Advice for getting into an elite college: be a leader

A co-worker asked for advice for his daughter, who is in high school and wants to apply to Wharton (which he knew is my alma mater).

I happily discovered that his daughter has very high SAT scores, but I pointed out that while low grades and test scores are nearly a guarantee of getting rejected, even super high scores don’t guarantee acceptance.

What the elite universities are looking for are future leaders. Why are they looking for leaders? Well, from a cynical viewpoint, leaders make more money, so they will have more to donate to the university when they’re alumni. They also add to the prestige of the university.

I handed my co-worker a Dilbert cartoon which depicts one of Dilbert’s co-workers inviting him to join MENSA. Dilbert asks, “If we’re so smart, why do we work here?” This cartoon demonstrates how many people smart enough to get a high score on the SAT can easily wind up in a dead end job where they won't be likely to donate any significant amount of money to their alma mater. Dilbert is an example of the kind of applicant who gets rejected.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, is the kind of applicant the elite universities are looking for. People like to make fun of Bush for not being so smart, and they express disgust that Yale and Harvard Business School accepted him over candidates who were surely smarter. But the schools saw Bush’s leadership potential.

It may very well be that an important part of W’s leadership potential was the fact that his father was a Very Important Person, but the admissions committee knows that if your father is a Very Important Person then you’re a lot more likely to become a future leader. No one ever said this admissions process was fair.

Sports are considered strong indicators of leadership, for some reason or other. Excelling at high school sports will help one’s candidacy. If the college applicant isn’t athletic, then some other extra-curricular activity is essential. The goal of these extracurricular activities is to demonstrate leadership. Being on three teams isn’t as valuable as having a leadership role on a single team. And the same applies for non-athletic activities.

All the essays on the admissions applications are opportunities to demonstrate how the applicant is a leader and not just a nerd who gets high grades but will wind up like Dilbert after he enters the workforce.

Comments

[Mark Foxwell]

Bush Jr's "leadership potential?" Come now. This fraternity brat has never once in his life demonstrated an ability to handle a single challenge of any kind on his own, without handlers and rich relatives to pull strings to get him into prestigious situations and out of them again before the bill for being there arrives.

His father has definite ability. Many of those around him have accomplished things on their own. But G. W. Bush's "leadership" abilities are entirely a matter of his family connections and the willingness of people desperate to believe that we are not going straight to hell in a handbasket to pretend he is saying reasonable things. Never mind whether the purported reasonable things could possibly add up to a coherent world view--one that is of any use in setting policies for challenging times like these. He just says what his bases want to hear and his handlers go ahead and do as they will for their real base, the corporate elite that he serves.

"Leadership" might often mean an ability to understand situations and react appropriately, but in the case of the CEO all too often it just means a stuffed shirt. How keen of you to notice that that kind of "leadership" earns more reward and respect than serious creative work in our society, for it is not run by creative people but by sharks.

[Half Sigma]

Bush is a leader. In fact he has the highest leadership position possible, president of the United States. The important thing is not whether he's good at the job, but the fact that he has the job.

The point here is that elite colleges are looking for someone who might be a future president or future CEO.

Yale and HBS were clearly right about Bush.

[Andy D.]

Wow, being the leader of the free world doens't make you a leader...I'm not sure I can agree with that Mark! Good point about leadership there Half-Sig.

[superdestroyer]

And the easiest place to be a leader is to attend a very homogenous private high school imagine how easy it is for someone like Bush or Al Gore to demonstrate leadership by being in a place where everyone is rich and white and comes from about the same background. Now imagine a middle class kid who goes to a diverse high school and trys to demonstate leadership. The middle class kid probably does not have a chance.