‘Comp’ Should Stand for Completion

After a hypercompetitive admissions process, students admitted to Harvard feel an overwhelming sense of relief. The war is over — or is it?

A new source of stress and competition soon arrives: the “comp.”

At Harvard, the process of joining extracurriculars is called “comping.” Some organizations have completion-based comps, where you are admitted so long as you complete set tasks. Others have competitive comps that elect students on the basis of performance, with assessments getting as difficult as applications followed by multiple rounds of interviews.

These selective comps restrict opportunity and create a competitive extracurricular environment on campus, when the goal of student organizations should be to allow students to explore their interests and potential career paths.

With freshmen eager to prove themselves worthy of their spot at Harvard, any especially competitive organization carries a strong allure. Clubs may boost their reputation among anxious freshmen by lowering their acceptance rates and striving to seem prestigious.

Before classes even begin, conversations in Annenberg invoke the names of uber-competitive consulting groups, political organizations, business boards, publications or acapella groups. Quickly, freshmen develop an understanding of which organizations on campus are most prestigious — that is to say, most exclusive.

Yet exclusivity does not necessarily signal value, and we should call this so-called prestige into question.

Ideally, college should be a clean slate where extracurriculars provide opportunities to explore one’s interests. They can also provide important training grounds for future careers and incredible networking opportunities. When students have to jump through needless competitive hurdles to join them, such opportunities become inaccessible to all but the most experienced students.

Organizations can shift transition towards completion-based comps with little cost.

If you’ve been involved on the extracurricular scene on campus, you’ve likely noticed a pattern throughout any given semester: many members join in the beginning, and then slowly membership trickles off as overcommitted students narrow down their priorities.

When a completion-based comp is sufficiently rigorous and long, it can yield committed and capable members. The length of the comp gives students a trial run where they can determine if the organization is where they want to dedicate their time, before they get the chance to become ghosts on a mailing list. Organizations have confidence at the end of the process that their new members will be committed to the organization because they’ve actually witnessed their dedication over time, rather than gauging their intentions to be engaged from a short application and interview.

For example, anyone can become a writer for The Crimson’s opinion section as long as they successfully complete a semester-long comp process. The curriculum is rigorous, so it inevitably weeds out uncommitted writers who will not put the work into writing articles or will not show up to meetings. Yet any student with the right level of interest and commitment can become a writer if they so choose.

And if students weren’t sufficiently capable of writing articles to begin with, they learn, because the comp seeks to educate them.

Of course, some organizations have a more reasonable case for competition, whether due to capacity constraints or the need to control the quality of student work. A debate team may need a try-out process because it can only enter so many students into national competitions. A consulting organization may need to vet its students before entrusting them with paying clients.

Yet, even organizations which benefit from competition aren’t typically incapable of providing avenues for less qualified students to be members of the organization in a separate capacity. On a debate team, for example, this may look like offering a non-competing team to develop student skills or allowing initiates to shadow practices, thus preserving excellence, accessibility, and education all at once.

As the 20 percent A grade cap comes into effect next year, students will be under more stress than in recent memory, balancing an ultra-competitive extracurricular environment and increasingly difficult classes. Transitioning to a completion-based comp model, while still rigorous and time-consuming, would make the extracurricular scene less stressful for all.

Our classes treat us as individuals possessing the capacity to grow and learn. Clubs shouldn’t be any different.

Scarlett E. Eldaief ’28, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Winthrop House.