Why Are American Colleges Obsessed With 'Leadership'?

Presumably managerialism? Structural analysis of universities is obviously relevant. As well as their function in the economy.

Most of that shit was designed (originally) with racist intent. I don't think modern admissions committees are racist; at this point, it's more of a "how things were always done" dynamic, and it's taken for granted that nonacademic factors should have a huge influence over college admissions. (One problem is that grade point averages aren't standardized and the SATs don't go high enough for as competitive as college admissions are. The bullshit gets such a high weight because so many students are 2400/valedictorians, now that admissions are a national pool with many students submitting 20+ applications.)

Admissions tests (such as the SATs) made college admissions "too" meritocratic in the 1920s-30s and prep-school boys started losing spots to ethnically diverse applicants from public schools. For example, student bodies went from 0-3% to 20-25% Jewish in a year. Many of the professors and administrators welcomed the change (the quality of students improved) but wealthy donors went into race panic and demanded that WASP-biased extracurricular factors (what would be called "pattern matching" in modern VC-istan) be injected back into the process.

I currently attend UC Berkeley and graduated from a fairly affluent top US high school a few years ago. Meaning: everyone was very concerned (I won't say obsessed) about college admissions.

This focus on leadership in admissions is very well known, and manifests itself conspicuously in competitive high schools. There's a considerable amount of unspoken pressure to get "leadership" positions in school clubs, do "leadership" activities in community service, do varsity sports or other leadership in sports, and participate in ranked competitions. The list goes on and on. This breeds a lot of cynicism about people's motivations, especially as people try to game the system (with empty leadership positions). What starts to happen is that when people hear about a high schooler who goes off and founds a non-profit and does work in Africa (or something like that), people start to wonder whether that person did it just to improve their admissions chances. The sad part is that this person could very well be genuine.

EDIT (reply to below): Sometimes those people are college admissions officers. I'm in college now, so I don't worry much about that stuff anymore. I just recognize that the system is screwed up.

> But the implicit message behind the rhetoric of leadership in the American college admissions is that intellectualism alone is not enough, even for an academic institution. Simply learning for learning's sake is not enough.

Implicit? I'd say it's pretty explicit. Harvard, Yale, etc. aren't trying to be "normal" colleges, they're explicitly trying to produce the next generation of world leaders. Admissions make very clear that intellectualism/learning on its own is not enough.

And rhetoric? It's reality. Our most recent 6 terms of presidents, and 9 out of 9 current Supreme Court justices, all have degrees from Harvard or Yale. So the whole leadership thing appears to be working, whether or not you think that's a good thing.

I don't think Harvard, Yale, or anybody else is arguing that most colleges need to, or should, focus on leadership. But they're certainly within their rights to want to -- it's one of the things that makes Harvard and Yale what they are.

It's easy to say that the American college admissions game relies on strange and difficult to quantify criteria, especially at top schools. The more interesting aspect is the comparison to the UK and other high quality European universities. As a student at a "prestigious" American college, I find it strange how little the lone wolf mentality is encouraged. In graduate programs, the most successful students are almost always lone wolves in many ways, since leadership ability doesn't get you very far with pure science or truly original ideas.

I wonder what the impact would be if American universities used Oxford / Cambridge as a model instead of whatever they're doing now.