Is Being Class President a Good Extracurricular for College Applications?

The short answer is that class president has lost most of its admissions value at elite schools, and chasing it at the expense of more impactful activities is a strategic mistake.

The role made sense as a prestige signal decades ago because students were largely limited to what their high school offered. Student government sat at the ceiling of available leadership opportunities, and admissions officers evaluated applicants within that narrow ecosystem.

That world no longer exists.

Today, a motivated high schooler can co-author research with a university professor, build software used by thousands of people, launch a nonprofit with documented legislative wins, or compete at the national level in academic disciplines before senior year. This expansion fundamentally changed what "leadership" and "impact" mean to admissions officers at MIT, Stanford, and the Ivies. They have shifted decisively toward what insiders call spike profiles: students with deep, demonstrable, real-world impact in a specific area.

The core problem with class president is what the role actually entails. Planning pep rallies, managing a homecoming budget, and advocating for a new vending machine require real organizational skills, but they do not produce the kind of measurable outcomes elite admissions offices are looking for.

Compare that to a student who spent the same hours working with a city council member on an ordinance or running a voter registration drive that enrolled thousands of residents. The skills class president is supposed to demonstrate, leadership, civic engagement, persuasion, are now far more convincingly shown through actual participation in the real world.

You do still see class presidents at Harvard and Yale, but when you look closely, a pattern emerges: it is almost never because they were class president. These students carry a separate, compelling spike in research, athletics, arts, or real-world advocacy. Class president is background noise on their activity list.

Class president is not the worst use of time on the extracurricular spectrum. As a secondary activity that coexists with a stronger primary spike, it is unlikely to hurt you, and it does require a school community to vouch for you through an election. But spending significant time and social energy chasing the role, at the expense of building real-world impact, is a trade-off that rarely pays off in elite admissions today.