It appears that participating in 4-H and similar activities hurts your chances of getting in to competitive private colleges. One is of course free to set different goals or not mention such activities on a college application.
From an institution's standpoint, this makes perfect sense.
In order to grow your endowment and sustain your position, you want to stock up on potential future wealthy donors.
Activities that show a student having an interest in going into farming are probably not going to become wall street traders. The risk is that they will never be able to make that $2,000,000 donation to Elite U. The same is true for ROTC. There is little money in being a service member.
Also, I think that the *entire* educational system (particularly K-JD) as it is currently configured does very little to help people develop into being better people. It needs to be replaced with a better "system", meaning less bureaucratic and more flexible.
It's current weakness is that it's larding people up with massive non-dischargable debt. That crisis is just beginning obvious, which means that it's not going to become a political problem for years.
