Well put, that.

Ditto, 22B.

In addition, if you want to play the 'truly gifted' card, then frenetic extracurricularing is the opposite of a 'tell' for geniuses. Deep focus is more their style, isn't it?

Tallulah, I think that it actually just depends upon the person. Some polymaths dabble in a lot of things. And when I say "dabble" I mean that they simply don't CARE about extrinsic motivators such as praise, accolades, or rankings-- they do those things to get something intrinsic and personally meaningful out of them, and (speaking as a parent to one of this type)-- good luck even convincing them to DOCUMENT such activities well. That's just not the point for those people.

They will dive into an interest for a bit, then completely drop it (maybe for a time, maybe forever) once they've gotten what they need from it.

I think that this is something of a personality quirk, myself. My entire household seems to share it-- so my DH is the one that once he's done with something, he's kind of done with it for good, though sometimes it takes him a while to admit it. Me, I circle back-- but it may be a long latent period. DD is more like me, but she has interests like that which she hasn't touched in a year or more. She'll be back to them, though.

Didn't the extracurricular thing originally develop early in the last century because the ivies wanted to keep the "Jewish swots" from being admitted in large numbers? I think I once read something to that effect. They overwhelmingly brought the better academic credentials with them but at least country clubs could be relied on to keep them out of tennis and riding lessons. Officially, admission officials talked about leadership, though. These days, the disadvantaged ethnic group would probably Asian kids.

My home state (I live in Europe) started introducing interviews as assessment criterion about a decade ago for high level public sector jobs (entrance for which had until that time been determined exclusively by standardized exam grades) when women began to outperform men on the exams and would have had to be recruited in larger numbers than men. (Not that they had been bothered about gender equality in the 200 years before that). Officially, of course, it was all about character and personality being important for leadership in the administrative and justice sector blah blah blah.

My point being (yes, I do have a point and I'm coming to it) the same as 22B - that if you introduce fuzzy admission criteria on purpose, they purpose is not usually the one that is being brought forth officially. If you want to distinguish by academic ability, use a criterion that actually measures academic ability and does not enable covert selection for SES, ethnicity or gender.

Thanks, that must have been the publication I read the article about when it first came out.

A comparable piece of hypocrisy would be the practice of gapping, where colleges admit students on the basis of academic merit, but then discourage low SES students from attending by cutting down the financial aid offered to an amount that makes attendance financially unfeasible for them, freeing up places for students from higher SES with slightly lower academic credentials who can make a larger financial contribution.

Oxford and Cambridge have an even worse record in admitting students from state (public in the us) schools versus independent schools (private in the us), the split is roughly 50/50, while the percentage of students attending independent schools is about 7 %. The hypocrisy is not in the recruiting efforts by the universities, who can't get past the fact that the independent schools churn out much more qualified candidates than the state schools do, and whose outreach efforts to the state system I'd be prepared to give the benefit of doubt, but in a public education system which suppresses and drives out talent while pretending that this self reproducing independent sector does not exist.

Which is why you go to a state school for free.

Oxford was actually free at the time I went. Doesn't help if admission is so strongly biased in favor of those whose parents could afford the right school in the previous 13 years of their lives....

No-- it doesn't.

And the problem is that Ivy/Elite admissions are exactly that way in the US right now-- only it's obscured by the window dressing re: "diversity" admits, quotas behind closed doors, etc. etc. etc. EC's are just one component of it, but all of it just provides a better smokescreen for them to admit basically the same kids they always have.

Some of the people I know that were part of that "jewish swoth" at Harvard, went to the catskills or the Sands club in Long Beach, LI where they had tennis for their jewish members.

I don't think the Asian kids, particularly the Chinese, are so disadvantaged. They are scoring higher. As an ethnic group they are scoring higher. Now is that because they have 3X the population and you are getting a better sampling? Who knows but when you consider that between the Chinese and India, you are dealing with 6X the US population. They now have the resources and the ability to pay for top US schools. So you have a pool of really smart kids with money applying. You can make a bunch of comments that they are not creative etc etc. But China had to totaly rebuild after the destruction that Mao inflicted. 35 years ago they had no universities left. No intelligencia. They had to send out students to get educated. And hope they came back. The people who are rebuilding China have to be pretty smart. We get idiots who earn 700X the average worker wage to run a country into the ground, if it looks good on paper. While a CEO in Japan makes 67X the average worker. It is all about the culture of entitlement.