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JonahSinick comments on What colleges look for in extracurricular activities - Less Wrong
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This seems to be the kind of question for which the answers shouldn't be taken at face value. Imagine they'd given concrete preferences for certain extracurriculars -- the potential trouble that could get them into. Anything from outcries of "discrimination!" (as soon as there are social or racial discrepancies in activity participation, "They did not recommend religious clubs, damn liberals!" / "They mentioned clubs supporting minorities, which may contradict affirmative action regulation 27-B!") to putting young people in the difficult position of choosing between what they'd actually like to do and what best furthers their chances of admission.
No, regardless of their actual preferences (or lack thereof), from a public relations and legal standpoint it's obvious they had to answer this way, and as such only weak evidence in and of itself.
(I'd be very surprised if there wasn't some systematic ordering over extracurriculars in the actual admissions data.)
Thanks for the comment!
Ok, maybe I should reframe that point as "there's a uniform prior over the signaling value of engaging in different types of extracurricular activities, subject to basic common sense (e.g. joining the KKK has negative signaling value)." If there are preferences, they're nonobvious, and it's not clear how you would go about discovering them. (I haven't found anything more than students' speculation by Googling around.)
I also should have given more context. When talking with the admissions officers, I had the subjective sense that what they were really looking for was a good story, as conveyed by the student's essay about extracurricular activities, and that this is more a matter of being able to craft a good narrative than the topic of the narrative chosen.
Here's one: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/opinion/19douthat.html
And some of the hits in http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=college+admissions+odds+extracurricular look promising. ('odds' is there to help weight towards quantitative studies which would be using odds ratios as their effect size, since you're either admitted to a particular college or not, and a binary effect size like odds ratio is what most statistical approaches would use.)
Very interesting, thanks.
This is vaguely irritating. Life tends not to follow a clean narrative. Such a preference rewards people for presenting their life as something it is not.
(Full disclosure: I'm well past school and glad of it)
Well, you just plan the narrative in advance and make decisions about activities accordingly :). Some people really do go through high school and college like this. In fact, one college admissions guide I read suggested that you prepare a "fantasy resume" before you start high school. How irritating is that?
Yes, but it's also reassuring that the topic doesn't matter (so much), corresponding to freedom to choose one's activities without needing to optimize for signaling.