Tonight I was rejected by Northwestern with a 4.0/2000+ SAT scores and multiple extracurriculars. I don’t feel comfortable explaining my entire profile, and by no means do I feel entitled to admission to any university. I felt as though I at least had a shot.
If I got rejected by Northwestern, does that mean my chances of being admitted to an Ivy League school are bleak?
Honesty is appreciated. Thank you! 
It means you got rejected by Northwestern. Over 80% of people who apply for the Ivies’ chances to get into the Ivies are bleak.
You will know soon enough. Absolutely nothing you can do about it now anyway. And believe it or not, many very successful people in every discipline did not go to an Ivy League school. You will survive either way.
If you’re looking for reassurance, I know several people who were rejected to Northwestern who were also accepted to top Ivies such as Cornell, UPenn, and Princeton. You’ll be fine.
As CC’ers are fond of saying, admission to the Ivy League is a crapshoot (whatever a “crapshoot” is . . . ). This element of randomness remains true even for applicants with very high stats and strong ECs. Remember, too, that the Ivy schools have overall admission rates under 10%–and probably around 5% for those applying RD rather than ED. This means, of course, that 90-95% of kids who apply are going to face a “bleak” rejection. Hence, in all honesty, your chances don’t look good . . . because nobody’s chances look good!
On the other hand, there are applicants with your stats who do manage to get in. Hope for the hopeless is the flip side of randomness.
Keep your expectations realistic (to protect yourself from major disappointment born from a too-rosy assessment of your chances), but–at the same time–don’t let the rejection from Northwestern get you down. You can never know in advance who’ll win–which, as the adage holds–is why they play the game.
Good luck!
Sorry to hear about Northwestern. It doesn’t mean anything about the Ivies, as others have said. Presumably you have applied to a range of schools. You should get in somewhere good.
^agree with above^
All you can do is get your stats in the ballpark. It is up to admissions officers with their own biases and goals for the university after that. Do not let these decisions get you down. I got rejected from my first choice ED, but I still applied to other schools just as selective and got in. You do not know how things will turn out.
Every admissions office runs separately. Though they do have criteria in common, each office still has different things they give weight to. Thus, rejection to one college doesn’t necessarily mean anything about chances with another school. Good luck!
Similar story here. DS 2300 SAT/35 ACT 4.0 GPA multiple EC… rejected from Northwestern tonight. We don’t really understand. He has some nice acceptances already, including Notre Dame, which is theoretically harder to get into. While we’ve been waiting to hear from these last very competitive schools, I’ve said to the curious, “Look, everything he hears from a college from now on could be a rejection.” I said it. But I didn’t quite believe it. And in the last week we heard rejections from Northwestern and U of Chicago. It kinda takes the wind out of our sails as we wait for the Ivies at the very end of the moth.
@Community2605 D has similar stats (right down to the 2300 SAT) and is facing a similar situation. She is in at UCLA and WashU, but was just rejected by Pomona and waitlisted by Vanderbilt . . . and Bates (even though her quantifiables are well above the 75% percentile and she had a good interview).
All in all, it’s been a deflationary process, and we’re not hopeful as Ivy Day approaches. Still, you can only attend one college at a time, so–ego-crushing rejections aside–all you really need is to get into one good school that you can make work financially.
Yep. That’s why it’s not a good idea to let your ego get tied up with college admissions.
Whether you get in to school A or get rejected or school B or whatever does not change who you are one iota.
The kid who only gets admitted to Cornell and rejected elsewhere receives the exact same education and opportunities (assuming they’re in the same major) as the kid who got 10 other accecptances elsewhere and goes to Cornell.
@Community2605, you should believe it. It’s insanely competitive to get in to any Ivy/equivalent/near-Ivy these days. And you’ll be happier when you do because any acceptance going forward would feel like a free gift.
By SAT scores, Northwestern falls exactly in the middle of the Ivies. So the question, under different circumstances, is reversible: “Rejected from Ivies: any chance at Northwestern?”
Northwestern is easier to get into than HYPSM, columbia, penn, dartmouth, and duke (more comparable to JHU, Cornell, Brown, WashU). Among the top places i mentioned, it can be pretty random, but once you go below that, you can predict acceptance w/ a higher degree of certainty. You haven’t listed your stats so there are a few possibilities:
Good luck!
^ Alternatively, USNWR provides selectivity rankings. Northwestern is ranked after WUSTL, equal to Penn and Dartmouth, and ahead of Duke, Brown, JHU and Cornell.
You may even get into Harvard and Yale, don’t pressure and caterogize yourself by looking just one small rejection letter!
@merc81 the fact that WUSTL leads the pack just proves that those ‘selectivity’ rankings can be gamed.
What do you mean? @merc8
@Community2605, USNWR assigns a “selectivy rank” to the top 50 schools in the national categories. Here are a few of the universities referred to and their ranks:
Yale: 3
Columbia: 5
Harvard: 5 (tie)
Princeton: 5 (tie)
WUSTL: 5 (tie)
Dartmouth: 10
Northwestern: 10 (tie)
Penn: 10 (tie)
Duke: 14
JHU: 18
Cornell: 20
Brown: 39 (an obvious error)
^^ I’ll add Chicago (3) and Notre Dame (15), since these universities have particular relevance to your son’s situation.
@community2605 & @MrSamford2014,
Don’t lose hope just yet. My younger son was rejected at Northwestern, but accepted at Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins, and ultimately, Harvard, where he’s currently a freshman. SAT superscore 2340.
At this level, making sense of the admissions results of any single student seems like a recipe for insanity. Although from the admissions committee view of things, I’m sure there are rhymes and reasons, from our perspective, it looks like a random walk.