Why Are American Colleges Obsessed With 'Leadership'?; Atlantic, 1/22/14

Tara Isabella Burton, Atlantic; Why Are American Colleges Obsessed With 'Leadership'? :

"Earlier this month, more than 700,000 students submitted the Common Application for college admissions. They sent along academic transcripts and SAT scores, along with attestations of athletic or artistic success and—largely uniform—bodies of evidence speaking to more nebulously-defined characteristics: qualities like—to quote the Harvard admissions website—“maturity, character, leadership, self-confidence, warmth of personality, sense of humor, energy, concern for others and grace under pressure.”

Why are American colleges so interested in leadership?...

As Lan Liu, author of Beyond the American Model, puts it in a piece for the Harvard Business Review, “Leadership is culture-specific. Unfortunately, this theme has been unduly overshadowed by the bias, which is often an American one, toward the pursuit of a universal model of leadership.”...

Certainly, it's worth asking if assumptions about “leadership,” culturally-specific and quintessentially American as they are, penalize candidates from different cultural backgrounds, where leadership—particularly among adolescents—might take different forms, or be discouraged altogether.

College admissions has come a long way in recognizing how candidates from different backgrounds and different levels of opportunity might present themselves differently. At its best, the holistic admissions process allows admissions officers to assess test scores and grades in context. But so too it’s worth looking at the context of the personal qualities admissions officers value. Do we need a graduating class full of leaders? Or should schools actively seek out diversity in interpersonal approaches—as they do in everything else?"