Kids cant fool their way into college by starting an app or landing a big-name internship heres what works instead

If you’re beginning to feel like every teenager at your child’s high school is the CEO of a start-up, a non-profit founder or a social justice advocate, you’re not wrong.These days, teenagers aren’t just biking around their neighborhoods or going to the movies — they’re interning at major tech companies, cultivating bespoke brands and building AI-powered apps.

But just because these activities impress the parents at the country club doesn’t mean they impress college admissions officers. In fact, they might even tank a student’s chances at an Ivy League acceptance. When a student interested in evolutionary biology starts a lucrative tech business or one who wantsto study classics miraculously lands an internship at Google, the message they send to colleges is clear:They don’t care about developing their real passions or bettering their community — they just want to get into an elite university. Every admissions cycle, countless families try — and fail — to develop a compelling application through flashy, contrived resume items.Frantic parents ask questions such as: “Should I build an app for food insecurity in Cambodia? Or do you think it’s better to launch a sustainable jewelry brand on Shopify? Should my kid take up cricket? Will they have better chances of admission if they apply as an anthropology major?”But these questions reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what admissions officers at Ivy League and other elite universities are looking for today.

Rather than artificially curated resumes packed with global impact and buzzwords, top colleges are looking for the one thing you can’t fake: authentic passion. With the explosion of pay-to-play programs, admissions officers have become increasingly savvy atspotting inauthenticity.They know when a student’s brand-name internship resulted from a family connection, not a cold email or when a research publication was paid for, not peer-reviewed.

And they raise their eyebrows w...