[saint_fiasco]

> I've never heard of a college admissions board that saw working as a valid extracurricular.

The cynic reason is probably that they are filtering for social class and don't want working class people, but that sounds awful. Do colleges give a better reason, or at least an excuse?

[michaelchisari]

I don't think it's a matter of want, as much as a matter of being disconnected from what working class life is like, which I think ends up having the same effect, even if the intention is much less sinister.

[avn2109]

Actually I used my 4 years of high school work as a rural irrigator to get into Ivy undergrad, it worked like a charm despite my preposterously low grades and uneven disciplinary record.

The trick is just to spin it as more "sunset over the cornfields/1950's Americana" than "grim middle class suburban strip mall McDonalds drudgery."

Basically you just have to accord with the idealized mythos of smallholding independent yeomanry that is built into our culture and that East coast admissions officers so desperately want to believe about flyover country.

As the parent comment alludes, they're not working class, they don't know anyone who is, and they have all sorts of silly ideas about mythologizing the dignity of work and the lived experience of the proletariat. Just don't let your application disabuse them of the notion that digging holes in the hot sun for 14 hours a day is a glorious pastime.

Fancy school admissions is just like the art world, their whole objective is to avoid association with anything coded middle-class. It's fine to be low or high, just stay out of the middle.

[michaelchisari]

I have to say, that's a brilliant way to spin it.