Congratulations, You Made the Top 75% of Your Class

When I ask a family what their kid has going on, what they do, what honors they've picked up, there's one answer that comes out first almost every time.

"Well, she's National Honor Society."

Let me tell you about the night my daughter Lizzie got inducted.

She was in 11th grade. I'm sitting next to her in the audience, and I start doing what I apparently cannot stop doing, which is counting. There were about 220 kids in her graduating class. I'm looking around the room trying to work out how many of them are getting this same honor tonight.

So I lean over and say, hey Lizzie, this is awesome. Congratulations. You made it into the top 75% of your class.

She did not think that was funny.

She was right to be annoyed, and I was right about the math.

Here's the test I want you to apply to any credential on your kid's list. Have you ever, in your life, heard an employer say "get me the National Honor Society kid"?

No. Nobody has ever said that.

That's a participation trophy. Not worthless. Just not differentiating, which is a different thing.

And I want to be careful here, because this gets misheard every time I say it. I am not telling your kid to skip National Honor Society. Join it. It's fine. Put it on the list.

Just understand what it does and doesn't do. It does not make your kid stand out, because a large fraction of the kids they're competing against have exactly the same line on exactly the same list.

Anything a quarter of your kid's class also has is not a differentiator. It's table stakes.

This is the trap of the honors-and-awards section generally. Families collect these things believing each one adds weight. Then they arrive at an application where every single line is something several thousand other applicants also have, and they cannot understand why the file reads as unremarkable.

It reads as unremarkable because it is unremarkable. Not because the kid is. Because the list is.

The uncomfortable question, and it's the one worth sitting with tonight: if you took your kid's activities list and swapped the name at the top for another strong student from the same high school, how much of it would still be true?

If the answer is most of it, that's the problem. And the fix is not adding a tenth item.

Onward.

-Andy "Top 75%" Lockwood

P.S. There's a real distinction between the credentials that check a box and the ones that actually separate a kid from the pile, and almost nobody teaches families to tell them apart. That's ordinary conversation inside the Lockwood Inner Circle, drawn from what we do with our private 1:1 college advisory clients. A dollar gets you in: lockwoodinnercircle.com