@ playandlearn — Even if it is true that college admissions officers have preferences concerning the nature of the activities, if one doesn't know what they are, one might as well that they have no preferences.
I should clarify that in my original post, I wasn't just reporting what they said at a literal level, I was also reporting on my subjective impressions based on the whole of my conversations with them
My interest in this subject is that a lot of students sign up for lots of extracurricular activities that they're not interested in because they think that it will look better for colleges. I think that they probably have an inaccurate model of the situation, and that they would do better from the point of view of personal satisfaction, from the point of view of building skills for using later on, and from the point of view of securing admissions if they did what they were interested in.
It's not the case that one has arbitrary freedom – getting high grades in ostensibly challenging courses and high test scores is nonnegotiable, but on the dimension of extracurriculars, it seems that one has a lot of freedom.
@ HowlerKarma — I spoke with admissions officers at the top 15 ranked schools because those are the ones that people are most interested in. I believe that the same facts are true for lower ranked schools as well. The subjective sense that I got as I went down the list is that for lower ranked ones, the preferences concerning extracurricular activities are still weaker, with indifference not only to the nature activities, but also to some extent with respect to depth of involvement / commitment, etc.
