Spike, Hook or Theme: What's the Difference?

"Your child needs a spike"

A parent comes home from a college information night with one sentence stuck in her head. Someone on the panel said that well-rounded students no longer get in, and that every applicant needs a spike.

Her daughter is a strong student who plays viola and tutors, and she has never won anything outside her own school. By that account she is in trouble, and it is already the spring of junior year.

What often follows is a rushed project: a nonprofit registered in April, a research paper started in May. It costs the summer and it rarely convinces anyone, because a reader can see the date it began.

The advice was less wrong than blurred. Three different ideas get mixed together in conversations like that one, and each calls for a different response.

What a spike is

A spike is one area where a student has gone well past what a strong high school student normally does, far enough that people outside the school have noticed. Picture a profile drawn as a line: level in most places, rising sharply in one.

Examples make it concrete. A student who places in a national science competition has a spike. So does one who performs as a soloist with a regional orchestra, publishes research done with a university lab, or holds a state ranking in chess. Being president of three clubs is not a spike. It is breadth.

The word comes from admissions consulting. You will not find it on the admissions pages of the colleges cited in this article. The reasoning behind it is that selective colleges are assembling a varied class. Yale, for example, says it wants a student body with a range of talents and experiences. A student who is outstanding at one thing can be easier to place in that class than a student who is good at ten.

Two facts about spikes tend to get lost when the word is passed around. They take years to build, and they come from interest the student already has. Nobody reaches a state ranking on a parent's schedule.

What a hook is

A hook is a different kind of thing. It does not measure what the student has achieved. It is a category of applicant that a college favors because of something the college itself wants.

The clearest evidence comes from Harvard, whose admissions data became public during a lawsuit. Economists Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler and Tyler Ransom studied that data and grouped the favored categories under four letters, ALDC:

• Athletes recruited by a college coach
• Legacies, meaning the children of graduates
• Applicants on the dean's interest list, a list of applicants of special interest to the university
• Children of faculty and staff

More than 43% of the white students Harvard admitted were in one of those four groups. The authors estimate that about three-quarters of them would have been rejected without the preference.

A second study, by Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman, looked at the Ivy League and four similar colleges. It found that applicants from the highest-income 1% of families were about twice as likely to be admitted as middle-class applicants with the same test scores. It traced much of that gap to legacy preference, athletic recruitment and higher ratings on non-academic qualities.

Why a hook is outside a family's control

Look at the four categories again. Three are settled by who the student's parents are: where they went to college, where they work, and what their relationship with the university is. Nothing a sixteen-year-old does can change any of them.

The fourth, athletic recruitment, is earned, but it is not the same as being good at a sport. A college coach has to choose that student for that team. That usually follows years of competition at a level most high school athletes never reach, and the decision belongs to the coach.

That is why a hook cannot be a plan. You either have one or you do not, and no amount of effort in junior year creates one.

It still helps to know hooks exist, for two reasons. A family without one can stop wondering what they did wrong. And a family can check whether a given college uses one: every college publishes a Common Data Set, and section C7 states whether it considers a relationship to alumni and how much weight it gives. Some colleges have stopped considering it.