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The University of Texas has launched a brand new undergrad program in Informatics in its School of Information. I reached out to Natasha V. Saldaña, the Undergraduate Program Coordinator, with several questions and here are her polite responses. You may contact her here.
How is the School of Information different from the MIS major at McCombs or BHP?
Informatics is multi-disciplinary and has six different concentration areas for students to pursue. All of them have an aspect of how technology intersects with humans. For students who are interested in CS, ECE, and MSIS, the Bachelor of Science in Informatics (BSI) is considered a STEM major.
If you are specifically interested in Data Science we offer the Human-Centered Data Science major concentration.
Concentration in Human-Centered Data Science
Data is one of the most valuable commodities in the information society, and workers who can use data to gain new insights are in great demand. Diverse skills are required to collect, manage, and analyze data, as well as consideration of the great ethical responsibility that comes with collecting, managing, and analyzing data, and the importance of critical thinking skills. The Human-Centered Data Science Concentration of the B.S./B.A. in Informatics will prepare you for a career involving artificial intelligence, machine learning, information retrieval, data curation, and data analysis. The Human-Centered Data-Science Concentration includes taking Introduction to Human-Centered Data Science followed by advanced topics courses such as Data Wrangling, Crowdsourcing, Machine Learning, and Search Informatics. Choosing the Concentration in Human-Centered Data Science will prepare you for a career in which you leverage data, information, and technology to benefit society.
In which college does the School of Information lie (Natural Sciences, Liberal Arts, etc.)?
The School of Information.
Do you have an Honors program associated with the Informatics degree (like the Polymath or Deans Science Honors)?
At this time, no; Fall 2021 is the launch of the new program and we will begin to build these programs.
Can students pursue a double major?
Yes, students can dual-degree seek. In the School of Information, there is only one major. Students can choose to pursue a BA or BSI.
Approximately how many students are in the Freshman class?
For the first class, we anticipate 50-60 freshman students. The additional 40 are internal transfer and external transfer students.
What scholarship programs do you have outside of the usual UT offerings considering that you're a relatively new degree?
As you mentioned, we are a new degree and because of this, we do not have any established scholarships. We are working to build these as we grow.
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We like to think of ourselves as the Amazon of college counseling! We
provide a full suite of services - high school course planning, college
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According to The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), the top admission decision factors for colleges are as below. As you enter high school, it makes a lot of sense to focus on the Top 5.
While most colleges worldwide accept students based on grades (or class rank) and scores on a standardized test, top American colleges are unique in how they select their future students.
Grades, admissions test scores (SAT/ACT), the strength of curriculum (performance on Advanced Placement exams, for example), and recommendation letters are all carefully evaluated. An essential part of an application is often comprised of the non-academic portion of your profile – extracurricular activities, examples of leadership, community service/volunteering, internships, research, work, talents/awards. Along with listing them, you would humanize your experiences in college essays that are designed to explain how you grew and contributed; and what you learned.
Race, gender, and ethnicity
As American colleges and universities move to equalize opportunities to help create a more diverse society, all of the above merit factors begin to pale in comparison to the one metric that is so hard to measure: a student's background. This huge catch-all umbrella includes various measures that a student can't control, such as gender or race, and the so-called adversity score, which measures such intangibles as family structure, housing, educational attainment of the community, and the likelihood of being a victim of a crime.
The theory is that students who overcome disadvantages and still do reasonably well in high school deserve a shot at admission to the best colleges over those students who are more privileged and may even have a better student profile overall, partly because of the privilege. Studies have shown that regardless of a student's background during high school, graduates from an elite institution such as Harvard or MIT all do equally well, get the best positions in business and industry, and continue leading productive careers.
Elite Schools' Supply & Demand equation
Demand: There
are 24,000 high schools in America, and each has a valedictorian, the
student ranked #1. Besides the salutatorian, the student ranked #2 also
deserves nearly the same recognition because, over four years, these two
students would have often traded places with each other. This makes the
group of over-achievers a total of 48,000 students. There are also
15,000 National Merit Finalists (NMF) — admittedly, some who include the
class valedictorian and the salutatorian — who are chosen based on the
highest scores achieved on the PSAT-11 test. The finalists must also go through additional scrutiny and a review of supplemental essays, school recommendations,
and overall academic merit. This means that there are nearly 63,000 academic over-achievers across America. And our simple model here omits every other merit student outside of the valedictorian, salutatorian, and an NMF finalist.
Supply of seats: The
combined freshman acceptance of all eight Ivy League schools is about 16,000
students. Discounting this number by international students, who
comprise about 25% of each incoming Ivy League class, the effective
number of elite seats available to American students is only about
11,000.
During the last 25 years, the number of elite college admission seats
has remained the same. So, at a macroeconomic level, this is a classic
supply and demand imbalance problem, tilting heavily to the demand side
while the supply stays the same.
