<p>Kei-o-lei - the stat you quoted should be put in the context of hooks, e.g., how many of the 2.1% are URMs? Athletes? Legacies?</p>
<p>^ To answer your question, all of them. Although when you’re digging that low, it’s likely that those students are developmental cases and high-priority athletes.</p>
<p>There is no practical lottery at that level.</p>
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<p>Not at all. Let’s look at the composition of an average ivy class:</p>
<p>recruited athletes: 17%</p>
<p>legacies: 11-15%</p>
<p>URMs: 15-20%</p>
<p>development/staff/connected: 2-4%</p>
<p>All of those groups can have substantially below the median stats for a school. On the flip side, most without one of these hooks have stats above the 75th percentile.</p>
<p>There are few miracles in admissions. Once in awhile there’s an amazing set of circumstances that makes a college admit an unhooked student with sub par stats. During the 2 years I worked in admissions at an ivy, I remembering that happening twice. And in those days, we were admitting 50% of applicants.</p>
<p>A guy from my school got accepted to HYSM. He had 80 something average (about 3.5 I would guess), but he did some insane research on some disease, was really passionate about it (researched on weekends, school days, had only about 5-6 hours of sleep per day) and found a plausible cure for it. </p>
<p>So ya, I guess he basically had an outstanding EC compared to his grades</p>
<p>I thought the “cure cancer” phrase was a proverbial sarcasm…WOW</p>
<p>I got into Harvard; but I turned it down to live my dream, one that no name could buy: a garbage man. That’s life-- lol jk.</p>