<p>Does anyone happen to know any hooks for yale and other ivies that would make an applicant stand over and above many others. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>Poverty, race, athletic recruit, legacy, etc.</p>
<p>Sent from my DROIDX using CC App</p>
<p>Also geographic location.</p>
<p>Sent from my DROIDX using CC App</p>
<p>Legacy is not a hook at Yale. At best it’s a weak tip. </p>
<p>There are only a handful of true hooks – major advantages in admissions – at Yale and other highly selective schools. You have a hook if you’re a recruited athlete, a URM member (African American, Hispanic, Native American) or a development case.</p>
<p>would it be a hook to state in your essay that you were interested in pursuing a certain career path that would make you famous and then your counsellor reiterated that in his/her recommendation by saying that you possessed the ability to achieve that goal</p>
<p>No. You have to show by explaining your activities and achievements that you have the potential to make it in a particular career. Not a hook, but that could help your application. Simply saying you want to pursue a career path that will make you famous, however, will make you sound silly and pretentious. And your counselor’s bare conclusion that you have the ability to gain fame will be of no value. It has to be coupled with a discussion of your tangible achievements in the area.</p>
<p>entrepreneurship seemed something the admissions officers were all interested in when i did my on site admissions process (interview, info session etc.)</p>
<p>With regards to geographic distribution, are they looking for that at the state level (accepting a kid from south dakota) or regional level (living in a really poor, rural area of a populous state) or both?</p>
<p>They look right down to your home town / ZIP Code as that’s the smallest denominator that’s organized (cities are broken up into various ZIP codes) </p>
<p>but if you go to the Yale website you’ll see that only a handful of officers handle all applicants, so your factors in this case all depend on the pool overall.</p>
<p>But in perspective, they know if you’re (like me) from a poorer part of Long Island, an otherwise rich area of the country.</p>
<p>I’m ignorant; what’s a "development case?</p>
<p>class of 2015</p>
<p>Number of
Enrolled Freshmen
1,351
Number of
Admitted Students
Postponing Yale
Enrollment 36
Legacy Affiliation*
13.5%
*sons and daughters of alumni of
Yale College and of the Yale Graduate
and Professional Schools</p>
<p>I don’t see this as a weak tip if 182 students in one year have this label.</p>
<p>See: [Brenzel:</a> preference for legacies decreasing | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/may/04/brenzel-preference-legacies-decreasing/]Brenzel:”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/may/04/brenzel-preference-legacies-decreasing/)</p>
<p>“We turn away 80 percent of our legacies, and we feel it every day,” Brenzel said while on the panel. He added that this year, Yale rejected more children of the University’s Sterling donors — a classification for some of Yale’s most generous contributors — than it accepted.</p>
<p>Glibby - 20% acceptance is a lot better than 7%.</p>
<p>I am also curious why it started going up from 10% in 2010-11 class to 13% in 2014 class and 13.5% in 2015. </p>
<p>What exactly is a 2010-11 class?</p>
<p>For the gazillionth time, you can’t compare the percentage acceptance rate of legacies vs. non-legacies without knowing how the qualifications of those groups compare–and Yale says the legacies are, on average, more qualified. Without more data, you can’t tell whether there is any advantage at all.</p>
<p>Hunt - Is there a question of qualifications here? Even the athletes and URMs are qualified which is irrelevant to the question at hand. If you are a legacy, your qualifications matter a bit more than others in the acceptance process.</p>
<p>My point is that there are plenty of legacies with qualifications that will get them admitted without any need to consider legacy status–indeed, if you look at results threads here, you’ll see that many of them also get into other highly selective schools where they aren’t legacies. This makes it difficult to measure the real advantage of being a legacy without understanding the relative strength of the groups of applicants. I think legacies do get a tip, but I don’t think it’s as great as 20% vs. 7% suggests.</p>
<p>Just as an analogy, if you saw figures that said graduates of private schools were accepted at a rate of 15%, and public school graduates were accepted at a rate of 7%, would that mean that merely going to a private school gave you that much of an advantage?</p>
<p>20% doesn’t sound bad. That is the admit rate of high stat kids at top colleges. Considering that legacy kids as a group are probably more qualified than the average, they are admitted at a rate for top stat kids is not out of line, imo.</p>
<p>Hunt - I look at it this way - If my kid applied and a legacy kid applied and both have equal qualifications and there is one seat left in class of 2016, it would surely be given to legacy, all things being equal. That is in the school’s best interest to protect the legacy in order to keep the alums happy.</p>
<p>I don’t claim discrimination, or that the school is in the bag for legacies. It is a matter of fact that the edge goes to a legacy. The fact that legacies get admitted to other big name schools does not prove that they are more qualified but only that pedigree can help elsewhere too. It is quite possible that the other big name school admits the legacy and my kid because they have two seats available.</p>
<p>Igloo - I am not sure how Yale counts Alums (only undergrad, only parents etc.). Harvard legacy counts only undergrads and they have a 30% rate.</p>
<p>I understand Yale counts graduate school graduates. Actually, I believe Harvard had 35% legacy admit rate. That’s where I begin to have a problem with. It is way over the admit rate of most qualified applicant group, 4.0/2400 types. 20% is reasonable. Admitting legacy at their top admit rate, I don’t have a problem with.</p>
<p>Ivy colleges seem to have an institutional need to keep the legacy numbers between 12-14% of the incoming class. As an adcom from Tufts mentioned in a seminar about how they choose applicants for institutional needs, a member of board of directors whose name is on one of the buildings on campus has a niece applying, the niece clearly has merit (that is exactly what he said). </p>
<p>So the 11.5% percent of legacies may be clearly qualified and 0.5% fit the name on the building classification but in the end, the schools are compelled to list 12% as legacy.</p>