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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