And
there's brutal competition for these prized seats. Consider
Asian-American students, some of the most high-performing teenagers
striving to enter elite institutions. According to the Census Bureau,
the Asian-American population increased from 10.4 million in 2000 to
18.9 million in 2017, an 80 percent increase in a generation.
For
the class of 2023 and in recent years, many of these superstar high
school students never made it to even one of their choice Ivy League
schools.
How to increase your odds of elite admission
High-school students must start carefully strategizing about their roadmap to an elite school four to five years before submitting their college applications. Students must have outstanding academic metrics: GPA, SAT/ACT scores, strength of curriculum, and class rank.
They also have to be the best in school and extracurricular activities. They must demonstrate character by being on the school's athletic or debate teams or representing their school in band, orchestra, or drama. They should show leadership by being elected to a position of importance in student government, being selected as ambassadors, or working on the school's newspaper or yearbook team. They also should demonstrate a passion for a skill or talent, such as playing the violin or creating art.
And they must engage in community service, such as serving those in need or older adults.
Most students from privileged families strive to build impressive overall profiles, shunted from activity to activity by caring parents.
Applying Early Decision is a crucial strategy to help lift an application over the top, but doing so comes with its own drawbacks. Also, it may be better for Asian American students to not disclose their race on the Common App.
The new definition of 'student promise': Overcoming adversity factors
Americans of all stripes and colors want a fair shot at their pipe dreams. Income inequality is a real issue, and elite colleges are trying hard to address decades of systemic injustices to look at students and evaluate merit differently.
For
students who face adversity at home — and who belong to
under-represented minority populations — colleges generally exempt them
from having to build their extracurricular profiles in the manner
described above. For these students, taking care of a sibling and doing
chores around the home when a single parent goes to work are far more
relevant than perfecting skills on the violin. Even work experience —
earning a paycheck at a McDonald's to support the family income — is
weighted significantly higher than many traditional extracurricular
activities pursued by "privileged" white or Asian-American students.
Because decades of data show a strong correlation between adversity and race, colleges have used adversity as a code word to admit more students from under-represented minority Black, Hispanic, and Native American populations at the expense of white and Asian American students.
Until twenty years ago, America's elite colleges largely considered only an applicant's accomplishments. In that sense, American institutions were more like professional sports leagues. Imagine if the qualifications to be ranked as a Top-100 tennis player had a "race" component in addition to matches won or lost. Such an idea would have been immediately dismissed.
This conflict is at the heart of the Supreme Court case against Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill, brought about by Edward Blum, founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiffs in the current court cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Blum argues that elite colleges should not admit students based on race, although he favors a diverse student body based on diverse socioeconomic income classes.
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The highest math level that is expected to be tested on the SAT is Algebra II, meaning that the questions are generally easier and less complex than the math questions on the ACT, which includes precalculus content as well.
There are 4 math subjects that are tested on the SAT Math section:
Heart of Algebra: This section mostly covers topics that are taught in Algebra I, and the questions are heavily focused on solving basic linear equations and linear inequalities. Mastering this section in Khan Academy is vital before moving on to practice the other two sections. There is also heavy emphasis on analyzing and interpreting graphs.
Problem Solving and Data Analytics: This section includes some Algebra I topics, but also includes basic statistics and proportions problems. It is key to remember concepts such as mean and median, ratio laws, and exponent rules.
Passport to Advanced Math: This section is almost all Algebra II topics and relatively advanced geometry. Most of the questions will require manipulating equations and solving for a single variable, thus requiring the most practice overall.
Additional Topics: This section mostly covers Geometry topics and complex numbers. It is important to remember concepts such as the unit circle and other widely-used geometric theorems.
There are two subsections on the SAT Math test, a Calculator and a Non-Calculator section. The calculator section questions will generally be harder than those on the non-calculator section, because the College Board knows that the test-taker has a tool to help with calculations.
Non-Calculator: The section without a calculator comes first. There are 20 questions and a time limit of 25 minutes. Most of the questions are multiple-choice questions, with a few grid-in questions at the very end. Because this section is generally easier, expect questions from the Heart of Algebra, Data Analytics, and Geometry sections, but be prepared for some tricky algebra or manipulation questions. There will be some graph questions but not as many as the Calculator section. A lot of them will be simple "one-line" questions that only take a few seconds to read and roughly 30 seconds to solve, so it is important to prioritize picking up easy points on questions like these before moving on to the harder problems.
Calculator: This section appears after the Non-Calculator section. There are 38 questions with a time limit of 55 minutes. There is a generally better spread of questions across the 4 sections, but the questions are more difficult because of the student's ability to use a calculator. Not all questions will require usage of the calculator, so try and save some time by not using it if possible.
