@skieurope I beg to disagree, on both points. Making a hook is just making yourself interesting, to stand out. Sure, some of that can seem desperate, but how else do schools choose between very similar graded/scored candidates? The books A is For Admissions, The Gatekeepers, and Acceptance all make this point.
You’d need to have a very narrow definition of “top schools” to get a number near 15k. UCB probably near 15k traditionally unhooked admits alone, if you consider both freshman admits and transfers (by “traditionally unhooked”, I mean not counting out of state or international as hooks). Some more selective Ivy-type privates also have larger enrollments. For example, Cornell has ~6,500k admits per year. As touched on in my earlier post, needing to be in the “top 1%” seems to be more of a requirement specified by some forum members than a requirement suggested by college admission reps or related admission stats. College representatives often say the opposite, such as my earlier MIT quote.
A student who is a legacy can make that a hook by choosing to apply to the school in question and by applying Early Decision if that option is available.
Let’s look at the data. Since most colleges do not superscore the ACT, we can treat that as a proxy for a single test estimator of talent. We can find a college’s reported middle 50% ACT score of enrolled students through collegedata.com, and treat the lower bound as what colleges expect from everyone except candidates with a very strong hook (e.g. athlete, major donor, URM, etc.).
An ACT composite score of 33 is top 1%, and 32 is top 2%, and 31 is top 4%, and 30 is top 5%. Here are the 25th percentile ACT scores for the US News top 20 National Universities.
Princeton: 32
Harvard: 32
Chicago: 32
Yale: 31
Columbia: 32
Stanford: 31
MIT: 33
Duke: Does not report
UPenn: 31
Johns Hopkins: 32
Dartmouth: 30
CalTech: 34
Northwestern: 31
Brown: 31
Cornell: 30
Rice: 32
Notre Dame: 32
Vanderbilt: 32
WashU: 32
Emory: 29
So what do we see here?
75% of CalTech's students are in the top 0.5%.
75% of MIT's students are in the top ~1%
75% of 9 of the remaining top 20 colleges are in the top ~2%
Other than Emory, all the remaining top colleges are fishing in the top 4-5%.
There are probably about 30K freshmen across these 20 colleges. If we estimate that there are 3M distinct students that take the ACT or SAT each year, the top 2% represents about 60K students. Therefore a large percentage of them are attending a top 20 National University, and another large percentage are attending the top liberal arts colleges.
@hebegebe really? Aren’t there also a very substantial number of those tippy top students who are not at top 20 colleges? Aren’t there a lot of them who are at publics, or who took great merit packages? Or who go to Oxbridge, or McGill, etc…? Not being snarky, I am just wondering.
Yes of course. I didn’t say all, just a large percentage to indicate that many of the top students end up at a top college. And perhaps I should have used 22.5k students rather than 30k students since the bottom 25% are the wildcards. But if you disagree with my general conclusion, could you explain why?
It’s very simple if you are a perfect GPA holder, perfect SAT scorer, recruited athlete, Broadway or Hollywood Actor, recent poor immigrant from a war torn country, went to poor urban or rural school, grew up homeless or were a shelter kid, wealthy enough to donate a million or few, doing world altering research, interned for Obama, can write Pulitzer level essays, all 4 of your grandparents went to same school etc etc
It’s silly to assume a characteristic of a the entering class is a requirement without considering what % of applicants had that characteristic, especially if nearly all of the published information says that characteristic is not a requirement or in some cases not even important. For example, 52% of Brown applicants had a top 1% ACT, and 56% of the entering class at Brown had a top 1% ACT. While 56% is more than 52%, this result is in no way suggestive that one needs to have a top 1% ACT or be a hook at Brown. You also need to consider the difference between correlation and causation, such as my earlier MIT quote in which the MIT admissions rep said that there is no difference in their process between a top 3% math SAT and a top 1% math SAT, and the higher admit rate for top 1% occurs because it the higher score is correlated with other factors that are more important to them. The quote is repeated below:
@hebegebe , no I don’t disagree. I think you are right, the bottom 25% probably are wild cards. I think though that a very substantial number of top students must go to publics, or go for full rides, etc…
No doubt. Using hebegebe’s ACT method, the estimated number of top 1% test score students in the entering freshman class at various “top” publics is below:
If you don’t know what a tippy top looks for, after stats, then all the data crunching in the world won’t get you further than you are now. You’d be in the 81% of 800 score kids rejected by, using the example, Brown.
Nothing says an 800 kid, top 1%, etc, knows how to present a good whole app and supp.
I don’t care how many times someone quotes how many top performers are admitted and matricate. Those schools are cherry picking those they feel are best for their campuses.
And you don’t find the missing factors in the CDS. Just as the colleges try to look behind the veil at applicants, you need the savvy to look behind the colleges’ veils.
But, no. Once again, too many try to interpret stats. That’s not enough.
That’s not what I am saying @lookingforward. I am not predicting the likelihood of any particular student to get admitted to any particular school.
Instead, I am making an observation, which is that a large fraction of top 2% students enter the top 20 national universities or the equivalent liberal arts colleges. And those that don’t have other options as @lindagaf points out. I make this observation by estimating the number of top 2% candidates that exist and the number of those taken by each college using the CDS.
To address your Brown case, Brown can well reject 80% of those students. Many of them will get picked up by a Cornell, or a WashU, or a Michigan. They will do just fine.
Thanks hebegebe your and Data10’s observations are VERY USEFUL. Please keep at it. I for one will not hold you to it in any way.
Lookingforward, I am not sure what is wrong in TRYING to predict. I think most “experts” post the same things 100s of times everyday:
“Elite colleges are unpredictable”
All readers/lurkers/posters KNOW that.
