Extracurricular Puzzle

Making the college attractive to other students perhaps? They feel an active student body will attract other students and thus like students they feel will be active. Remember with colleges you are choosing a community, customers in a firm just choose a good, so they don’t care about community activity within a firm.

According to this New Yorker article from 2005, the consideration of extracurriculars was introduced to avoid letting in undesirables (i.e. Jews).

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending…As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen”…that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising…The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea—a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body—was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit…The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates from “persons who know the applicants well,” and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. “Starting in the fall of 1922,” Karabel writes, “applicants were required to answer questions on ‘Race and Color,’ ‘Religious Preference,’ ‘Maiden Name of Mother,’ ‘Birthplace of Father,’ and ‘What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).’ ”

This isn’t strictly speaking true, but I have to say my sample size is very small and elite. Many Harvard grads and others from top schools get jobs ibanking or consulting based on their extracurriculars–whether they were team captains, edited the school newspaper and so on. I’ve even heard of interviews with Google where these activities mattered.

I’m not sure that this is true, so don’t take my word for it, but I’m heard that this dates back to the days when they were trying to keep Jews out. Because Jews tested well, they embraced the “whole person” approach, which provided a fuzzier set of criteria that made it easier to exclude Jews.

Eventually, I would guess, they started to believe their own propaganda. Or they just needed a rationalization to discriminate in favor of favored minorities without establishing formal quotas.

Bryan,

It seems to me that, at least at liberal arts colleges, extracurriculars are valued for two reasons: price discrimination and a form of faculty compensation. Although this was not the case for me, I have seen lots of people choose a school for the opportunity to play 4 more years of a sport, or dance, or theatre.

A large part of the compensation at a liberal arts college is in the consumption benefits of having good students. Even better if at least some of those students share the same extracurricular activities as you.

These two points would suggest that large universities would care less about extracurriculars, which I think is true. Empirically, however, this is clouded by size differences.

Remind me, Dr. Caplan, precisely who your principal employer is and what their relation is to the profit motive?

Surely, you could find a nice position at a good, for-profit institution like the University of Phoenix if you wanted…

The theory is that the more extracurricular activities a student was in, the more well-rounded the student was and will be, and the more they will bring to the college, and the more successful the student will be. I don’t know if any of that is actually true. It may be. All I know is that I hated extracurricular activities as schools defined them, and now I have a Ph.D., so I don’t know acout the success part, at least — but on the other hand, the exception doesn’t negate the rule, either.

Colleges care about applicants’ SAT scores. Employers don’t. What’s going on? I’m tempted to just repeat my adage that, “For-profits are crazy,” but even for-profit colleges care somewhat about SAT scores.

I wouldn’t say that employers don’t care about extracurriculars. Many employers want reasonably happy, well-rounded employees; having an interest in things outside of school/work shows that you aren’t just another worker drone that’s going to hate your life (and job) when you turn 40. Since employers are real people too, they might prefer to hire those to whom they can relate. Of course this is a good bit less important than hiring people that can do the job, but it can make a difference when considering two equally qualified candidates. Also, sincerity is more important to employers, so a candidate with a sincere interest in fishing might get the job over a candidate with an insincere interest in starting a school chess club or a soup kitchen. Obviously the extent to which this is a factor highly depends on the industry, nature of the job, and company size.

Regarding colleges, remember that they’re in competition with other schools and that intangibles are important factors to many students. It’s good marketing for them to have an active student body with a diverse supply of loosely organized interests. A prospective student might look at a flier hyping the registered Ultimate Frisbee Club and say, “hey look, if I go to ______ I can play Frisbee!”, even though they can do that anywhere. The school has an incentive to select opportunistic sycophants that take up activities (like the Math Club, for example) because it might get them somewhere, so the student has an incentive to be an opportunistic sycophant.

So to bring it all together, since schools stand to benefit from marketing people’s spare time, they place an unusually high weight on extracurriculars–whether sincere or not. Since employers only marginally benefit, and since there can even be a cost associated with employing suck ups anyway, they place a lower weight on extracurriculars and have a stronger incentive to consider their sincerity.

I think it’s just further differentiation of applicants. How else do you decide between two students with identical GPAs and SAT scores? Also, could it be colleges wanting to enroll students who will boost the colleges’ own extracurricular activities?

