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The Ivy League cares a lot about "PC" diversity (race, gender, sexual orientation). But not so much about regional or ideological diversity. In fact, leadership activities and accomplishments that scream "red state" actually reduce your chances of getting into Harvard - being a leader in the ROTC cuts your admissions odds in half ceteris paribus[1].

Poor rural white kids don't go to Harvard.

[1] Ron Unz explores this and other Ivy League admission statistics in "The Myth of American Meritocracy" http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...

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I know the idea that conservatives are persecuted by liberal academics is a popular one. But isn't it more likely that what the article is talking about is due to rural vs urban or academic vs non-academic backgrounds and experiences rather than liberal vs conservative ideology?

I agree that regional and ideological diversity might be a problem for elite schools (or any school, for that matter). But I don't think the issues are necessarily political ones. In other words, are Harvard admissions people rejecting 4-H club members because they assume they're Sarah Palin loving conservatives, or because the Harvard admissions people didn't participate in 4-H clubs and don't know much about them?

> I know the idea that conservatives are persecuted by liberal academics is a popular one. But isn't it more likely that what the article is talking about is due to rural vs urban or academic vs non-academic backgrounds and experiences rather than liberal vs conservative ideology?

I tend to agree, but I haven't read the source cited by the article. If anyone here has easy access to Epenshade's book, I'd love to hear how rigorous the "4H,ROTC decreased P(admission) by 65%" result was.

87 Espenshade (2009) p. 126.

> In other words, are Harvard admissions people rejecting 4-H club members because they assume they're Sarah Palin loving conservatives, or because the Harvard admissions people didn't participate in 4-H clubs and don't know much about them?

A third possibility: admissions people don't believe that generic "leadership" clubs are worthwhile, leading to a perceived bias towards clubs with more specific purposes than being line-items on college applications. We could test this hypothesis by looking for differential performance between 4H and ROTC and between 4H and NHS (Natl. Honor Society, the prevalent line-item club at my high school, which was not rural).

4H and ROTC are many things, but they are not "generic leadership clubs without a specific purpose". Both groups are much more akin to something like the Boy Scouts, as they demand substantial amounts of time and effort, and give achievements for the mastery of specific skills.

I used ROTC as an example of something that was decidedly not a generic leadership club, sorry I didn't make that clear.

My opinion of 4H was based on 10 seconds of skimming their website, but in that time the generic terminology and cheap selling points targeted towards parents were enough to turn my stomach. It's possible that their website is just targeted towards a different audience, but you would have to convince me.

> they demand substantial amounts of time and effort

That doesn't exclude the possibility that they are a generic leadership club. A leadership club that didn't demand time and effort would be entirely fraudulent rather than simply having dubious value.

> and give achievements for the mastery of specific skills.

If it's like the Scouts, I'm tossing it in with "generic leadership club" unless they provide a metric by which I can judge the engagement and independence of an individual within their system.

Part of what I would want to see from an applicant would be personal goals outside of the framework of the institutions surrounding them. The ability of the individual to bend the institution to those goals would then count as the type of leadership I think colleges are after. They want people who will use the resources around them to do interesting things, not people who aim to collect every badge in the pile.

The pollution of the term "leadership" by those seeking to sell educational experiences is regrettable. Got your morse code badge? Not leadership. In charge of a group of kids learning morse code? Possibly leadership, depending on how much initiative you took to go beyond provided materials. Started a morse code club, created a curriculum for newcomers, advertised, handled paperwork / fund acquisition to get materials & go to a morse code contest? Leadership!

Just about everybody believes, both intuitively and based on research, that ideology relates to discriminatory behavior by employers, cops, judges, juries, etc. Why assume elite academic admissions committees, tasked with rejecting 95% of applicants, are different?

Elite disdain for the assumed characteristics of rural Americans may not explain all of the outreach or attendance gaps, but it's reasonable to assume it plays a role.

Anecdata: this rural 4-H club member was admitted (and went) to Harvard.

> Poor rural white kids don't go to Harvard.

Only because they don’t know to apply, in my experience. I grew up in a rural, mostly poor, 97% white small town, which happened to have a few excellent teachers who pushed strong students to apply to the ivies. In most years 3-6 or so students are accepted.

We had 4H and JROTC. Those groups never did anything interesting or challenging to speak of. They certainly weren’t developing “leadership” skills, and participating in those groups took time away from doing far more interesting things. The kids in my class who went to the ivies weren’t in them because they were doing those more interesting things, which tended to be endeavors requiring personal initiative, not just showing up for activities.

Maybe 4H and JROTC aren’t a joke in other high schools, but I’m not surprised that they carry no weight in college admissions from what I’ve seen of them.

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