Differences in Ivy League Admissions?

Applying to College
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<p>Hey guys, </p>

<p>One of the things I've been trying to find out recently are the differences betweens admissions criteria at the various Ivy League Schools. Yes, obviously you need a strong academic record and test scores to get into all of those schools, but I know there must be some difference between them. </p>

<p>For example, which schools look more at extracurricular involvement? I would think that Yale, perhaps due to its residential college system would do so. </p>

<p>Thoughts?</p>

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<p>Rank in Class is important to UPenn.
Race and Ethnicity are important to Columbia.</p>

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<p>Extracurriculars are important to Harvard. I have heard that from more than one admissions rep.</p>

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<p>^ I agree. Academic is the big thing for yale, more than others.</p>

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<p>Class rank for Dartmouth.
SATs for Princeton.
ECs for Brown.</p>

<p>Just to clarify on a point: obviously they all care about the same things greatly. The above are just slight variances that I’ve noticed.</p>

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<p>SAT’s for Princeton really?</p>

<p>I knew they didnt care super much about GPA because they ignore freshmen grades but thats just a plus especially for people who are great test takers.</p>

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<p>^
<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/admission/images/stats/applied2013.gif[/url]”>http://www.princeton.edu/admission/images/stats/applied2013.gif&lt;/a&gt;
Compared to policies at other elite institutions, I’d say so.
Remember that when it comes to school at the Princeton level you pretty much want to have the whole package.</p>

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<p>10charbump</p>

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<p>A guy i know (who’s an international like me) got into cornell.
His grades were not the best. class rank not so good. SAT’s 1840 (I), 2400 (II, three subj)
EC’s great i guess (from what i heard, he was in our junio national team for cricket, and had done some prestigious projects).
From this i infer cornell looks for EC’s</p>

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<p>Are we counting JUST the Ivy League or also the Ivy Like? If so, Stanford appears far more subjective/holistic than the other schools. Despite being just as selective - with just as any high scoring students applying - their average SAT scores are much lower. This is true even for unhooked and anti-hooked applicants. Numbers seem far less important. See the REA slaughter for more. I, for example, was a low-income/URM/first generation - as were others on the thread - but there were plenty of ORMs and Asians with lower scores than us. Awesome!</p>

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<p>I definitely agree about Stanford. Actually, not only are their scores lower; the percentage of kids taken from the top 10% of their class is much lower too.</p>

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<p>Applicannot: “but there were plenty of ORMs and Asians with lower scores than us. Awesome!”</p>

<p>What is so awesome about it?</p>

<p>Some ORMs/Asians with ‘average’ scores got in but there are so MANY asians/ORMs with near perfect scores didn’t get in!!</p>

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<p>It’s awesome because it proves that the admissions process is holistic, and not all about a score foot race.</p>

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<p>I’ve always been a bit weary about schools that keep preaching the holistic admission process. That’s not to say a holistic process isn’t valuable; it just seems that schools are overemphasizing it and it’s turning ECs into something ugly. At least when grades and test scores were overwhelming determinant for elite school admissions a few decades ago, cut-throat attitudes and competitiveness existed only in the realm of the classroom. Outside of the classroom one could participate in an activity without consciously being disingenuous or, perhaps even worse, being afraid of being judged as disingenuous. </p>

<p>Today, the desire to get into top schools is just as strong as ever, and with much greater emphasis being placed on ECs, these ECs have become hyper-competitive where the worst has happened: there is a dearth of passion, and where passion does exist people are hesitant to express it because they don’t want to fit the former profile; judging passion is all but a guessing game with several but not too many exceptions. If you take on the piano because you have a passion for it, you just might look bad because of all of the pianists out there who are doing it for the sake of saying that they did it. It even seems like if you play a varsity sport but aren’t recruited (few are) you could be judged negatively because of all the “filler” athletes out there who couldn’t care for the sport itself. And so the attitude now is that in order to show passion you have to take on some sort of esoteric EC; well, how many people truly have a passion for that? </p>