While Precalculus topics will not be tested on the SAT, it is preferred that a student has taken Precalculus before taking the test. We recommend accelerating through one of the three preliminary math courses (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II) in order to make space for the student to take Precalculus during his/her sophomore year, and then take the SAT during the summer between the sophomore and junior years, preferably in August. Precalculus does an excellent job of acting as a comprehensive review course for the topics learned in all of the three preliminary math courses, so the student will have the ability to review concepts learned years prior, as well as learning useful new concepts such as the unit circle and trigonometric manipulation and proofs. They will also have the benefit of practicing problems at a higher skill level to prepare for more difficult questions on the SAT and ACT.
Of the two mainstream choices for calculators for standardized testing, the TI-83 Plus and the TI-84 Plus, which do we recommend using?
There are actually only a few differences between the TI-83 Plus and the TI-84 Plus, with the latter offering a few additional features and an improved screen interface for the user. Students should also consider the TI-84 Plus CE (color edition), which is the same as the TI-84 Plus, but with a smaller feel and a colored screen that can make graphs easier to interpret. There are also a few more built-in applications on the color edition TI-84. . SAT - The TI-83 Plus works just fine. Most of the calculations will be simple PEMDAS or graphing, and therefore will not require any of the advanced tools that are present in the TI-84. Be familiar with the functions in the MATH tab on the calculator, and how to store values and recall them later for more complicated solutions. Become an expert at quickly graphing functions using the "y=" tab, and analyzing the graphs using the TRACE and CALC tabs at the top right. Some of these may help solve some problems faster than doing the math on paper.
ACT - The TI-84 Plus is preferred over the TI-83 Plus. Because precalculus topics are tested on the ACT, it is useful if you can calculate summation formulas and type in complex fractions without the use of many parentheses that could confuse you. Pressing ALPHA + "y=" will open up a menu that can simplify entering fractions into the console. Functions like entering complex roots that are more than the square root, finding the logarithms of functions at a different base than 10, and using the many statistical tools in the STAT tab are all available in the TI-84 Plus, and will likely be used many times during the ACT Math section, where time is of the essence.
AP Exams - The TI-84 Plus or TI-84 Plus CE is the preferred choice. Heavily math-based AP exams like AP Physics, AP Chemistry, and AP Calculus BC will have several complicated problems that require the extra functionality that the TI-84 Plus calculator provides. Make good use of the built-in applications within the APPS tab, which has features that range from converting units to creating vectors to graphing vertical x functions. Especially for the AP Calculus test, being able to graph polar equations, differentiate multiple graphs by colors, type out long summation formulas, and entering integral equations in the TI-84 Plus CE is a big plus.
Overall, the TI-84 Plus color edition is the best calculator that offers many more useful features than the other models and it can be used for all three tests. Plus it can easily travel with the student to college.
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Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website. But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.
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Jatin Rao has served, since 2017, as an associate at Rao Advisors LLC, a Texas firm to counsel students about all things college: readiness, financial planning, selection, strategy and admissions. He currently runs all finance operations for the firm, including invoicing, the creation of quarterly reports, and collections.
He has spoken at numerous customer webinars and in-person seminars on the road, usually in Austin or Houston, about high school preparedness. He fields audience questions from students and parents after live presentations; develops Excel models that chart college admissions data through blog posts on the firm's website; and provides advice to families about test-prep and high school course navigation during one-on-one counseling sessions.
Jatin is a senior at the University of Texas Canfield Business Honors program and a recipient of the Susie and Skip McGee Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Business. He was recognized by UT with the Distinguished Honors designation for each year from 2020-2022. For 2023, he is a College Scholar. He served as the Director of the UT University Finance Association and is an active member of the Texas Energy Capital club. He has accepted a position at Jeffries Investment Bank in Houston as an analyst after he graduates in May 2024.
Jatin is interested in Japanese culture and earned a certificate in Japanese by completing 24 credits at UT. He is an avid sports fan having co-led his high school's varsity tennis team. He is a devout ping pong player and likes to analyze football, ice hockey, and baseball.
In high school, Jatin was a finalist in the National Merit Scholarship competition in
2019-20, the only student in his graduating class of 726 students to win
the distinction. He was chosen by his 26,000-student school district to serve as a student Ambassador. As co-captain of his school's Quiz League team, he won the inter-scholastic tournament as a Sophomore, and a runner-up place as a Junior. He was his school's only National AP scholar completing 15 AP
courses with twelve 5s and three 4's. He scored a perfect 36 on his Math
and Reading ACT sections, and a 790 on his Math SAT.
Jatin can be reached by email or phone: 682.401.5281.
Ranking anything in the US is big business. Cars, hospitals, colleges, phone companies, home builders and consumer products are all ranked by various media outlets and customer satisfaction companies.
