As we know from the MIT Class of 2023 thread, it’s not 6, but closer to 6 dozen who had very high odds of admission, and that was “not an exhaustive list” compiled by one person.
Here is another thread, again from @agapetos, which shows award winners for the MIT class of 2022. Note that the first person responding works for MIT admissions, and is happy that someone put together the list of strong students they enrolled.
Let’s get back to why this is relevant. It’s because when a college has say a X% admit rate, almost no students actually have an X% chance of being admitted. They tend to be either far above or far below.
Let’s suppose a college has 20k applicants, an admit rate around 7.5%, and an overall yield of about 67% to fill their class size of 1000.
The very best academic applicants obviously have higher admit rates. In fact, for the top 1% of applicants, admission can be close to a sure thing, and let’s call that 80%. So, these are 200 applicants, 160 admitted. Let’s assume that these students have a lot of options and only 50% enroll. That’s 80 students, or 8% of the class.
The next 5% of applicants are quite strong, and get in at a rate of 40%. In addition to having excellent grades, test scores, and recommendations, these are the kids that have national level recognition in a non-recruited activity, such as winning a national photography award, or making USAMO, or doing research multiple years and getting a paper published in a minor journal. That’s 1000 applicants, 400 admits. If 60% of these students enroll, that’s another 240 students. We have now filled 32% of the class from just 6% of the applicant pool.
We now move onto the hooked categories which we define here as being athletes, URM and legacy. Suppose 10% of the applicants belong to this category, and as a group they are admitted at a 20% rate (we won’t double count the ones that were strong enough to get in purely on academics). That’s 2000 applicants and 400 admits. If they enroll at a 70% rate, that’s 280 students. We have now filled 60% of the class with 16% of the applicant pool
We now have 84% (16800 students) of the applicant pool remaining and competing for 400 remaining spots. If the yield in this group is 80%, then the college only needs to admit 500 students. Most of the kids in this group have fine grades, test scores, and recommendations. Perhaps they were even a three sport athlete, or won several regional awards. In other words, accomplished kids who will absolutely succeed in college.
And some of them will be admitted. But the real admit rate is 500/16800, or just about 3%. Nowhere close to 7.5%.
So in a way, @mtmind is right. There is a lot of randomness in that last group of admitted students. But that’s because there isn’t nearly as much randomness for a large chunk of the admitted students.