How hard is it to get admitted to Georgia Tech as an asian male in-state when applying early action?
The campus is overwhelmingly white and Asian. It’s baffling to me the number of posts by people who claim that white and/or Asian people are somehow at a disadvantage in the application process.
How do your grades and coursework compare to others from your school? Do you have compelling extracurricular activities, or is your involvement a checklist of things you think college admissions offices want to see? Are you writing an original essay, or one that hundreds of other applicants are writing similarly?
These are the questions you should be asking because these are things you can control. You have zero control over being born purple, blue, or orange.
This year approximately half of the in-state applicants for EA were offered admission. It depends, as the above poster says, on your stats, your essays, etc. But assuming you meet the typical profile grade- and test-wise, your chances are about 50%.
Well I’m an Asian male in-state and was rejected. Basically if you don’t have a perfect 4.0 and your test scores are in their mid-range, you’ll get rejected. It doesn’t matter if you only had one B in high school. If it’s not a 4.0 you’re rejected. It doesn’t matter if you took 11+ AP classes. If it’s not a 4.0 unweighted gpa, you’re rejected. if you’re Asian, you need a 4.0 and your test scores have to be above GT’s average. This is coming from my personal experience and my asian friends’. My Asian male friend who had a 2100+ SAT, 3.9uw gpa, 10+APs, state championship title for tennis, and a lot of school involved dance actvities got rejected from tech. He and I applied for neither engineering nor comp sci. I cried when all my white friends and Asian girls got in with sub4.0s and GT’s 25th percentile test scores.
My son is Asian and out of state AND does not have a 4.0 GPA. He was accepted to mechanical engineering. I do hear stories concerning this from friends that are living in Georgia and always thought it is a myth.
what were his extracurriculars and SAT/ACT scores? @johnqian
Okay, one more time for the kids in the back: Holistic review. It is astonishing to me how many supposedly top students simply cannot grasp that “oh you have to be perfect” or “only perfect Asians get in” are the bitter words of rejected applicants. Getting rejected sucks, full stop. There’s no way around that disappointment. But I doubt it’s due to ethnicity or a single B. Tech does holistic review and plenty of great candidates are rejected because they can’t take everyone; likewise, plenty of real human students (even those who sometimes got Bs) wrote compelling essays, had outstanding recommendations, filled a particular need for the incoming class, or simply got lucky.
If you’re a strong enough student to be competitive for Tech admission, you should know that “all my friends” is not a valid sample size for statistically significant conclusion. So with the disclaimer that this is also not statistically significant, I will tell you that there were 5 kids from my kids’ high school (in-state) accepted to Tech this year. 4 of the kids accepted were Asian, and 3 of them were male. I personally know of at least 6 more who applied (and those are just the ones I know) who were white and didn’t get in. Doesn’t jive with your conclusions.
(I’m not trying to be a jerk. I just hate seeing y’all torture yourselves. You can be awesome and get rejected and the reality is that you will never know why. Insisting it’s this or that discrimination only makes you miserable. Go to a school that wants you and remember that living well is the best revenge.)
1560 sat 35 act , he was First Robotics.
@yankeeinGA but the thing is you’ll rarely find White or Asian female in-state students getting rejected with the stats those Asian male in-state students who get rejected have. I mean tech’s in-state acceptance rate for EA was 49% this year, which is very high if you think about it, and look at how many smart in-state Asian males got rejected…
Again, your conclusion is faulty – maybe you haven’t heard of white or Asian females being rejected with similar stats, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Stats are not the whole story and believing you were rejected for your ethnicity/gender is just 1) making you angry and 2) preventing you from doing the kind of honest self-inventory that could help you move forward and improve yourself.
I urge you to stop trying to pinpoint the reason for this rejection. It’s moot at this point; move on. Where have you decided to attend college? This should be an exciting time where you start looking forward to your new life. Embrace it and you’ll do fine.
@yankeeinGA , there are many articles written where Asian are simply rejected because the Asian quota has been met by some of these top schools. Race does place an important factor in the holistic review. One cannot denied that. For any colleges/universities one can Google Common Data Set and see how many kids are Asian, African American, etc…
Here is Harvard:
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
About 49% in Harvard is mixture of Asian, African American, Latino, and other minorities. 51% is white.
The chart : The Top 100 Universities Ranked by Diversity
http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/most-diverse-colleges/
I think it is okay to understand why a kid is rejected. Only this way we can begin to address any issue with college admission. Only through mutual understanding and improvement, where African Americans are allowed to be in the same bus as white. Lately most colleges are trying to admit more females. This comes about because of discussion of equality. The absent of discussion is where we failed to improve. I urge all of to reflect who we are and how we can integrate more to this country.
@johnqian for sure there is some edge to URMs, where Asians tend to be ORMs at top schools. I’m not disputing that. And at a school like Tech, it’s true that women, for example, can have somewhat lower objective stats than their male counterparts, as they’re considered URMs. But I’ve not seen anything to suggest that white males get an edge over Asian males, which is part of what the poster in question here was asserting.
I also think that schools where holistic review is so important (I mean, most schools say that’s what they value, but in some cases, not so much) it’s impossible to know for sure why you were accepted or rejected. Here on CC I regularly see students self-rate their essays as a 9 or 10 out of 10 when their posts here are rife with spelling and syntax errors (suggesting that self-assessment of writing ability is… inaccurate, at best).
Personally, I made sure to sit down and talk with my kid during application season about how highly competitive schools are a crapshoot for everyone once you meet the basic metrics. We discussed how it accomplishes absolutely nothing to try to dissect rejections if/when they come. You do your best and then you move on, IMHO.