There's been renewed talk about what "counts" in evaluating admissions applications for competitive colleges. While much of that discourse has been discouraging, I was glad to again come across an effort by a coalition of colleges to capture more of applicants' lives than extra-curriculars and sports. These campuses are also experimenting with a question on the Common App that asks students to report, if they choose, their responsibilities to their families and communities.
When the central questions of admissions are "how well will they do here" and "what do they bring to our community", these additional questions on the Common App allow students to reveal that they kept their grades up while also caring for sick grandparents or siblings, translating for others, working on family farms, or helping relatives to navigate visa applications. Without having to center poverty or family trauma in admissions essays, applicants can nonetheless provide more nuanced information about their lives and their strengths in their applications.
It seems clear that students investing hours a week in these sorts of responsibilities are learning lessons at least as valuable as those learned while being driven by parents to weekend soccer tournaments or volunteering for a week at an eco-camp in Costa Rica.
The Common App webpage still mentions this optional question, but I can find little else since this article was written about how colleges have used this information.
I believe that both colleges and applicants benefit from efforts like this to recognize that "will they be a successful and valuable member of our first-year class?" and "were their parents able to buy life experiences for them?" are entirely different questions.
And I also fear that the limited information I can find as follow-up to the original article means that not everyone saw that as an important distinction in competitive admissions decisions.
