In addition to employing SAT tutors and private college advisors, parents of Ivy League hopefuls should visit art museums, according to a Harvard University study.
The study, "Chess, Cheerleading, Chopin: What Gets You Into College" reported a positive correlation between parents who visit art museums and their children's acceptance into highly competitive colleges.
These results were obtained by sociology professor Jason Kaufman and graduate student Jay Gabler, as they attempted to determine how extracurricular activities impacted the likelihood of admission into elite colleges.
According to the authors, these results suggest that children whose parents visit art museums are more likely to talk about the arts with their children. And if these children express their cultural knowledge on a college application or interview, it may distinguish them from their peers.
"A chance mention of the new Bertolucci film or the Ruscha show at the Whitney may tip an applicant from one pile to another," they write, referring to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Kaufman and Gabler utilized data from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey, an ongoing project conducted by the U.S. Department of Education that followed the academic endeavors of thousands of individuals who were eighth graders in 1988.
Due to the differing college attendance rates among minorities, Kaufman and Gabler only studied white students.
Nancy Price, director of marketing and communications for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said that visiting art museums can make people's minds work more quickly.
"Coming to a museum, looking at paintings or sculpture, it gives somebody a lot to think about," Price said. "Art is about ideas, and not only ideas that artists might have."
Price said that looking at art, especially modern art, can benefit the mind because viewers are forced to come up their own interpretation of the work.
Looking at modern art is like "looking at a problem and thinking that there's more than one way to solve it," she said. This is a skill that can be applied to many other fields, Price added.
After hearing that the study excluded minorities, College junior Edward Katz felt it was "probably biased." However, he noted that it exemplifies "how much parents do have influence over their kids."
"What parents see can subconsciously [and unintentionally] influence what their kids are like," Katz said.
Additional results show that several "resume boosters" such as school plays, academic honor societies and public service clubs did not impact whether students attended a four year-college, regardless of their academic standing.
Furthermore, student participation in other common high school activities like student government and interscholastic sports teams did increase a student's of attending a four-year college, although not necessarily an elite college.
