<p>I see all the time on CC that being in the top 10% of your class is an essential part of any application to a top tier school. However, my school's ivy acceptance rate is just over 20%, and if you include stanford, duke, northwestern, MIT, then it's just over 30. when people say that one must be in the 10% of your class (unless there are extenuating circumstances, like being a recruited athlete or a URM) are they referring to applications coming out of public schools with lower acceptance rates? Because I'm not a math major or a rocket scientist but it seems to me that if you're in the top X% of your class, and X% of any given class gets into ivy's, etc, then you have a good shot with your application. </p>
<p>Does this logic make sense? I'm a little confused.</p>
<p>But I also find the top-ten-percent thing very confusing.</p>
<p>If you look at the statistics published by colleges and universities themselves, you’d come to the conclusion that roughly 40% of American seniors are in the top 10% of their class.</p>
<p>What does your school’s elite college acceptance rate have to do with it? Do you mean to say that 20% of your entire class got into an ivy? If that’s the case, then your school is very competitive, and you do not need to be in the top 10%. </p>
<p>Being in the top 10% is a very relative and vague assertion. For most publics, you’d have to be in the top TEN for ivys, whereas you can have a lower rank with top privates.</p>
<p>Schools that send 30% to top colleges are usually not sending the top 30%. except in the case of very top magnets, such high schools are elite privates, filled with legacies and development candidates, and often top URMs and athletes.</p>
<p>Even at these schools, an unhooked candidate would typically be near the very top to get into HYPS, and top 10% to get into the other ivies and peers. But since these schools typically don’t rank and almost every student would be successful at a top college, colleges can dig deeper if a candidate holds interest.</p>
<p>Top colleges admit students mostly from the top 10% of the class. But being in the top 10% of your class does not automatcially get into the top colleges. You have a better chance to get in, that is all. Of course there will be feeder schools and top public schools like OP indicated that have a higher acceptance rate.</p>
<p>National Merit Scholarship Corp. indicated there are approx. 1.5 million students took PSAT, assuming that is the total number of students in a high school class. 10% of that class will have 150K students, yet, the American Top 25 universities and LACs do not have more than half of that many openings. So, in order to be selected by these elite colleges, being at top 10% of the class will give you better chances.</p>
<p>Competitive colleges look at the difficulty and competitiveness of your school. Obviously, if you do the math it makes sense. If 20% got into ivies, then there is another 10% of people who got in but was not in the top 10%.</p>
<p>This. Keep in mind that even schools that don’t rank (and I’m assuming your school, considering the level of competition, doesn’t) have ways of divulging to colleges approximately where a student stands.</p>