Average Princeton applicant

Colleges and Universities A-Z Princeton University
1

Dear all,

This is a question related to all Ivies, but since Princeton is the most competitive Ivy that I am interested in, I thought I’d post this here.

Getting into schools like Princeton is very competitive, but I sometimes wonder if the difficulty is overstated.

For example, the 5.1% acceptance rate seems to imply that getting into Princeton is 3 times more difficult than getting into PPE at Oxford - which it clearly is not. Since in the UK, you can only apply to one of Oxford and Cambridge (most top students would likely apply to both if they were able), and since about 85% of people who apply to Oxford or Cambridge have 10/11A+ at GCSE and 3A+ at A level (roughly same as perfect GPA and 8-10 5s in APs), and since the schools don’t have large marketing campaigns as US schools do, is it possible that a considerable portion of the applicant pool who has no real chance of getting in (ie. 27s in ACT, B’s in classes, no meaningful ECs)? Likewise is it possible that people apply to more than two or three Ivies thus driving down admit rates at all schools?

It makes intuitive sense that one of Oxford’s most competitive courses and Princeton would attract similarly intelligent students and should be equally difficult to get in. So I’m trying to make sense of what drives Princeton, and Ivies in general, admit rates down. My theories have been lower average quality applicants and people applying to lots of Ivies (as opposed to one or two).

Is the acceptance rate in RD for talented and able students roughly that of SCEA (which mainly talented students apply though)? This would make sense as Princeton’s SCEA rate was 18.5%, roughly in line (slightly higher, although expectedly so given recruited athletes and VIP students) with the acceptance rate of (the benchmark) Oxford PPE.

I guess my general question is, what constitutes an “average” Princeton applicant and what proportion of the pool is unrealistic candidates who apply simply for the sake of applying (without being remotely competitive)?

Thanks!

2

You simply can’t compare Oxford’s admissions with that of the Ivy Leagues schools in the U.S. The Ivy Leagues and other top colleges in the U.S. have adopted “holistic” admissions policies where students with excellent academic credentials alone get routinely rejected while students with less than stellar academic credentials do get admitted because of certain set of non-academic qualities about them or “hooks,” such as URM, recruited athletes, development cases, legacies, etc. etc. What you call “average” is strictly from the point of academic stats and therefore one-dimensional. These average applicants could have other talents and personal qualities that add to the campus life in ways that their test scores alone can’t. Should the top schools in the U.S. want to, they can fill the entire class with students with perfect academic credentials. But these schools see “merit” in multi-dimensional way.

I don’t believe that anyone with “27s in ACT, B’s in classes, no meaningful ECs” mindlessly apply to these top schools as if the admissions chances are a lottery. It doesn’t work that way.