Originally Posted by madeinuk
A friend of mine *used* to do recruiting for Carnegie-Mellon until the day that a kid that had stellar grades at school and a full-time job outside school ( he was the main breadwinner for the family) was rejected by the admissions office for not having any extra-curricula activities. Feeding his family was his EC for crying out loud! It was then that he realised that ECs are used as a covert proxy for SES by the admissions office at Carnegie-Mellon. This sickened him so much that after doing the recruiting for years he resigned from it.

I've seen similar. Egregious.