<p>Be an Olympic (m)athlete, have connections, be obscenely rich, get a 5/800 on 25+ of the Collegeboard’s exams and have 500+ community service hours, cure a disease, win a national spelling bee, starting your own multi-million dollar business, or having already completed an entire sequence of undergraduate courses for a certain major. Any one of these is a surefire way to get into Harvard. Potential applicants need not any of these qualities, but even one of them would be highly beneficial.</p>
<p>^Actually, how rich you are has nothing to do with your chances of getting into Harvard. They’re need-blind. Everything else listed would obviously help, though, no matter how sarcastic/sardonic your answer was meant to be :P</p>
<p>
There’s rich. And then there’s RICH. If a person’s family was to indicate to Harvard’s development office that a $50M donation would be made, many axles would be greased for that kid’s application.</p>
<p>Yeah – if a building on campus is named after a close relative, your odds of getting in are pretty good.</p>
<p>^ IF you are qualified.</p>
<p>^^^ And sometimes $$$$ gets you in even if you aren’t qualified. Think high school "C’ students like Ted Kennedy (Harvard), George Bush (Yale) etc.</p>
<p>okay seriously college admissions are a crapshoot. I know this from seeing my friends’ (and their siblings’) acceptances/rejections. Here are some examples:</p>
<h1>1 - Accepted at every school he applied to, including all Ivy League.</h1>
<h1>2 - Waitlisted at every Ivy League, though had ~2370 SAT.</h1>
<h1>3 - Waitlisted by WUSTL among some other Ivy Leagues. Accepted at Yale.</h1>
<h1>4 - Accepted at CalTech ED. Had two B’s in science/math junior year. 35 ACT.</h1>
<h1>5 - Recruited by Harvard for swimming. Was not NMSF; not a great SAT score.</h1>
<h1>6 - Accepted at MIT and CalTech. Rejected at Stanford and Harvard.</h1>
<h1>7 - Recruited by Cornell for soccer. Has B’s in sciences/math.</h1>
<h1>8 - Stanford with 2250 SAT.</h1>
<h1>9 - Accepted at Stanford and rejected at MIT with 2400 SAT.</h1>
<p>Elite universities pat themself on the back when they use the term “need blind” but it’s a bit disingenuous. They know low income kids from weak high schools have no chance of meeting their academic profile. Look at the high schools they admit students from every year. No free lunches at these high schools.</p>
<p>^^ Absolutely UNTRUE! Case in point: Stuyvesant High School, New York City. More than 40% of the students are on free lunch and one-quarter of graduates (over 200 students) matriculate to Ivy league Schools. You can make the same case for hundreds of other high schools across the country where students are on free lunch and get admitted to need blind schools.</p>
<p>Stuyvesant is an well funded ELITE MAGNET SCHOOL in NYC kids must test to get into. It’s a 1 in a million public high school. There are no Stuy’s for kids in Emporia, VA, or Orangeburg SC or the 99.9% of the country.</p>
<p>You were ranting about Elite Universities being disingenuous when saying they are “need blind.” Yes, Stuyvesant is an elite school, but more than 40% the students are on free lunch, which disproves at least half your point, if not all of it.</p>
<p>gibby,</p>
<p>In fairness, even if 50 of the Stuyvesant students going to Ivies are going to Harvard, that hardly proves your point, even if all of them are getting free lunch. That number of students would qualify as little more than window dressing.</p>
<p>But bud123, the fact is that the overwhelming majority of students who go to Harvard actually do receive financial aid - about 70% or so. And the average package (which includes no student loans, almost entirely grants with a small amount of summer earnings and term-time work study) is something like $46,000 per year, where typical costs are in the $56,000 - $58,000 range.</p>
<p>Thus, when Harvard says it’s “need blind,” they mean it.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the greater truth is that Harvard’s student body still skews heavily to the upper income categories. If you use the Harvard net price calculator, you’ll find that with one child in college, aid tends to fade to $0 at around family income of $235,000.</p>
<p>That means that 70% of families have somewhere around this income or less. And 30% have more. In fact, Harvard itself tells us that 40% of Harvard students come from households with $200,000 or more in annual income.</p>
