Chances for an Anthropology & Physics Double Major at Ivies?

Chance Me / Match Me!
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Hi! I’ve been lurking on here for a bit and finally decided to create an account. This isn’t exactly a Chance Me, but I was wondering if this crowd could help me nonetheless.

I understand that anthropology and physics are pretty different fields, but I’ve done a lot of niche interdisciplinary research- one of my papers is pending publication right now- and internships at the two major museums in NYC. I’m in the top 5% of my class, and I’ve taken all 3 years’ worth of the AP Physics courses and every humanities AP (all 4s and 5s). My SAT score is 1540, which is pretty low for Ivies from what I’ve seen.

What I’m asking is if you think I have any shot at top schools like HYBP- they have excellent programs and I want to challenge myself. Should I even bother? I know the information I offered is pretty vague, but still. Please let me know!

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You definitely have a shot.
But they are reaches for everyone, as you probably already know.

As long as you have schools that you’re definitely going to get in at and will be happy attending, and a few more “likely/probably will get in” schools, then no harm in shooting your shot at these.

But make sure they’re affordable! If they’re not then that’s the only reason for which I’d say don’t bother applying.

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I agree with @DadOfJerseyGirl. Make sure your family runs the Net Price Calculator at each school on your list that you’re considering. If the school only offers need-based aid (the Ivies), then if the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) is not affordable, then it should be removed from your list.

Also, make sure that you have at least one (and preferably more than one) school that you would be happy to attend, that your family can afford, and that you are extremely likely to be admitted to. If you need any assistance in creating a balanced college list, let us know. But yes, you certainly have a shot at the most selective/rejective universities in the U.S. Just realize that the vast majority of qualified candidates do not receive an offer of admission.

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I think you sound like a great candidate. Don’t worry about scores: you meet a benchmark and after that it is probably more about the interesting things you are doing outside of school.

Check out “little Ivies” as well, and Colleges that Change Lives. You can google both.

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Others gave you good general advice, so I was give you a really specific comment.

I think people have to be careful about what counts as a “good” test score in a test optional world.

I’ll just use Princeton as an example.

The enrolled class described in their 2020-21 Common Data Set (with 71% submitting an SAT score, and 45% submitting an ACT score), had a 25th percentile of 1460, and 75th percentile of 1560. These are enrolled students, so prima facie all these people succeeded. The complication is hooked applicants are evaluated differently. And also when people are required to submit scores, people can get admitted despite not-so-good scores. Still, in such a pool, 1540 was closer to 75th than 25th, and so I am confident that was a helpful score in that class.

Their next Common Data Set, it was down to 56% submitting SAT, 35% ACT (so we are now in test optional world, although apparently most of these kids submitted). 25th moved up to 1470, 75th stayed 1560. Not too much of a difference, but it is consistent with a small percentage of eventual enrollees with lower scores not submitting, either because they couldn’t or because they thought it would not have been helpful.

OK, then the latest Common Data Set: 60% SAT, 25% ACT, even more opting out. 25th percentile jumps to 1510, 75th percentile goes up slightly to 1570, and now they report 1540 as 50th.

Oh no, it is getting harder to get a good score for Princeton, right?

For the most part, probably not. Because if more people with lower scores opt out, the 25th mark will naturally move up, potentially quite a bit. The 75th might creep up a little (although one would expect less than the 25th), and then the 50th might move up in between. Which is consistent with what is happening at Princeton.

But you are also removing from the pool people who before had to report scores, but got in despite lower scores. Meaning a deeper percentage of the people who reported scores and enrolled actually had helpful scores, not unhelpful scores they managed to outweigh.

Hopefully that logic is clear. The bottom line to me is if you are around the 50th mark for enrolled students who chose to submit a test score in a test optional world, that is almost surely a helpful test score. Probably a good bit below the 50th too. I think only down close to the 25th, say, might you be running into a lot of people in the remaining pool of concern, namely hooked admits for whom that was a helpful score when it wouldn’t be so helpful for unhooked admits.

So that’s my two cents. Your 1540 very likely remains a helpful score at these sorts of colleges. And you need a million other things too. But I think you should at least feel like this is at least one helpful factor.

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The way I see it: if you don’t get into an Ivy, it won’t be because of that 1540 score.

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If you don’t get accepted to an Ivy…or anywhere else for that matter…you will never know why.

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To expand your options, you also may want to consider colleges with curricula especially suited to a student with interests across academic divisions, such as Grinnell, Amherst, Smith and Hamilton (as well as Brown).

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Unless one is a hooked applicant (recruited athlete, legacy although this may go, donor child, or underrepresented minority although who knows what will happen with that after recent court decision), one really must have something special that the college is looking for. Your grades and scores and AP rigor are good enough, but there are thousands of applicants with similarly good grades and scores. Is there anything else you are really good at, that sets you above the other applicants? That is what you need to get into the highly selective schools.

