@JustOneDad, a handful. Many more believe they are in that group than are actually in that group.
About 25 per cent of the kids at the Ivies can consider them to be matches for them. They are superb athletes or they have amazing connections( son of nyc mayor) or they are part of the 5 to 10 per cent of the admittees that get in for academic resons alone. So it is not a crapshoot for everyone
Certainly not 25% at any particular Ivy. There are kids that get into 1 but rejected by several others. Perhaps a high match but a school with <10% admission rate is not really a match for almost anyone. Certainly athletic recruits or those with major connections could be considered that way but not 25%.
There are extremely well qualified people academically who get into most Ivies they apply to. They represent about 10 per cent of the students admitted. Athletes are around 11 per cent So it is in the 25 per cent range
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I agree Carnegie Mellon should never be assumed an automatic admission by anyone especially at the school of art or computer science. That is hubris. Certainly there could be a situation where most people with certain stats get admitted but I doubt every single person above a threshold of stats gets admitted every time especially if that hubris is carried across in the application. Any college with less the a 50% admission rate should never be taken for granted which mostly means that every applicant should apply to more then one safety and that they should not be devastated if they are wait listed or such.
The kids who are near sure admits to many top colleges aren’t so solely because of stats. In fact, those kids are so spectacular that their stats are almost the last thing that you notice about them.
@PurpleTitan hits the proverbial nail on the head. I was at a breakfast honoring the top students in suburban Toledo earlier this weekend. The kids had to give a short speech about their favorite teacher. One kid mentioned 6 times in a three minute speech that he was “the Valedictorian from ___________.” He also was undecided because he had been wait listed at several top schools. We had been invited to attend a different event a couple of weeks ago where the teachers spoke about the students. This boy’s AP Calc teacher mentioned that the boy had taken HS Calculus in 7th Grade and often emailed her to ask if SHE understood certain concepts. He is undoubtedly a math genius, but his personality seemed to be lacking. He actually ended his speech with, “I am sure you’ll be hearing about me in the future.”
One of the other kids literally stared at his shoes while he read his speech.
On the other end of the spectrum, the girl who was Valedictorian in the most affluent suburb of Toledo was spectacular. She honored her elementary music teacher and ended her speech with a song that had been taught to the class in 3rd grade. I left the breakfast thinking, “Wow. She could be the next Julie Andrews - or at least the next Anna Kendrick.” The Salutatorian from the same school was not there, but had her father read her speech in her stead. It, too, was spectacular. These are privileged kids, to be sure, but it was easy to see why they were accepted to elite colleges while some of the other kids there were not.
I disagree with this, and apparently, so does @mainebh and @PurpleTitan as far as a “handful” goes, anyway.
This group does exist and should be recognized, even if someone doesn’t have personal experience with it.
While the group whose chance of admission to super-selective schools is relatively high may be larger than frequently assumed, a given student’s membership in such a group is often hard to know beforehand when making the application list.
In accordance with some of the posts above, I have to ask everyone whether they would even bother looking at Malala Youssafzai’s scores and grades were they admissions officers reviewing her application at Harvard or Stanford. I would say that she is “in” anywhere she chooses to honor with an application, and deservedly so. The competition among teenage Nobel laureates is not terribly intense; competition among high-stat high-school seniors is.
^Yes, there is a very small group–they can all pretty much fit on one elevator, I imagine–who can get into every, or nearly every, elite university to which they apply.
The problem is that there is a whole football stadium full of applicants who are absolutely convinced that they are in this group.
I would say it’s several elevators worth. The problem is that, as @ucbalumnus noted, before beginning the application process, it’s very hard for almost anyone to ascertain whether they are in that group.
Regardless of what her stats are, I think that’s why some of the best colleges practice holistic admissions.