There is a common theme to all elite college threads:
Elite colleges and community colleges are much the same, so its not worth spending more money on elites
Nobody should try and figure out how elites admit kids
I am baffled as to why…
The readers of this topic know hebegebe and Data10 and some others are presenting an interesting viewpoint for many like me.
PLEASE let it continue.
Hebegebe: Thank you!!! I fully agree with your of analysis/observations.I am finding this thread very informative.
I am extremely curious to understand this mystery and your thought process is very insightful to me. Please continue.
Maybe this has come up already, but for those mystified by “holistic” admissions, I strongly recommend reading The Gatekeepers. It’s about Wesleyan, 15 years ago, but it’s an excellent window into the process, and a discussion on a separate thread suggests it’s still very relevant.
@porcupine98 there was a whole new thread in this forum recently, in the last month, devoted to the Gatekeepers and what has changed since it was published. I then read the book in two days and found it most enlightening. The main, and obvious, point I took away was this, (so @BoiDel , pay attention): a real human reads your app and makes a case for you. You want that person to remember you. And that person KNOWS what his/her college is looking for in a student. If you are the kind of student they want, with the right stats, you have a great chance.
I won’t rehash that whole other thread, and anyone who is interested can do a search for it. I will add that a couple of other interesting points also stood out: top colleges can and do actively court top students, and ECs make a difference. A great essay can also make a difference.
I see you noted the other thread, porcupine
Boidel, I think you mean elite and PUBLIC colleges are the same, right? I definitely don’t always agree that you will get a great education at community college,though some are excellent. I myself went to community college.
Thanks Linda and Porcupine, Ive read the book. I still continue to be interested in new observations, thoughts and opinions and analysis on elite admissions.
I read a comment yesterday on CC that pretty much captured the essence of it all for me "In order to explain why someone with low GPA-Test Scores was admitted to an elite we cite “holistic admissions” and when someone else asks "can I get in with x-y GPA-Score combination, then he/she is told “dont even bother because elites only look for Top 1%”.
Ive been lurking for a year and have read 100s of threads on this topic and each time I find a group of people being discouraging, dismissive and scornful about the OP trying to figure out how elite admissions work.
BTW, I did mean CC advise that indicates “Elites and community are JUST the same. Its ALL about the person, and college does nothing” Thats another thing that baffles me as I said, why are so many trying so vehemently to disprove elites provide better education and outcome? If thats indeed true then why is elite admissions a billion dollar industry? Why do elites collectively get hundreds of thousands of applications?
Thanks
We had a sure-fire way of getting our #1 into an elite college. Based on my “expert” judgment as an academic, and my specific knowledge about the strengths of faculty in certain fields of study (this is researchable), I put several colleges and universities on our son’s list. He had some criteria in mind but was basically “no pref.” He was happy that I did the work for him. The colleges could be put in order of “degree of difficulty” of admissions based on acceptance rates and the posted stats on the GPA’s and test scores of enrolled students. I selected some that were high and some that were middle or lower on those criteria. His stats were superb, so he would be competitive almost everywhere. The central criterion in composing his list was quality of programs; secondary ones were location and type (LAC, university, etc.).
He chose to attend a university that was top-notch by academic reputation (ratings of academic departments) but with a high admission rate at the time (30-40%) – and thus was NOT classified as “elite” by many people on this discussion board (or earlier ones such as the one at Princeton Review). Now, 15-20 years later, this university accepts fewer than 10% of applicants. So it’s deemed to be “elite.” The university didn’t get any better over that time period.
You could infer that I’m skeptical of the “elite” word. I focused on programs and quality of education, and secondarily on location and size. As a graduate of a liberal arts college, I didn’t doubt that he could receive a top-notch education from a college that had only one or two thousand students. But their location would have mattered to him. “Major league city” was important, for example – by which he meant “major league sports.”
He graduated with honors and his career achievements to date have been commensurate with the quality and reputation of his university.
@odannyboySF It may be a question of semantics. I’m a purist, so hooks for me are URM/recruited athlete/legacy/development/celebrity. What you call “making a hook,” I call “marketing oneself.” The challenge with the books you listed is that many students (and their parents) use them as a connect-the-dot approach. Start a YouTube channel. Check. Publish a book. Check. Now if the student starts a YouTube channel à la It Gets Better then, yes, colleges will take notice, but not simply because the kid has a YouTube channel.
Yes, very serious.
I didn’t say that; I said that these attributes will not overcome bad grades. I don’t care how much a family has donated to a university or how many yards rushing the kid has, if he has a 2.2 GPA, HYPMS is not is his future. Now with a 3.6 GPA, then yes, I’d agree. Although if we’re talking a 3.6 GPA, we have a vastly different definition of “bad grades.”
I’d posit that a website that goes belly-up after publishing a sex tape should be nobody’s go-to source for admissions advice.
Mackinaw, I guess some make their selection PURELY based on “academics, departments, professors and programs”
and that “happens” to be elite (it had nothing to do with the name) or “transforms” into an elite some years later (as in your case). I find this thread interesting because I want to understand HOW elites work. I agree with odannyboy, all the elite admission guide books coach readers how to “craft” a hook.
@BoiDel I don’t think there is scorn or mockery here. I think a lot of people feel that the OP might be trying to conduct an exercise in futility. I think it is fair to say that many people, myself included, think that beyond great stats and great ECs, and of course good recs, good essays, etc…elite admissions are too unpredictable to try and figure out a formula. There is no way around the human factor that is the application reader.
There is a famous article somewhere, called something like True Admissions Officer Confessions. It’s a fun read, but one of the confessions that struck me as particualrly cruel was the AO who had been out for an Italian meal and got food poisoning. The next day, he rejected any application that came from an applicant with an Italian-sounding name. No way to plan for that.
