If the top (like 20,000) students in the us are all applying to the same top schools (harvard, stanford) wouldn’t all of the colleges just be accepting the exact same kids? then there would be a ton of spaces left afterwards.
Kids i knew who got into MIT were also taking a spot at Bekeley and Stanford that another student couldnt get right?
Your math may be a little off.
Assuming you’re talking T20 ranked universities, there are approximately a combined 20K (I’ll increase this randomly chosen number to 30K) enrolled freshmen each year. Simply dividing the undergraduate enrollment by 4 for a rough estimate of freshmen.
MIT: 1150
CalTech: 250
Columbia 1550
Yale: 1625
Stanford: 1911
I could go on, but you get the point.
Even if your assumption is true that the same 20K-30K students are applying to the same T20 universities, those students are enough to fill the incoming classes at all 20 schools, with likely some spillover carrying to other schools.
Yes, all those schools will admit random students who do not have superstar sky high stats. No, it’s not a good idea to assume one of those rare spots will go to any specific hopeful non-superstar stats student.
Apply and shoot your shot at any school you choose. Just be certain to have more reasonable options on your list as well.
Good luck!
EDIT: BTW, don’t assume that the few public universities on the T20 list with large enrollments (Berkley at 32K) will skew the averages. Berkley has only 16% OOS students, so most OOS applicants might have a more difficult time there than another school with a comparable admit rate.
Do all top colleges accept the same students?
Short answer…NO. Plenty of students who students who apply to multiple top colleges and get accepted to some and not others.
Maybe a significant proportion of tippy top kids are all applying to the same schools, but they are not ALL getting into all of them. There are not enough seats at the top universities for every valedictorian, salutatorian, recruited athlete, and all the other kids who are NOT any of those.
It’s probably true that MANY of the same kids are applying to a lot of top colleges. If you looked only at the YouTube videos of kids who all apply to just the top 20 colleges with maybe one safety thrown in, it certainly could appear that way.
It’s also true too that a lot of students will take a shot at one or two very high reaches. That’s why these colleges (Harvard, for example) receive 43,000 applications.
It’s also true that MANY stellar students won’t apply to tippy top colleges because there will be no way of affording them. Any Stamps Scholar at, say, the University of Oregon or U of South Carolina is at least as accomplished and talented as any successful applicant at Stanford. There are lots of top students who vie for other top scholarships at all kinds of colleges, which could range from U New Mexico to Kenyon College, or even a local commuter college. Not every top student wants to go to HYPSM.
There will be plenty of applicants to tippy top colleges who don’t post on Reddit, or YouTube, or CC. There will be kids who get in who have “unglamorous” resumes, or who spent their childhoods caring for elders or working in the family store. There will also be recruited athletes who are academically talented and will take many seats at top colleges.
There’s no one group of students who takes all the spots at the most selective colleges.
Although there may be some who are so attractive to all of those colleges to get many admissions if they apply to that many, many top end applicants are only attractive enough to one of those colleges to be admitted. So they may get zero (if the college that would want them is not on their application list) or one admission. Still others are not attractive enough to any of those colleges to be admitted.
At the moment I can only think of one student from our high school who applied to multiple top schools and got into all of them. Even then, she didn’t apply to “all” of them because some just weren’t good fits for her. We don’t have anyone who applies to schools merely due to the name (maybe an exception here for Penn State) or ranking. Kids thoughtfully look at colleges based upon their needs and wants.
Most only apply to a few, if any. Most students who apply to more don’t get into them all.
But I work at an average public high school. Private/prep schools may differ.
What you are paying for at a private/prep school (among other things) is a college counselor whose job it is to reduce “bunching”, i.e. having all the kids apply to all the same schools. This applies whether you’re talking Harvard/Princeton, or Georgetown/Notre Dame, or Providence/Stonehill, or Michigan/UVA.
They will spread the kids out- that’s their job. So the phenomenon of having ALL the top kids apply to ALL the highly rejective colleges- doesn’t happen. They get paid to have MOST of their students feel like they’ve ended up at their top choice (maybe not their first choice, but a top choice). And that can only happen if you prevent 30 similar looking kids from applying to Dartmouth.
kid around the corner from us was admitted to H Y P D C and other top schools . . . so it does happen. (smart URM athlete). . . that’s one of the few references i can offer!