<p>College adcoms like to preach their ability to distinguish passion, whether it be through essays, interview, etc, and I am skeptical to say the least. Obviously, it is easier to do with concrete and prestigious accolades, but how many 17 year-olds have those? Writing is not exactly a fool-proof method of doing so and interviews, while a lot more effective, still can be mastered (and aren’t even required for many schools). And perhaps the root of my skepticism: something like 25-30 kids were accepted this year ED at one particular Ivy. And let me tell you that while they were all serious about school work and most of them were pretty bright, I doubt the majority of them had a genuine passion about anything but were successful in feigning one. So when a school like Stanford sways even more towards the EC direction, I am a bit reluctant to seriously consider it (Only a bit!).</p>

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<p>monstor344, You have made some awesome points. However, that’s not the fault of top school admissions teams - that’s the fault of over-competitive students and helicopter parents. Anything top colleges do, no matter how good or bad, is going to echo among top college applicants. Colleges can’t really prevent that. If admissions were more statistically based, students would be fighting tooth and nail for high grades and SAT scores, even to the point of neglecting ECs all together.</p>

<p>However, I don’t think Stanford is solely focusing on ECs. They play a part, but honestly I think ECs are stupid (I volunteer, but honestly - and personally, of course - I can’t find any greater waste of time than “student government” or “glee club” or whatever’s popular these days). I think there’s a lot more to it. Stanford is really making headway in advocating for low-income or first generation students. Yes, there’s the unfortunate race factor. But Stanford is 17% low-income and 24% first generation (those numbers are according to their low-income student advocate, however I found different numbers in the guidebook). For an Ivy Like school, that’s pretty notable. They are also particularly lax in terms of scores… their bottom 25% is in the 600s, whereas the 50% spread for HYP is 700-800. Plenty of kids who got accepted REA weren’t just presidents of everything; they were novel writers and the like.</p>

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<p>This study is a few years old now, but here is what you are asking for:</p>

<p>[The</a> New York Times > Education > Image > Admissions Sine Qua Non](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/01/08/education/edlife/data.1.graphic.html]The”>The New York Times > Education > Image > Admissions Sine Qua Non)</p>

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<p>Low income, first generation, URM ……</p>

<p>So, it seems that holistic admission process at a top college is designed to work against middle class, college educated white/Asian families.</p>

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<p>It might seem that way, but if you look at the actual results you won’t find any shortage of middle class, college educated whites and Asians enrolled in the top colleges. Kids coming from that background generally do very well in college admissions.</p>

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<p>Ryan537, I have to agree with coureur. Low-income at Stanford is $60,000 or less. The median income in this country is just over $56,000. Only 17% of Stanford students come from families that make $60,000 or less - 83% come from families making more than $60,000 per year (higher than middle income to be technical). 49% of Students at Stanford receive financial aid; financial aid easily covers families up to $100,000. That means 51% of students come from families with at least six figure incomes. Since financial aid almost always goes up to $150,000, really, half of the students there are from families making more than triple the country’s median income.</p>

<p>Stanford is 24% first generation. 76% of all students at Stanford have college educated parents. How is that figure working against college-educated families? Stanford is 22.92% Asian. The population is a little over 4% Asian. How is that working against Asian families? Stanford is a mere 38% white. I could see your argument there. But considering that “technically” both Hispanics and African Americans are underrepresented (at levels of -2.7% and -3.89% respectively), URMs are NOT working against white students. So what’s your point?</p>

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<p>A high percentage of a certain group of people merely means they are well-represented; that does not mean that they are advantaged in the elite college admissions process. Hypothetically (and it’s extreme to make a point), let’s say that there are 30,000 kids with 2100+ on their SATs and 90% of them have blue eyes. Let’s say those with blue eyes compose 10% of the national population, and make up 20% of the population at some elite college. Would you still say those with blue eyes are not disadvantaged? Of course, the college admissions process is not so cut and dry but you get the point. Conversely, America is 14% African-American and Harvard is 8% African-American. You cannot claim solely from this data that African-American applicants are disadvantaged because of their ethnicity when it comes to elite school admissions.</p>

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One of the purposes of affirmative action of any sort is to help those who are disadvantaged, so while you can argue that the system does the middle class and college-educated families no favor, their favor is a generally stable upbringing and decent K-12 education. Now when you get into race everything becomes questionable but that is another thread ;).</p>