We just took a tour of Penn State on Thursday and were told by one of the admittance coordinators flat out told us that getting in to PSU is a numbers game. Due to the enormous amount of applications that they get it’s impossible to go through and look at anything but. Is NC State the same way? They are only 10,000 undergraduates difference so I was curious if NC State actually looks at each individual application for the “well rounded student” we are supposed to be raising?
Last I checked, State claims to look at every application. I honestly don’t believe it. The hours of effort and number of people it would take makes it a sisyphean task. At a very high level, a more likely process is it that they establish some upper threshold that gets you in, and a lower threshold that rejects. It’s the group in between that likely gets individual review.
I do know of 4.0 kids that did not get in, so at some level my process is not 100% accurate, but I’d bet it describes the process for the vast majority of students.
The process is streamlined like an assembly line. But at large state schools with dozens of thousands of applicants, the key factors are curriculum rigor factored into a reweighted GPA x test score, everything else is cherry on the cake for for scholarships (and test scores also matter a lot for scholarships.)
If you want a more holistic process look at smaller colleges, especially private .