College admissions

Fortunately, I don't have to worry about college admissions now.  But I remember those days.

When you're one of hundreds of thousands of capable students without some extraordinary gift that lets you write your own admission ticket, you have to worry about distinguishing yourself.  You all have good grades, test scores, and class rank. So you focus on crafting a portfolio of desired traits.

Back when I was looking at schools, the conventional wisdom was that colleges were looking for students with diverse accomplishments.  In other words, for two students with identical grades and test scores, participating in the debate team and the baseball team was perceived as better than participating in the debate team and academic decathlon team, because athletic and academic pursuits was somehow better than academic pursuits alone, even for students who do not intend to pursue athletics in college.

But if you think about it, it's rather discriminatory.

Obviously, colleges wouldn't expect a disabled student to be a varsity athlete.  They'd be considered as individuals.  But everyone else?  Well, they should participate in sports.  The short kid?  The skinny kid?  The fat kid?  Doesn't matter.

It's also about the month in which you were born.  The kid born in September enters first grade, and the kid born in August has to wait a year, and is 11 months older throughout his schooling, and by virtue of his age, is naturally better at physical pursuits.  Freakonomics documented that one is significantly more likely to become a professional athlete if one's birth month means they're at the older edge of the age range, for example being 8 years and 11 months when entering that sports league for 8 year olds.

I suspect there are a significant minority of students who aren't disabled, but lack the talent to participate in sports at even the competitive high school level.  Think the stereotypical "picked last in gym class" cohort.  Even if this group dedicated several hours a day to practice, they couldn't make the team.  And that makes them a worse student in the eyes of these college admission officials.

That doesn't sound fair to me.