Consumers crave for rankings because it makes it easy for them to sift out good products and services from bad without having to do any product research themselves. The organizations which are ranked covet these rankings and go to extraordinary lengths to appear high up in those annual lists.
When it comes to college rankings, our position is rather radical. We strongly believe that for most students applying to U.S. college and graduate schools, rankings don't matter much at all. There are far better ways to choose colleges than to use school rankings because there are just too many issues with current commercial rankings. We list them after the YouTube clip below.
Our approach is to not use rankings at all and look at what
real students do when they receive offers of admission. The College Navigator,
a world-class site operated by the U.S. Department of Education,
maintains selectivity and yield numbers for all colleges in the
admissions tab. Selectivity and Yield are critically important metrics
in the higher education sector. Colleges with the lowest selectivity and
highest yield are obviously the most sought-after institutions, and
therefore, are ranked very high. Watch the clip below.
Why we don't use rankings
We promised ranking enthusiasts that we will explain our skepticism, bordering on cynicism, about college rankings - so here we go:
Problem #1: Does the methodology make sense?
There are about a half a dozen outfits which publish college rankings. Every outfit uses its own methodology to arrive at a rank. U.S. News, the largest and most popular college ranking organization, says that it gathers and weights data from each college on some 15 indicators of academic excellence, such as:
Graduation and retention rates (22.5 percent)
Faculty resources, such as salary and class size (20 percent)
The weights reflect U.S. News' judgment about how much each measure matters. Just as anyone who has played around with an Excel sheet knows, if you change the weights, the rankings would change too. So, the first step in accepting U.S. News rankings as the Holy Gospel is that you agree that its indicators and the weights are just as meaningful to you as they are to U.S. News.
For most people, this is a problem. Most students go to college or graduate school not only for the experience of learning and exploration, but also, to find better employment after graduation. But the U.S. News ranking methodology does not consider how employers rank the school! Nor does it include graduate placement statistics - details about how many (and the kinds of) jobs students got after graduation. If the most famous ranking outfit does not think graduate outcomes are important, something is wrong!
Here's an excellent article in the NY Times in which a Columbia professor of math challenges Columbia's ranking. Here's his full 22-page post. And another article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that describes how Columbia and other top universities pushed master’s programs that failed to generate enough income for graduates to keep up with six-figure federal loans. Columbia is one of the highest-ranked schools by U.S. News and such a high ranking probably influenced many students to sign up for programs that clearly did not produce promised outcomes.
Problem #2: Ranking is not the same as reputation
We do not need any publication to tell us that elite schools such as the Ivy Leagues or Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Duke, Rice and Carnegie Mellon are outstanding institutions of learning. We already know this fact. This kind of reputation is earned over decades (and in the case of the Ivy Leagues, centuries) of hard work and accomplishment. In a sense, reputed schools are famous - for being famous.
Rankings, however, ebb or flow with the tide. It is nearly impossible to take an institution with millions of complex interactions involving its management, faculty, students, parents, employers and trustees for nearly a year — and reduce them all to a number.
There’s also the question of how valid the underlying data - for all these interactions - is. Most ranking outfits rely on the schools to provide them with information — such as admissions figures, financial resources, graduation figures and alumni giving — because a transparent, central hub of data does not exist. This creates an inherent conflict of interest. If a school is truthful in its reporting to an external organization, it could potentially end up being ranked lower. Should the school be truthful or aim to manipulate data a bit so that it can end up being higher? When perfect data is not available, every ranking organization makes assumptions to compute scores. Are these assumptions all valid?
The Obama White House criticized this approach in a September 2015 fact sheet as old and static, not consistent with what families and students need. “The old way of assessing college choices relied on static ratings lists compiled by someone who was deciding what value to place on different factors”. [Emphasis ours].
Problem #3: Commercial school rankings are, well, commercial
A key issue about commercial school rankings is exactly that — that is, these rankings are produced by commercial, for-profit companies, which love the status-quo. The ultimate goal of these outfits is to sell their rankings or build a brand around them. In 2007, the US News site was regularly getting about half-a-million hits a month. Within three days of the rankings release, traffic went up to 10 million page views, a twenty-fold increase. In 2010, the company walked away from magazine publishing altogether focusing instead on its rankings business.
Another problem with rankings is that students are placed in the uncomfortable, counter-intuitive position of choosing a ranking system before choosing a school. Each organization uses its own method to rank, so which ranking system is best for you? If the school you like is ranked high in a few lists but ranked lower in the others, what should you do?
The Obama administration set out to correct these flaws. Rather than rely on surveys and snapshots of data as the ranking outfits do, it proposed to use real data to rate the quality of colleges. Every student who takes a student loan is lodged in the Department of Education database. If a student transfers to another school, this information is also reported to the government. Every student who graduates and begins a career has to file a W-4 withholding form, so the IRS knows where this student went to work and how much she is making. If a student failed to make loan payments over a consistent period, this information is also known to the government because the IRS has the power to divert tax refunds to unpaid loan amounts.
