The college admissions scandal exposed the amount of money some parents will spend to guarantee their children a spot at a top college.
Assuming students attend private school, participate in at least four years of each of these categories of extracurricular activities, and parents hire SAT tutors and independent consultants to help students prepare their college applications, families could wind up spending more than $200,000 preparing a student to apply to college before they ever get there. In many areas of the country the cost would likely get even higher.
In a poll published Monday, by the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, nearly 30% of parents said the cost for their middle- and high-school children to participate in school activities — school-sponsored sports teams, plays or other extracurricular activities — was higher than they expected.
That’s likely to be particularly true if a family has limited funds and needs to make a trade-off between another expense and paying for extracurricular activities or if a student may need to give up time earning money for their family to act in a play or be on the swim team, she said. On the other hand, families who can afford to spend money on these types of activities, and belong to a social circle where such spending is typical, can feel pressure to pay for a child’s extra music lesson beyond the school orchestra or the equipment and fees necessary to play on a travel soccer team, in addition to the school’s varsity squad.