From what I’ve seen while searching for colleges is that at the top ones, admissions are really random. I see people with literally perfect stats being rejected from second tier schools while others with subpar stats and EC’s getting in. Why are admissions so random? Or is there something I don’t know?
Whenever you get to a school with >20% admission or so, the school gets so, so many more times the amount of totally qualified students than it can accept each year. It was, I believe, a Yale adcom who famously said that he could toss out every single acceptance in a given year and accept a completely different group of kids, and they’d be just as qualified. I think he said he could do this 5 times over.
That being said, there are some things you just can’t tell from Naviance. The students who were accepted to a top-notch school with an ACT of 29 might well have been development cases (parents donated big bucks) or athletic recruits. A school might have graduated its star clarinet player and need a new one for jazz ensemble. It might be the child of a famous person. Etc etc. All you can do, is control what is in your control. The rest…I don’t know, pray that an adcom takes a liking to your application and goes to the mat for you. Because yup, there is some dart-at-dartboard stuff going on.
This question is asked in some form or another nearly every day. It is not random. A college builds a class. There are a certain number of athletes and other hooked kids. They want diversity, so a lot of white and Asian kids will simply never be strongly considered. They want the best international applicants. They want kids with a unique talent. They want first generation kids, they want/need some generous donors’ kids, kids from every state, and on and on. By the time they fill their class with a few extra to spare, there is no room left for the majority of the 52,000 Vals and Sals with perfect stats. All those people they want do not have perfect grades and tests scores, because that is not interesting.
Have a look at these very telling bar graphs. Not surprisingly, the most selective schools are also the most diverse. Of course, admissions are not just about diversity, but there is a strong correlation. It is not random.
http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/most-diverse-colleges/
There is a part that is not random at all. If you do not have the appropriate grades, scores, and/or hooks, you will not get in by random luck. But once the clear deny and clear admit portions of the pool are pulled aside, there are many times more applications left than spaces in the class.
The rejections at this stage feel almost random, because they are hard to predict from the outside by who can’t see the pool or listen to the admissions discussions. Saying you were rejected “randomly” (or because of another factor beyond your control like skin color) is also an ego defense mechanism, because being rejected hurts.
If it is random, then they don’t need an adcom. It is because most of the top schools are using holistic review process that strong score and GPA does not guarantee admission. For lower tier schools rejecting higher stat applicants, it could be partly due to Tufts syndrome.
It isn’t random. Shoot for being interested and interesting, while keeping your stats high enough to be considered. And work hard to build a list that also includes matches & safeties that are affordable for you and that you’d be happy to attend.
It is not random, but it is opaque enough to appear random from the outside.
Definitely not random. They have hidden “quotas” in the name of diversity. Yes, they need athletes; yes, they can’t have 50% of the class filled with Asians doing Pre-med, and yes, they admit people with vastly different “academic status” based on ethnicity. These are hard truths, any shadings of those are just pure bunk. Holistic is a term they can defend in the courts because nobody is the same in that framework, and schools have a full range of arguments why X is in, and Y is not. I have parents told me - so the game has the kids to do this and do that starting from the 6-7th grade, work the arse off for six yrs, and then they chged the rules (this EC is not special enough, we have too many kids doing the same ECs, study for ACT 36 is not enough, 16 AP classes not enough… too many Chinese/Indian kids won the Intel-like awards… too many STEM applicants… blah blah blah) and yet the game is shifted towards favoring URM, First Gen or low income - NONE of which is controlled by the kids themselves. Do these kids wish they were born poor, with a different race, and different background instead of six yrs of non-stop work and only get disappointed at the final race? I sure don’t know. JMHO
College admission in the US is not a meritocracy. The randomness is really veiled racism.
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Maybe you’re not seeing the whole picture. Kids with high GPAs and board scores with lukewarm recs (can happen to grade-grubbing kids) may be set aside. And what is a “subpar EC?” That expensive trip to Guatamala to build a school or volunteering at a soup kitchen may not impress the committee; being really into something offbeat like Morse code or having a part time job at a pet store might get their attention that the student is an interesting person.
It is not random from adcom’s perspective, but very so from applicants’ perspective.
According to MIT’s admission blog, they could form three perfect classes out of their applicant pool. If you take that at face value, even someone well qualified(by MIT’s holistic admission standards) still might only have a 1/3 shot at admissions. There’s a lottery component to admissions. As mentioned above, there’s hooks(URM, first gen, legacy, development, recruited athlete, famous/powerful parents), which all could allow someone with lower stats to be admitted.
Although most of the above posts make good points, I am also going to put in a word for the AdComms: they do actually know something about their university, and there is something to the alchemy that they are working in building not just a specific class, but a campus culture. Think of the different ‘personalities’ that many of the top-tier colleges & universities have (easy ones: Dartmouth v Cornell; Oberlin v Washington & Lee, Brown v Columbia, Harvard v Yale, Vanderbilt v JHU, UVa v W&M). The differences reflect more than just the facts of their geography or student size, and they persist in no small part b/c of the AdComms.
I know (& have known) a lot of tippy-top students who didn’t get into their ‘dream school’- but got into other super selective colleges, and in almost every case I think the AdComms (at both places) made the right call.
tl;dr: what @hzhao2004 said!
Frank Bruni, in his book, “Where You Go is Not Who You’ll Be,” cites another book, “The Price of Admission,” where its author Golden “estimates that at elite schools, minorities make up 10 to 15 percent of students; recruited athletes,10 to 25 percent; legacies,10 to 25 percent; children of people who are likely to become generous donors, 2 to 5 percent; children of celebrities and politicians 1 to 2 percent; and children of faculty,1 to 3 percent. If you take the middle figure in each of those ranges, you’re looking at as many as 55 percent of students who were probably given special consideration at admissions.” Bruni goes on to say that “Fifty-five percent, though, could also be a conservative guess. I’m using the middles of Golden’s ranges, not the tops, and his breakdown doesn’t take into account applicants who aren’t legacies and aren’t faculty children but are connected in some other way or have used their and their families’ social networks to pave an inside track.”
And I believe these figures are of those students enrolled, not of those offered admission. The rest of unhooked student body then gets selected, as others have already mentioned, to build a specific class based on the institutional needs. For unhooked students, simply slice any elite school’s all-time record-setting selectivity rate roughly (and conservatively) by half, and there’s your chance. So, is college admission random? NO.
This apparent randomness is a US thing. It is not that way in the rest of the world.
For us, given this apparent randomness, and coming mostly from a “not preferred” ethnic group with unimpressive athletic ability, our safeties needed to be either our local state flagship (where straight A’s and in-state status does get you in), or in Canada (where straight A’s and high SAT scores does get you in).
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“By the time they fill their class with a few extra to spare, there is no room left for the majority of the 52,000 Vals and Sals with perfect stats. All those people they want do not have perfect grades and tests scores, because that is not interesting.”
That may have been the case a few years ago, but now sals and vals are smart enough to know they need to be more interesting, participate in meaningful activities and take on leadership roles. The stereotype that they’re just going to the library to study should probably go away. Colleges prefer diversity no doubt, but they would really prefer a diverse class with flawless transcripts and excellent scores.