Problem #4: The establishment likes the status-quo
With advances in data sciences and computing power, the government has the ability to come up with a technological solution to tie all of these disparate pieces of real information into a comprehensive ranking system that is based on actual data and not subject to commercial interests. In 2013, President Obama announced that all 7,000 of the nation’s colleges would be ranked by the government. As the New York Times reported, the aim was to “publicly shame low-rated schools that saddle students with high debt and poor earning potential.”
But the plan ran into fierce opposition. “Critics, including many of the presidents at elite private colleges, lobbied furiously against the idea of a government rating system, saying it could force schools to prioritize money making majors like accounting over those like English, history or philosophy.”
This type of thinking is at odds with the outcome based selection approach we have advocated for years. If students are really passionate about subjects like English, history or philosophy, they may still choose careers in those fields but this should not stop them from knowing how much they may earn after graduation, or that the return on their college investment is likely to be poor.
The Obama White House succumbed to this pressure from the entrenched establishment and when the new College Scorecard was released in September 2015, it did not have a ranking system. The Trump administration did nothing to correct this issue. And it is unlikely that the Biden administration will rank colleges using outcome.
Problem #5: The conflict of interest is paramount
Ranking outfits must rely on colleges to provide data and self-declare it as authentic. This presents a conflict of interest because some institutions could submit faulty data in the hopes that ranking outfits do not catch it. The result could be better rankings.
According to an indictment of Temple University's Fox School of Business by the U.S. Department of Justice, "relying on the false information it had received from Fox, U.S. News ranked Fox’s OMBA program Number One in the country four years in a row (2015 – 2018). U.S. News also moved Fox’s PMBA program up its rankings from No. 53 in 2014 to No. 20 in 2015, to No. 16 in 2016, and to No. 7 in 2017."
Our takeaway
Students are better off to use rankings sparingly and more as a final filter, if at all, rather than as a crucial pivot throughout the process. Outcome based ranking lists, such as those from the College Scorecard (although not ranked) or Payscale.com are far better than commercial ranking lists because they keep your focus on the Return on your College Investment.
The best approach is to use selectivity and yield numbers from the College Navigator and base your decision on what other students do.
A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website. But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.
Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee. Please contact us for more information.
There are outstanding summer programs to keep your teenager engaged and
active, while giving them an opportunity to make friends, learn, and
have fun.
Summer programs are also about exploration, so it is fine to
have your child enroll in a program that you may consider to be outside
of her interests or career goals. The best programs offer what a high school generally does not - an opportunity for hands-on, experiential, and collaborative learning in a space that supports scalable, real-world experiences.
Click here for our expanded list of opportunities broken down into several tabs - Business, Computer Sci/AI, General Science & Engineering, Volunteering, Debates, Government & Leadership, International Relations & Foreign Languages, and Creative Pursuits (Fine Arts).
Notes
Colleges look for four components in a student's overall profile. Your chosen summer program must fulfill one or more of these components.
Commitment to an activity resulting in improving skills. If you are committed to an activity and keep doing it, you are naturally going to get better at it.
Team dynamics.
When you are in an activity that promotes team dynamics, you learn to
share, give, and take.
Leadership.
If you are good in #1 and #2 above, you could be promoted to a
leadership role within your EC activity.
Service to community. The impact of
your EC activity is important. Are you dedicating part of your week to
helping others who are less fortunate than you are? Here are guidelines for the Presidential Volunteer Service Awards - this intensity of service is not required always, but, it is good to have on a resume at least for one year.
We recommend summer activities that will best help students reflectively describe in their college essays the way they grew, contributed, and learned.
11th-12th grade summer: Leadership programs; volunteering in field of major; research; internship, or job.
Summer academic programs fall into two basic buckets, STEM and Liberal Arts. Non-academic programs range from providing service at a local nursing home to volunteering for an international organization such as the Red Cross. Work or internship options are also attractive ways to keep children engaged. For a review of why extracurricular activities are important, please read our post here.
Applying early is critical.
Note: We do the best to maintain this popular page but we do not control the validity of the links. If a link leads to a dead page, please try creative searches on Google or ChatGPT to find the proper link. Please let us know the correct link so that we can keep this page updated.
For high school students who are interested in pursuing a political science, government, or international relations career, there are numerous opportunities. Many start off in high school clubs that culminate in inter-school competitions at the regional, state, or even national level. Other opportunities are available through essay competitions or internships.
The best ones are those that are sponsored by the government, or by organizations representing the government. It is never a good idea to pay exorbitantly for such experiences, so be wary of internships or pre-college programs or summer sessions at elite top schools such as Stanford, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Columbia, and Brown.
