Hey! My school recently received rankings and I came out to be 3/85. (We are a small competitive school) I really wanted to be a valedictorian and even though we have three more semesters, I don’t see any hope of my standing out as valedictorian in the applications. Should I give up and not apply to Harvard since I am not valedictorian? What should I do?
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3 out of 85 is still great.
There is no guarantee for valedictorians or anyone else to get into Harvard.
So still apply, but realize it truly is a reach school for everyone, even the valedictorians.
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Short answer, no
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In my son’s year, he has a Princeton student - and they didn’t rank but had a top 25 breakfast and she wasn’t even in the top 25 (of 600 or so).
So - that’s not why you wouldn’t get into Harvard.
In a 2017 article The Daily Beast claimed that 75% of valedictorians who apply to Harvard get turned down: College Admissions: 15 Ways to Predict Where You’ll Get In.
There are a lot of problems with some of the ‘facts’ in that article (starting with the vexed question of correlation v causation), and the stats are out of date but you can torture yourself some more with it 
tl;dr- that will not be what tips the balance between acceptance or rejection.
No, you don’t have to be a valedictorian to get into Harvard. In fact being a valedictorian is no guarantee of getting in. If you have high academic achievement and you’re Black/Hispanic/Native American, the child of a wealthy donor, a recruited athlete, or possibly a legacy, then you have a decent chance. If you don’t fall into any of those preferred categories, then what it seems that you have to be is one of the best in the nation at your specific “thing”. Very high academic achievement plus being a pro-level dancer, musician, actor, extraordinarily precocious business person, social activist, champion chess player, etc. So if you are achieving at the international, national, regional, maybe state level in the EC that you are most involved in, plus you have high academic achievement, then you do have a chance, assuming that Harvard is looking for your specific EC the year that you are applying.
Don’t be upset. 3rd in the class is great. Your academic achievement is enough that it wouldn’t keep you out of any school. Aside from the UCs, a very high test score will help, too. Add in outstanding achievement in your particular beloved EC, and you’ve got a chance at a T20 school that may be the best match for you, along with possible substantial merit money at third tier schools and certain flagship state U’s.
At this point, if it is possible to turbo-charge your favorite EC activity into something very high level, do so. If you can prep for and achieve a stellar standardized test score, great. Keep up the excellent grades. An outstanding summer activity doing something that you love doing would help, too.
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Harvard’s CDS indicates that they do not consider rank. The vast majority of admits did not submit rank. I’d expect that most admits are not valedictorian of their class.
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I agree with other answers that whether or not you are valedictorian will not have any meaningful impact on your admissions chances to top schools, including Harvard. Actually it will not have an impact on much of anything other than what they hand you at high school graduation.
Generally students who get accepted to Harvard (or MIT, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Caltech, …) are very good students. However, being valedictorian is neither necessary nor sufficient to get admitted to a university at this level. Also, the universities will generally have already made their admissions decisions before high schools even figure out who the valedictorian will be.
However, being a very strong student, which you are, will help you in a number of ways going forward. Most immediately this will have set you up to be in good shape for university. For example, study skills that you may have learned in high school will be needed in university.
Make sure that you apply to safeties. If you feel that Harvard would be a good fit for you, then also apply there, but know that it is a high reach for nearly every very strong student.
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Please don’t stress about rank, or winning national or state awards, or excelling in an EC or any of that- for the sake of getting into Harvard.
You need to understand that top colleges are assembling a class, with an interesting mix in terms of lots of factors, socioeconomic, geographic diversity, diversity of interests and talents and so on. It isn’t hierarchical in the sense that one individual is somehow better than another.
If you are focused on Harvard, I guess I would ask how familiar you are with other colleges and universities. I would avoid trying to fit a particular school and instead find a particular school that fits you. Try to research a side variety of schools.
If you have an interest, by all means develop it, but not for admissions - for you!
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It sounds like this poster is currently a HS junior.
But the short answer to the post question is….NO.
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Hey! This is not a joke and I am not a senior. I am from a very isolated area where we don’t get the necessary aid to search for college advice. It’s extremely rare for someone to even apply to Harvard. I didn’t imply that only valedictorians get into Harvard. Pardon my way of wording the question. I just asked in a way of asking if not being a valedictorian would’ve weakened my chances of getting in.