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thank you!! im narrowing down a list of about 20 schools- mostly targets and top 30s that I’ll for sure be applying to as well :]

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I have a few “spikes” (i think they’re called that?) in visual/performing arts as well as business and sports.
I have a state title in figure skating, I do a lot of fashion design and have a webcomic online, and I run a popular Depop shop (about 10k followers). I’ve also starred in a lot of regional shows and won some small awards for directing them.
I don’t think that’s really anything as important compared to other fellow applicants, but will that help? I haven’t done anything life-changing like all the other admits, so I’m sort of worried that it’s a futile attempt.

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My next two cents (I think I am at four now) is the data that came out of the Harvard admissions lawsuit showed that a lot of their admits were actually just normally outstanding high school students.

The puzzle has long been how schools like Harvard select which fraction of such applicants to admit, and it turns out that was not usually on the basis of the applicant having more/better academic qualifications, awards, or so on than the other outstanding applicants. A few got admitted that way, but not many–something like around 10% of unhooked admits.

So how did the other 90% or so of normally outstanding admits get selected? By having a very good personal score, rather than a merely generally positive personal score.

OK, so good news and bad news. Good news, you don’t need a “spike”, if that means something beyond just the sorts of things normally outstanding high school students do.

Bad news, Harvard and its peers grade your personality/fit, and that is a daunting prospect for many.

Still, it means you can feel free to take a shot. And it means the admissions officers who advise you to try to just let your true, interesting, human kid self shine through your application are not lying. They see a gazillion impressive kids. They are looking for kids who are impressive, but also who they can really imagine being valued by their fellow students. So, let them see you, and then you can see what happens.

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My kid there reports that many of their classmates seem to have extraordinary achievements/abilities in various areas, meaning big “spikes”. The personality score was shown in the lawsuit to be a fudge factor to allow Harvard to “shape” its class in a “holistic” way - in other words, to admit the applicants that it wanted to admit, for qualities that had nothing to do with achievement or “personality”, and everything to do with race.

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I am interpreting this to mean that you’re planning on using your 20 Common App slots and that you plan to apply to the Ivies (8 schools) and other schools in the top 30 (whose top 30?) and perhaps some targets, which for some people that means schools where they think they stand a 20-40% chance of being accepted.

If my interpretation is correct, I have a couple of questions for you:

  1. Do you have at least 1 school where you would be extremely likely to be accepted, that your family is willing and able to afford, and that you would be happy to attend? Ideally, you’d have more than 1 such college on your list, but you at least need one. If you just put your state flagship on there with the assumption that you won’t have to go there, that doesn’t work. There are too many students who were extremely strong candidates whose college list was all schools where their chances of admittance were well below 50% and then they end up at their “safety” school and are trying to find another place to go or are planning how soon they can transfer. Don’t let that be you. Make sure you would be happy to enroll and spend four years at whatever college(s) are extremely likely admits for you.
  1. This isn’t so much a question as a comment. Make sure that every college you apply to is one that you think would be a great fit for you. If you like the name/prestige, but don’t care for the curriculum, or that a significant percentage of the student body are into X, or that the location is Y, or the weather is too Z, I would urge you not to include the college on your list. If prestige is important for you, that’s fine, but there are lots of different schools that are “prestigious” that have different fits/vibes, and you want to find the ones that are right for you.
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So there was a battle of the experts in the Harvard lawsuit. One thing that was clear is that the personal factor was definitely not just a proxy for academics or objective measures of “achievement”. In terms of ethnicity, all ethnicities had members who got the necessary personal scores for admission, but there was a higher frequency in some ethnicities than others.

The plaintiffs’ expert argued this was evidence of ethnic bias. The defense expert argued that there were other explanatory factors that simply correlated with ethnicity. Harvard won that issue at trial, and it was not one of the issues that the Supreme Court reversed on appeal.

In any event, regardless of what one feels about that issue, it is empirically inconsistent with spike theory. Meaning if spike theory was correct, Harvard would simply have been admitting whatever students scored best on academics/achievements. And it was not.

And it was more than a “fudge factor”. Almost everyone got either a 2 (very good) or a 3 (generally positive) for this factor on Harvard’s 6-point scale. If you got 2s for academics and activities, and also got a personal 2, you were likely to be admitted. If you got 2s for academics and activities, but only got a personal 3, you were unlikely to be admitted. A few unhooked people got admitted with personal 3s and academic or activity 1s, which would be consistent with spike theory, but those cases were relatively rare compared to the 2/2/2 cases. Meaning many more people got in thanks to a personal 2 than an academic or activities “spike” that Harvard credited as truly unusual.

All this said, my intention here is not to try to relitigate whether or not what Harvard is doing in holistic review is reasonable or instead biased. My intention is just to make it clear to the OP that the actual data was inconsistent with spikes playing more than a minor role in Harvard admissions, but consistent with Harvard’s personal score–whatever that may mean–playing a major role.

Which is exactly how Harvard always said it worked. They always said these personal factors were critical, that they were used to decide which of the far too many applicants they thought were qualified actually got admitted. And that is what they were in fact doing, for good or ill.

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This is factually incorrect. You might want to read the case documents before you give the OP misleading information regarding spikes (and personbality scores), setting them down a path of trying to grab various “shiny objects” which will not lead to the results desired but rather lead to disappointment.

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