There are numerous STEM programs that may interest your child. Many require students to have demonstrated STEM skills in school through coursework and club activities. Some are open to all students.
No matter what your passion for community service is, there's always an organization that is eager to have you volunteer.
It helps if you can tailor your interests to the current trend in college admissions. Since the 2020 George Floyd protests, there has been a national awakening, especially on college campuses, about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Some states have banned official consideration of DEI programs for hiring and college recruitment, but volunteering to help uplift disadvantaged communities will always be looked at in good light.
Black, Latino, Native American, Refugees, LGBTQ are good examples of communities that can benefit from your volunteering. Causes could include Rights & Criminal Justice,
Education, Health, Immigration, Voting, Youth, Urban Poverty, Enterprise Zones, Financial Literacy, and the Economy.
Independent 501(c)(3) organizations
Many students pursue a passion for which no established organization exists. One client enjoyed painting on shoes and reselling them, using the profits from the sale to donate to an established charity. Another used her expertise in quilting to sell products on Etsy and contributing all of her profits to a charitable organization. Another used his passion for tennis to get other friends to join him and conduct tennis coaching camps, donating the proceeds to improve public tennis courts in the community. For such activities to be legal because money is involved, you are better off creating your own tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization named for a section of the I.R.S. code that regulates charities.
There are plenty of destination organizations that would be grateful for charitable contributions.
If none of the above options appeals to you, look at our link to find causes to help you find an organization in your area. Often, local charities are the best places to find meaningful and fulfilling opportunities.
A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website. But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.
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An ED student commits to attending their first-choice college giving up
many rights. If accepted, they voluntarily agree to withdraw
applications to other colleges. The student is unable to compare
financial aid offers because there are no competing offers, to begin
with.
Early Decision - Image Courtesy: ACT.org
Early Action - Image Courtesy: ACT.org
In return, the college, grateful that students are willing to commit to
it and lock in a seat, slightly lowers the standards of admission. For
the student, this means an increased chance of winning admission.
At Tulane University, an elite school with an acceptance rate of less than 10%, 46,000 students applied to its class of 2026. Of the 1,800 freshmen seats available, nearly two-thirds who were admitted had applied ED (Tulane has two ED rounds with most admitted from the first round). Only 106 students gained acceptance from the regular decision pool.
This appeal - of landing a coveted slot early in the admissions process -
is drawing more and more students to apply early in a game wrought with
strategy, anxiety, high-fives, and unfortunately, disappointment. Which
school should I apply ED to? Do I apply ED? Or EA, where my action is
not binding? Do I apply restrictive EA (like to Yale and Stanford) where
my action is not binding but I am still obligated to apply to no other
school on an ED/EA basis?
The table below shows that it is practically impossible to gain admission to the top schools in the regular pool. Top colleges continue to fill more seats during the ED/EA window leaving behind fewer seats for the regular season. This promise has resulted in an explosion in the number of students applying early forcing colleges to become extremely selective even for the early pool. At Harvard, the number of early applicants increased by a whopping 57 percent from last year, while 148 fewer students won admission.
Despite these grim statistics, the only chance of getting in, however slim, is through the ED/EA window. Our analysis proves this for six top schools - Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Rice, and Yale. We don't know the full regular admission numbers yet, so we assumed that the number of overall applicants will remain the same (as for the class of 2023, the latest year for which numbers are available) although many non-elite colleges are reporting lower student interest because of Covid-19.
Rao Advisors analysis based on numbers provided by the institutions
Class of 2024 Analysis (Detailed)
This analysis is for high school students who started college in the Fall of 2020. Here are some anecdotal results from clients we know.
Stanford EA. Denied. Someone ranked #11 out of 726 students at LD Bell High School; NMS Finalist; Perfect score on the ACT in Math and Reading. Varsity athlete.
Yale EA. Deferred. Someone who is a valedictorian in a TX high school near the DFW Airport.
Stanford EA. Denied. Someone who is a valedictorian in a Frisco ISD high school.
Cornell ED. Denied. Someone who is a star debater and won numerous UIL competitions, and was ranked close to 11% in a Houston ISD high school.
Duke ED. Denied. Someone who started a 503(c) non-profit for the empowerment of women and had outstanding extracurricular activities.
The 2024 ED/EA calculus for Yale (using real numbers)
To understand the power of the prestigious university's EA program, let's look at the class of 2023 - the latest for which public data is available at the time of writing of this post - when 36,844 students applied, all to win admission to the 1,526 freshmen spots that were open. Women won selection at a rate of 6%; men, 7%. These numbers were for the entire freshman class - students applying EA and regular decision.
For the class of 2024, Yale News reported that 796 students received offers of admission from the EA pool (out of 5,777 students who applied EA), so the selectivity of the EA pool was 13.78%, more than double the selectivity for women two years ago in the mixed overall pool (remember that it was 6%) and nearly double for men.