For help in forming a college list, you may want to create a topic on CC specifically for this. As a high school junior, now would be a good time to begin this process.
You do not need to be a Val to get accepted to Harvard (or any other college for that matter).
Are you interested in Harvard? What are the characteristics of Harvard that are appealing to you? So far, what is your GPA? What about the PSAT score? What sorts of majors might you be interested in?
Do you know how much your parents can pay for college each year.
I agree. Answer these questions and folks can help you search colleges.
Come back early & often - people here will be happy to be helpful. Fair warning, the most frequent advice will be:
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don’t fall ‘in love’ with any school, esp not “highly rejective” schools (the ones that reject 90%+ of their applicants
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build your list from the bottom up
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figure out your budget first!
There are a lot of great programs out there that students haven’t heard of. People here on CC can help you come up with a strong list.
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FYI: Many high schools don’t name valedictorians at all, many only state whether someone is among the top 10%, and there are some that don’t even supply that information to colleges.
One thing for you to think about: Fit. What school is a good fit for you?
There are a lot of very good universities in the US, and just as many more outside the US. They are not however all the same. As some examples: Somewhere like Dartmouth College or one of the top LACs are small schools. They tend to have small classes, but might not have as many majors as a larger school. Dartmouth is also in rural New Hampshire. Harvard by comparison is a bit larger, and is right in the middle of Harvard Square where there is a LOT to do on a Saturday evening. You would not run out of things to do in four years there. Stanford is on a very large campus on what used to be a farm in a more suburban area. MIT is academically intense and known more for engineering, math, science and a few other things. Caltech is small and academically intense. McGill is large, academically challenging, and right in the middle of a bilingual city (you will overhear some conversations that just go back and forth between English and French mid-sentence). There are many very good universities to choose from. Also, your local in-state public flagship is most likely very good and will have quite a few majors and quite a few very strong students wherever you are.
In applying to universities, it is important to look for schools that are a good fit for you. Unfortunately this is more difficult compared to just looking at rankings. However, finding a good fit will make your four years of university both more enjoyable and probably more productive.
If you tell us what you want in a university, and what you find appealing about Harvard, this might help us to make some other suggestions for schools to at least consider. You could start a new thread for this purpose if you want to.
@bubblepink25 I always suggest checking out this website: College Profiles – Colleges That Change Lives (ctcl.org) Lots of great schools.
For very selective schools (and you may provide some measure of geographic diversity):
Ivy League: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell
“little Ivies” , Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Tufts, Middlebury, Bowdoin, Bates, Colby, Bucknell, Colgate, Hamilton, Swarthmore, Connecticut College, Haverford, Lafayette, Trinity, Union, Vassar
Women’s (if appropriate) Smith, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, Barnard
Midwest: Macalaster, Carleton, Oberlin, Kenyon, Grinnell
CA/OR Pomona, Pitzer, Reed, UC Berkeley, UCLA, USC
South Emory
mid-Atlantic Muhlenberg, Goucher, Elon, Davidson
and many others people can suggest!
Harvard does not consider class rank, nor is class rank a component of the Academic Index that Harvard uses to characterize academic standing. Moreover, many of the applicants to Harvard attend schools that do not provide class rank, making it an even less useful distinction.
What Harvard does consider, however, is how your teacher recommendations (and if you attend a school where the counselor has the time to write a meaningful school report, the school recommendation) rank you versus other students the recommenders have known. Are you the best student they have seen in your class year? In the past ten years? Best student of their entire career? Those assessments when explained convincingly carry considerable weight.
Does it hurt to be a valedictorian? No, but neither does it help unless that factors into a consistent story revealed in your recommendations.
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The resounding answer to your question is “no”, and I agree with it – and I don’t really have anything additional to add to that.
If I were you, I would think about the things that draw you to Harvard – size of the school, location, available major(s), weather, something else? – and form a list of other schools with those qualities.
If it’s just the name Harvard, well – disregard that. Chasing prestige could send you to a school at which you’d be miserable. So the advice stands – think about the kind of school you desire, and form a list based on that. Run the Net Price Calculator to reasonably verify if each school will be affordable, since affordability is of the utmost importance.