Does Harvard have limits on the number of people they will take from the same school? I know they like to compare applicants from the same school to each other, but does that mean in a given application season they’ll only take the top x number of applicants from that school?
I ask because in my high school Harvard usually only accepts around 1 person a year, and somebody has already been accepted as a recruited athlete, so I was wondering whether it would still be worth it to apply to Harvard SCEA? If they’re very unlikely to take another person then would I be better off using my early advantage at a different school?
Not formally, but they have a good idea of roughly how many students they should get from schools with which they’re familiar. They aren’t going to vary much from that.
Thank you for the responses! @notjoe so do you think that the recruited athlete will count as the 1 they’re taking this year, or are athletic recruits a sort of different pool?
@gibby I saw in one of the other threads that you think Harvard does have caps on the numbers they take from particular schools. What do you think of this situation?
I think it’s perfectly reasonable – Admissions can’t take every student from a particular high school. For example, close to 30,000 eighth graders in New York City sit for an SAT-like test and the top 3% are admitted to Stuyvesant High School. There are very few high schools across the country that are packed with so many talented students. When it comes time to apply to college about 150 to 200 of them apply to Harvard – but Admissions can’t take them all, even if all of them are National Merit Scholars with 2200+ SAT’s. So Admissions cherry-pick’s the students they want. That’s as fair as College Admissions gets. What would you prefer? That Harvard takes 200 from Stuyvesant and none from your high school?
I do not believe that Harvard or any other similar schools has a hard cap. I do believe that past trends will closely approximate future admissions decisions. So if, for example, Harvard has enrolled roughly 20 students from a particular feeder school every year for the past 5 years, it is unrealistic to expect that Harvard will accept 30 this cycle for the reasons the @gibby mentions above.
A few things to keep in mind:
• If Harvard accepts 20 students from a particular school, I will guarantee you that they will not be the top 20 in rank or SAT scores. One or more of those applicants will be rejected in favor of another with slightly lower stats.
• There are 37,000 HS’s in the US, without even considering international applicants. Harvard’s class size is 1660. So every year, there are at least 35,000 schools without any acceptances (of course, a big chunk of those also had no applicants either).
Sorry @gibby and @skieurope for being unclear, I meant the following by ‘this situation’:
In my high school Harvard usually only accepts around 1 person a year, and somebody has already been accepted as a recruited athlete, so I was wondering whether it would still be worth it to apply to Harvard SCEA? If they’re very unlikely to take another person then would I be better off using my early advantage at a different school?
Basically, is it likely Harvard will take another student this year from my high school?
I believe T26E4 or JHS answered that question for you. An academic applicant is NOT in competition with a recruited athlete, so all things being equal, your chances should be the same as last year.
This was answered above; recruited athletes are in a different pool. Neither you, nor any other non-recruited applicant, is competing for one of those spots. You should just pretend that there are 1460 spots available instead of 1660. If you were to get rejected, I seriously doubt that the reason will be due to a recruited athlete from your HS.
Imagine the most excellent high school ever that graduated the best 2500 seniors in the world each year, and they all aplied to Harvard, and Harvard was no longer concerned about diversity questions, and was willing to take its entire freshman class from this school. Since Harvard only has about 1665 freshman seats, there would be a hard quota of 1665 from that school, no matter how excellent the other 835 seniors were.
In principle, Harvard has no quotas. But as the real world, with finite resources, intrudes, Harvard has to have an informal idea of approximately how many applicants to accept each year from each school from which they obtain applications. No school has a quota of one assigned to it. Rather, there might be an expectation that a given school may produce one successful applicant per year, but that the school might produce two, or none, in a given year, is not out of the question.
So, you need to move past from the idea of quotas and just do the best you can do.
And, yes, academic apelicants are a separate p [like from recruited athletes.
@notjoe, well said, the chance for HC as a GENERAL applicant no matter how STRONG you are is basically a LOTTERY… WHY everyone wants HC? Just for the name? If ONLY the name could benefit you a whole life, it makes sense. Otherwise, persistently working hard with passions in the right track that fits you is critical to the successful life.
I’ll agree with the consensus that you needn’t worry about the athlete taking your high school’s “one slot” at Harvard, but with one notable caveat.
If the accepted recruited athlete also happens to be the strongest applicant from your high school, athletics notwithstanding, and if Harvard truly does have an unofficial cap of one/year from your school, then the athlete might just be “the one”.
Unfortunately, many on CC erroneously assume that recruited athletes are academically subpar, but lots of valedictorians, National AP Scholars, top SAT/ACT scorers, etc., also happen to be very good athletes, and these kids, to a large extent, end up at Harvard and Princeton.