It's this distinguishing feature that attracts more and more students to apply for ED/EA: You substantially increase your chances of winning a seat - but with so many students applying, the ED/EA pool is becoming bigger and bigger each year. Just think of it this way. If everyone in the class of 2024 ED/EA pool had been given admission, that would nearly fill the entire Yale undergrad body, all four years of students!
Worse, ED/EA programs dramatically cut opportunities for students applying for regular admission.
Assume that the strength of the 2024 freshman class is the same as that for 2023 because top universities viscerally hate the idea of increasing class sizes. This means that 796/1526 = 52% of all spots are already awarded to the ED pool. Yale is an EA school - students are allowed to turn Yale down and go somewhere else - but truthfully, who would turn a Yale offer away? Some lucky students who will get into Harvard or Princeton during the regular cycle would, but that's a rare possibility. Suppose that all 796 students gladly accept their Yale offer.
There are now only 730 seats left to fill during the regular decision cycle, a pathetically low number. But wait, don't forget deferrals. Yale News said that 3,235 students from the EA pool were deferred admission, which means that these students will be competing with those who applied during the regular decision cycle with a slight edge, the edge of having expressed loyalty and interest to Yale ahead of those in the regular cycle who may have expressed such loyalty to some other school (like Chicago or Columbia) during those colleges' ED cycle.
Suppose that 4% of the deferred pool wins admission during the regular cycle. This equates to 130 seats, leaving 590 seats up for grabs for the regulars.
While we don't yet have numbers for the total applicant universe, assume a 5% increase year over year from the class of 2023. The new universe of students for the class of 2024 would be 36,844 x 1.05 = about 38,686 students. Subtracting the 5,777 students who applied ED/EA, we have 32,909 students who apply in the regular pool, all for 590 seats!
This brings Yale's selectivity for the regular decision cycle down to 1.73% for admitted seats, an amazingly low probability. For offered seats, we should divide this by Yale's yield of 69% resulting in a selectivity of 2.50%.
So what was seemingly a 6% chance for women and a 7% chance for men - overall - breaks down this way:
A 13.78% chance if you're lucky to be in the EA pool.
A 2.50% chance if you are in the regular pool.
Summary
It is little wonder that more and more students want to apply ED/EA. But this simply makes the situation more lopsided as it becomes increasingly harder to win ED/EA admission. And the regular decision cycle reduces itself to a joke.
In fact, for those who apply regular decision, merit today matters very little. Only luck does.
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Music class on Mondays and Thursdays. Dance on Tuesday. Swimming on Wednesday. Band practice and debate team on Saturday. Volunteering at a community organization on Sunday. Oh, did we forget Fridays?
If you can relate to this schedule for your teenager at home, you're not alone.
Extracurricular activities have come to define what college admissions officials say they look for in a high school student when they conduct a "Holistic Profile" evaluation. Holistic in this sense refers to both academic performances and to activities that begin when the last class of the school day ends. Here's a laundry list of benefits that accrue to students because of extracurricular activities, according to the College Board.
Encouraging our children to pursue a passion or two is one thing. But forcing our children to fill out their brag sheets with dozens of activities - simply for the sake of listing them out, is another. How did we come to this?
Note: For our companion post about how many extracurricular activities are meaningful for a high school student, please click here.
For one thing, American capitalism doesn't help. There's an entire cottage industry dedicated to serving the anxieties of parents so that children can be one up on their competition in a diverse set of extracurricular activities. Typical examples include: Drawing and Painting; Music – Violin, Piano, Drums, School Band; Dance; Team Sports – Soccer, Baseball, Football, Basketball, Hockey, Lacrosse; Individual Sports – Tennis, Golf, Swimming, Track and Field, e-games; Debates; Computer classes; Robotics; Photography; Editing and writing, including school newsletters and yearbooks; Debates. Non-profit activities such as community service and scouts are additional.
The Basics: How Important?
During the last three decades, extracurricular activities have become an essential component of a child's overall brand especially for admission to the most selective schools in the United States. These include the Ivy League institutions and such venerable schools as MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley - in general, schools with acceptance rates of 20% or less. Here are great tips about extracurricular activities from admission officers of several selective colleges.
But in a NACAC survey of 230 selective colleges, those with acceptance rates from 20% to 60% reported that extracurricular activities were not quite as important as academic ability, such as overall grades in high school, SAT/ACT scores, teacher recommendations, college essays, AP scores or class rank. Student demonstrated interest - how well you rate a college and how likely you are to attend it if offered admission - is a lot more appealing to these colleges than a student's extracurricular activities. After all, a college is a lot more interested to lock you in and fill a seat than scrutinize how committed you were in high school band.