<p>There really are lots of middle class, and even working class and poor kids at Harvard, the school really does give away buckets and buckets of aid, but the children of the well-off still take a disproportionate share of the seats in Harvard’s undergraduate classes.</p>
<p>Gibby, I’ll give you Stuy, even though I was not talking about elite magnet high schools(and I’m sure there are a few others) and say my point is valid at the 99% of low income weak public high schools out there.</p>
<p>Another good approach is to go to Haverford. But say it real fast when people ask where you graduated. …oh yes I did go there sister…</p>
<p>bud123: I don’t get your point. You claim H’s policy of need blind is disingenuous – because they fail at recruiting enough low to low-mid income kids? Which elite school meets your approval, then?</p>
<p>It goes without saying that wealthier families, on the whole, will have gigantic advantages over low income kids.</p>
<p>What would be disingenuous would be if H somehow turned a blind eye to them. Although Questbridge isn’t partnered with Harvard, you’re mistaken to think that it doesn’t value applicants from traditionally unrepresented applicant pools. They do.</p>
<p>My point is directed at all top universities. Adcoms know the academic profile needed to gain admission into their school favors advantaged students from advantaged schools and does a nice job of screening out low income kids from failing schools.<br>
To say you will give a poor kid from a weak high school need aid if he meets the academic profile needed to be admitted to an ivy school is like telling a football quarterback with poor coaching you will give him a football scholarship to Alabama if he is a 5 star football player. Well, thanks for nothin. A disingenuous offer.</p>
<p>Trust me, many of these rural and inner city and all the other pit stereotypes you can think up, often put the rest to shame.</p>
<p>I went to college at harvervard umm havervard ummm harverfoort oh yeah it was Haverford …</p>
<p>The need-based aid gives a chance to really gifted, low-income kids to attend a university geared towards educating highly gifted kids.</p>
<p>Not a lot of kids are able to break free from their circumstances but its much better than the days when I saw gifted kids with no hope of a gifted education.</p>
<p>A university is not the cause of anyone’s poor circumstances, poor parenting or poor schooling so don’t even try to put that burden on them. They offer the hand of aid to those that can reach it and there are kids that do.</p>
<p>bud, Harvard is hardly perfect, but they are very serious about the need-blind aspect of their admissions process. The recent improvements in financial aid were part of the outreach to lower-income students. </p>
<p>When I went to Harvard, the school was need-blind. Financial aid was good – H cost me less than my state flagship school would have cost me – but nothing like what it is today. I was the first person from my family to attend college. I had classmates from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds; classmates from high-crime urban neighborhoods; classmates from poor rural communities; many classmates from Stuyvesant, it is true; and classmates with famous parents and/or buildings named after their grandfathers. The generosity of the families of the latter made it possible for many of the rest of us to afford Harvard.</p>
<p>What I noticed, though, was that many people, particularly people from my home town, assumed that my family must be wealthy because I went to Harvard. I think this mis/perception still holds true in many places, and part of the University’s outreach to less-advantaged populations includes making people understand that one need not be a one-percenter to afford Harvard. </p>
<p>I can tell you that the admissions committee considers a student’s background when evaluating his/her application. They know that students at Stuyvesant, TJ, or top prep schools have advantages and opportunities that someone living in a poor neighborhood in New Orleans or in Middle-of-Nowhere, Oklahoma, could not have had. The regional admissions reps are familiar with the high schools in their regions, so they know if your school expects everyone to take six APs per year or only offers two AP classes, total. They know whether 100% of students graduating from your school attend college or 65% of incoming freshmen never graduate.</p>
<p>Applicants are expected to have made the most of what was available to them – to whom much is given, much is expected.</p>