I wanted to make this thread to get some opinions and facts gathered up.
What I seen is that there are people - on different sites like Quora for example - who say that smaller colleges only want numbers and couldn’t care less about passion and then there is the other side that they that bigger colleges (UCLA, UCB, etc.) don’t care about passion because they just don’t have time to go and read through all the essays.
What are your opinions?
Facts/Sources possibly?
I’ve heard that the higher you go up in terms of rank and selectivity, the more the schools care about “passion,” because there are just so many applicants with perfect numbers. I don’t have any data to support it, but it seems logical enough. However, the big thing a while back was to show that you were extremely well-rounded; I don’t know if that still looks good to top schools as well.
To add on to the above, in some scenarios, showing passion doesn’t even matter.
If you apply ED to X university, they know that you will have to attend if you are admitted and that applies to all ED applicants, so passion doesn’t mean much–if not at all–in this case.
Some schools that generally have low yield rates are serious about their applicants showing passion. They don’t want to admit someone who will likely not attend if admitted. Tulane, Case Western, and WUSTL are notable examples.
Passion for something is extremely important. If you are passionate about a sport, musical instrument, or organization then that will help you. Colleges don’t want a well-rounded kid, although that helps, but they want a well-rounded class. They want a class filled with all different kinds of people interested and passionate about different things - music, art, sports, or certain subjects. Nowadays, everyone has similar statistics so by certain passions, that’s how colleges pick
I agree with you 100%, @nbfanforever, I could not have said it better myself.