In my rather limited experience I have seen this go both ways. Sometimes a student will be accepted to one top ranked university (eg, Stanford) when they are rejected by another top ranked university (eg, Cornell). Other times a student will get accepted to multiple highly ranked universities, or multiple highly ranked programs in some specialty. One daughter when applying to DVM programs was put on the wait list for a “top 10” program with a known spot. The spot looked low to me, but they told her she would probably get in off the wait list, and she did. This suggests that quite a few of the students above her on the wait list had also gotten accepted to other very good programs.
If you look at a strong student applying to a top ranked university in the US, whether they will get admitted or not can be difficult to predict. Even if the top schools have very similar criteria, apparently the criteria are not quite identical.
Outside the US things may be different. I was aware, years ago, of strong students in Canada who only applied to McGill and no where else, because it was their top choice and they knew they would get in. The same can be said for UBC related to my relatives from the Vancouver area.
We have seen exactly this also. In the cases that I was aware of, the student found a very good university that was affordable and was a good fit, even if it wasn’t a famous school.
This is where the prep schools with well connected college counselors have an advantage. They will be better able to tell the student which of the most selective colleges are more likely to see a particular student as a “fit” from the college’s point of view and encourage the student to apply to those, versus those which are less likely to see the student as a “fit”. Note that whether the college sees the student as a “fit” is not necessarily the same as whether the student sees the college as a “fit”.
Yes! To go back to my Dartmouth example, every prep school kid who likes to ski thinks Dartmouth is a fit. The adcom’s are tired of reading “Why Dartmouth” essays that read like an Travelocity review of NH’s ski resorts.
An experienced (I don’t think being well connected has much to do with it- it’s the experience/judgement) college counselor can redirect the kind of kid that Dartmouth likes to admit to a more distinctive essay topic.
I push back on well connected because I see that the private school counselors can help kids even when the college in question is WAY out of the school’s experience. Kids targeting Julliard and Curtis- from a private school that has never sent a kid to a conservatory. Kids targeting RISD when nobody ever applies to a fine arts institution. Kid targeting MIT and CMU when usually the “mathy” kids end up at Lehigh or Bucknell. I don’t believe that counselors can make “connections” in September of a kid’s senior year. But their judgement-- that’s the key.
I don’t know who the top (like 20K students are) and I doubt the colleges know either. So I don’t think it can be answered - but one can surmise by the kids who get into Harvard and rejected by Cornell or into Yale and rejected by UNC - and the list goes on and on - No.
Don’t think so… may be a few kids, but the yield rates for most of these schools is 75-85%… not only are few getting accepted to many… few are getting accepted to more than one of them.
Agree. I think we “notice” the news about a kid getting in to “all the Ivies”, but in reality many high performing kids apply to reaches ED or REA. If they get in, they are done, certainly in the case of ED, or they might apply to another school(s) that offers merit. A few of course like to collect “trophies” of multiple acceptances, but I suspect that is rare.
Looking at data here (What Are the Ivy League Schools' Acceptance Rates for 2022?) for the top 5 yield % schools (HPYSM… ignoring Chi, as something is wrong with the data there), 8346 of 10031 accepted enrolled. Thus, the maximum number of students accepted to more than 1 of these 5 schools is 1685… the max number accepted into 3 schools is 842 (or ~10% of those accepted). Realistically, kids don’t apply to the same set of schools… those that are accepted ED withdraw other apps, etc. Additionally, the holistic review process, grade inflation, easier SAT w/o subject tests, absurd number of applications overall… lead to a fair amount of stochasticity in the admissions process. I’m guessing (at least for these 5 schools) there are maybe a few hundred kids that get accepted to more than one without being an UR applicant. The kid that overcame many challenges, has a great story, has great stats and achieved amazing things in backwoods Montana? Yeah, that kid will get accepted to a few… the reason they are accepted to a few is precisely BECAUSE they are rare… they stick out to AOs. If you do not stick out from the thousands and thousands of other highly qualified applicants, you are subject to the randomness and unlikely to get into more than one.