This said, at least for the top schools, extracurricular activities can make a crucial difference and could well mean the difference between getting in or not. By expanding a child's readiness for college to include actions unrelated to high school academics, the nation's top colleges are indulging in an indirect form of affirmative action.
Harvard says it looks "for promise" in all of its applicants rather than academic performance alone - a vague term that gives it full license to grant admission to anyone it wants.
Breaking down Extracurricular Activities
Colleges look for four components in a student's EC activity, no matter what it is.
Commitment to an activity resulting in improving skills. If you are committed to an activity and keep doing it, you are naturally going to get better at it.
Team dynamics. When you are in an activity that promotes team dynamics, you learn to share, give, and take. You become better at helping your team leader organize. These skills are extremely important not only in college, but in work, and life. A bonus is when your team participates in competitions across schools in the same district, and moves up to regionals, state, national, or even the international level. The University Interscholastic League (UIL), a creation of the University of Texas, Austin (since 1910) is the platinum standard to challenge teams to compete and recognize achievement. UIL hosts contests in just about every EC interest area, so students can always find an activity that they like.
Leadership. If you are good in #1 and #2 above, you could be promoted to a leadership role within your EC activity. Colleges love examples of leadership. Many essay prompts specifically ask you for leadership anecdotes and what better way to demonstrate your skills than in an EC activity?
Service to community. The impact of your EC activity is important. Are you dedicating part of your week to helping others who are less fortunate than you are? If your current EC does not involve a service to community component, you need to invest time in developing a new activity that devotes time to volunteering. Here are guidelines for the Presidential Volunteer Service Awards - this intensity of service is not required always, but, it is good to have on a resume at least for one year.
Remember that reporting volunteering hours on a college application works on the honor system. That is, you report your effort honestly. Unfortunately, many applicants exaggerate their hours of service which is why colleges, not having a mechanism to validate, let the reporting stay as it is. Unless you are pursuing a Presidential Volunteer Service Award medal, you should not be concerned about obtaining evidence for your volunteering hours.
The gold standard in community service is recognized by the White House and Americorps. The President's Volunteer Service Award (PVSA) Program
recognizes selfless service by students as young as 5 years old. High
school students can earn the prestigious Gold award by committing 250+
hours of service during the year. Lower service levels are also
available.
Students whose native language is not Spanish but who are taking advanced Spanish classes in school have additional opportunities to demonstrate your interest in serving underprivileged communities and simultaneously improve your Spanish. You can engage in areas as varied as Rights & Criminal Justice, Education, Health, Immigration, Voting, Youth, and the Economy by working with Hispanic organizations such as Unidosus or the AAMA.
Would the volunteer hours during the summer after the 8th grade and before the start of the 9th grade count towards a student's high school volunteering hours? Yes, they would. Volunteering falls in a grey area and the accounting is not as rigorous as academics because the activity is more age-based. See PVSA requirements above for guidance. Because there's overlap in the 11-15 years bracket from middle to high school, a rising 9th-grader's summer volunteer hours would count.
One of the best EC activities: Become an Eagle Scout (Boys) or win the Gold Award (Girls)
Is there one activity that combines all four of the above components? Yes! Boy or Girl Scouts!! Eagle Scouts (fewer than 5% of all scouts earn this distinction) are highly valued by college admission teams.
A typical Eagle Scout needs to prove competencies to win at least 21 merit badges, many representing life skills such as CPR, search and rescue, or swimming, and the entire journey commits the scout to 4-5 years of regular participation. All Eagle Scouts must design, engineer, and implement some community service project - leading other scouts. Similar requirements are in place for Girl Scouts Gold Awards.
Before enrolling into a Boy Scouts troupe, we advise families to verify that their children would be safe. The Boy Scouts organization in July 2021 agreed to an $850 Million settlement over abuse claims dating back decades.
We conducted a webinar on Dec 17, 2020 - attended by over 500 parents and students - at which five outstanding high school students shared their extracurricular journeys. Featured are Rohan (Golf), Sarika (Debate), Ankitha (Band Director), Sahaj (Eagle Scouts) and Anish (Computer Science/Robotics Club). This program is one hour long.
Our takeaway
Regardless of the relative value in college admissions, there is little
doubt that extracurricular activities help grow a high school student
than just core academics. They provide opportunities for students to
pursue a passion and demonstrate commitment. Most students begin
experiencing what true leadership is all about. High school students
also end up making friendships that help them socialize better in
college.
The landscape is changing rapidly. If your child is considering a highly selective school, extracurricular activities are critical to your child's chances of getting in. Otherwise, if applying to schools ranked between 50 and 100, extracurricular pursuits are not quite so important. Regardless of college admissions, extracurricular activities help shape a student's profile like nothing else, so one or two strong activities should form a student's profile.
As to how many extracurricular activities are important, we will address this question in a separate post.
A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website. But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.
Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee. Please contact us for more information.
