The Harvard Graduate School of Education put together a report called Making Caring Common. It includes tips for parents who want to help their teenagers with the college admissions process. The Washington Post summarized the main idea of the report by pointing out that “Colleges want students who care.”
The report says that most colleges want students who engaged in community service that is immersive, sustained, authentically chosen, and a powerful learning experience. Parents can help by exploring with their teenager what he or she finds to be meaningful. They may feel a passion to feed the homeless, or to help end bullying (for example).
Colleges consider the answers to the following questions in regards to community service:
Is the student immersing themselves in an experience that increases their ability to take other perspectives, to care about people different from them in terms of race, class, political ideology and other characteristics?
Are students able to commit to a single community engagement or service activity for at least nine months? Sustained engagement indicates that the student is more likely to build ethical awareness and character, and is often a strong predictor of college success.
The report also found that quality is more important than quantity when it comes to achievement. It explains that colleges don’t want “long brag sheets”. They want to know about the depth and quality of the student’s civic and intellectual engagement.
Parents can help their teens with this by helping them to look at the big picture. Ask insightful questions. Why is this activity meaningful to you? What goals does it achieve? What have you learned about yourself, others, and your communities?
Parents may be surprised the learn that the report recommends that parents set limits for standardized tests. Discourage your teenager from taking the same standardized test more than twice. The report found that taking standardized exams more than that rarely improves student scores. Instead, it makes students feel anxious.