricular activities that cost the families either very little or nothing at all. I attended a low- to middle-income public elementary and middle school where I was able to practice violin for several years, and it didn't cost my family anything.

Costs aren't always direct "pay this much to participate in this thing" costs.

Having to arrange separate transportation home because you stayed after school past when the buses leave is also a cost.

None of those will stand out on a college application.

One thing that might stand out is a complete lack of interest in doing anything besides studying. It seems like it may be a sign of low social intelligence

Why is that necessary to get educated?

It's not.

But elite schools select for (1) students who will enrich the experience for their classmates and (2) who are likely to have an outsized impact on the world as adults and bring prestige to the institution.

There are some people who are so quantitatively intelligent that a lack of social skills/intelligence doesn't matter (geniuses), but these people are so exceptional they can't be really measured by a test like the SAT. It's too easy to get a perfect score.

Instead they'll distinguish themselves by excelling at STEM competitions (eg. Math Olympiad, programming contests, the Putnam).

Putnam is a collegiate event, on which most students in the math department of elite colleges (except MIT) score approximately 0.

I’d also like to add an anecdote: while my family wasn’t necessarily poor, I pretty much spent all my extra-curricular time doing things like coding and design, and neither of them were really in a way that was documentable. There was no “coding” club or “graphic design” club and if there was something similar that popped up in high school the physical gathering nature of most clubs was odd when applied to things like internet coding. So the clubs tended to be a waste of time more than anything, and most students participated knowingly just to pad college applications.