I am aspiring to apply for top-tier schools, mainly MIT and Stanford. I am just wondering if 10-20 qualified students from one high school decide for a particular school and their applicaitions put them near the top of the aplicant pool, would colleges only consider the top 3 to be admitted, or will they take into account that other applicants from the same school are just as qualified as the other applicants.
Frequently asked question. The answer is NO. If MIT/Stanford et. al finds all of you to be not up to snuff, no one will be admitted. THey have no quota to fulfill nor a set aside amount to assuage people at your HS. They admit whom they want, when they want.
I understand. I guess I wasn’t too clear. I was wondering if there is a limit on how many people they can admit from a particular school.
To what purpose? Why would a school limit itself? The only reason would be b/c they plan to set aside slots for other schools. To what purpose? To please whom? No one.
They admit whom they want at whatever number pleases them. Zero for ten years or ten in one year – whatever they choose to do.
I have developed a standard response to this FAQ:
There is no cap per school. They’ll evaluate you in terms of what they’re looking for in their incoming class. You’ll get compared in the context of your school, yes, but they won’t sit down with the files from your high school and say we can only accept 4 of these, who do we accept.
My graduating class of 455 students had 46 students accepted to Cornell (highly competitive STEM magnet high school). We also had 18 accepted to Duke, 16 to MIT, 12 to Brown, 11 to Princeton, 10 to Penn, and 10 to Stanford, to name a few schools (I only know schools with 10 or more acceptances because of the school profile; I didn’t apply to any of these schools). This is a similar pattern every year.
If that doesn’t disprove the myth that top schools won’t take multiple students from the same high school, I don’t know what does.