I agree with SB7. Admissions could be decided from a simple, open formula using objective inputs like SAT scores and GPA. Schools don’t want to do this for several reasons. It would destroy the mystique of the status they confer if anyone could plug in the numbers. It would leave them open to charges of discrimination if the results have too many or too few members of some group. And it would force them to reveal how much preference goes to legacies, applicants with famous parents, etc. With lots of information available on each applicant, any decision can always be rationalized.

Employers have no choice but to make subjective decisions, since there’s no standardized test for each possible position. So employers have no need to confuse the issue of why they make subjective decisions.

Joe in Morgantown,

Are employers allowed to administer their own SAT-like or IQ test to candidates?

I wonder what prompted this post. Perhaps I missed a post from earlier with a link?

As an employer, I definitely do prefer workers who dedicated time to extracurricular activities — particularly if they relate to the job.

To Phil: I took IQ-like tests when applying for jobs when I was younger. They are not uncommon on Wall Street.

In Portugal, colleges don’t care about extracurricular activities – you do a written test, your results in these test and you high school grade are computed according a predefined mathematical formula, and the “x” better candidates are accepted – we don’t have these ridiculous anglo-saxon methods, like interviews, recomendatiobn letters, etc.

“Are employers allowed to administer their own SAT-like or IQ test to candidates?”

In Portugal they can (usually in a mix of intellectual and psychological test).

At least with regards to top colleges – you must also remember that filling the incoming class with 4.0gpa/2400SAT students would not be difficult. Extracurriculars are only one of a variety of criteria colleges use to judge the deeper quality of a candidate….4.0gpas are not all created equal. Not by a long shot. High school rigor varies wildly. Moreover, who is the most interesting candidate: a 4.0/2400 student who spent all their time studying; or a 3.8/2250 student who was also a nationally ranked tennis player, attended high school on scholarship (while working a job on the side), member of the national debate team….

this is of course an extreme example, but I think it illustrates the point. Bare grades and scores are not as revealing as an application that probes into the applicant’s personal life – how they spend their time, what kind of passions they have/what drives them.

and, I would also note, employers may indeed ask for SAT scores (mine did, ~1.5yrs ago); and do indeed care about extracurricular activities for the very same reasons outlined above (this from a currently ongoing job search in my group).

Of course, at higher levels extracurriculars become more moot on a formal level (CEO – certainly don’t care if he/she also is captain of the local soccer team), but the virtues of ‘well-roundedness’ do not ever go out of style (I would argue).

Again – only the opinion of one.

Three points:

1. Top-tier colleges seem to care more about extracurricular activities than second- and third-tier colleges. That suggests two possibilities:
a. They need the additional information to differentiate between applicants that are way over in the right-hand tail of the normal curve, where both GPA and SAT scores fail to differentiate well.
b. They are looking for applicants that will succeed so thoroughly in some area that their reputations will rub off on the school. That is, the schools look for the bext debater, the best tennis player, etc. — the best specialist in many disciplines, so that they can place a large number of high-payoff bets.

2. Employers recruiting at colleged ask about extracurriculars because the students’ indicia of success at the job for which they are being recrutied are imperfect at best. For example, does a high GPA in marketing classes really tell yu that the student will be good at marketing in your company, or that the student is really good at studying for exams? Asking about extracurriculars helps by adding other data. I would note that the “extracurricular” that employers want to know most about is relevant internships.

Max

I have been a hiring manager for 20 years and the people I hire to be consultants should have extra-curricular activities. If they don’t have any that they are willing to talk about, I am concerned that their activities could lead to something embarassing for the company. If they truly have none, then they probably aren’t the type of person I need as they do not have diverse thoughts or interests that would enable them to be open to alternative ideas and solutions.

While the college experience certainly involves some team work and social interaction in pursuit of academic success, all work and no play makes John a dull boy.

Maybe if the job doesn’t need skills developed through human interaction, team work, or social participation then there is no need to be concerned with extra-curricular activities. But that’s not what I am looking for.

Bryan, you’re just wrong. Good employers absolutely care about extracurriculars. I’m a partner in a software company and we place a lot of emphasis on this.

You know who else does? Google (I have friends who work in their recruiting dept). Ever hire (*every* one!) is signed off on by Larry Page, and the hiring packet includes a detailed report on the applicant’s extracurricular activites and how that contributes to their culture.

Think about that for a second. Unlike some career paths, software is a discipline where the vast majority of interview questions have right and wrong answers i.e. there is a correct way to build a linked list in C.

But in building our company we’ve found that people who don’t have outside lives tend not to do as good a job of interacting with and understanding the absolute most important thing a company must have: customers.