<p>Harvard lists their admission rate at 7%. So people automatically gasp at such limited numbers. However if you really look at the admission chart you will see a vast majority of students who applied had little or no chance(reach applications) to begin with.</p>
<p>I would estimate at least 70% of those applying were long shots at best from the start. Surprisingly there were quite a few accepted that had GPA's below 3.5 AND ACT between 14! and 26. So the question becomes, of the truly qualified applicants, what would you estimate to be the TRUE admission rate?</p>
<p>Harvard says about 70% of the students that apply are academically qualified. So 35k applicants apply. Let’s take away the 30% (10500). So that gives us 24500 applicants that are academically qualified.
They accept a little over 2k but let’s keep it simple and say they accept 2000 students. So that gives us a 8.16% acceptance rate compared to a 5.8% acceptance rate.
So to put it shortly, if you’re qualified, it’s still a long shot.</p>
<p>Well…I understand “Harvard” says 70% are qualified but the chart says otherwise. Is a 3.5 qualified…yes…is a 29 ACT qualified…yes…combine the 2…NO. So a 3.5 with a 35 ACT absolutely or 4.0 with a 30 absolutely. However look at the chart. A majority of students applying fall below in both categories. I know it’s best guess but I would say a truly qualified applicant is more along 17-20%.</p>
<p>I think the question is unanswerable in any case. I do understand what you are getting at. Why count an application from the clueless student with a 2.9 GPA, no AP courses, and a 1650 SAT total. But those are fairly few, I feel sure. For the rest, how do you really define those that have “little or no chance”? I agree with @xFirefirex. I look at that chart and the vast majority of the dots are in a region where some people got accepted. Only a few total outliers.</p>
<p>I think what you really want to know, perhaps, is what percentage of students with certain statistics still got denied. You could (well, Harvard could) create a chart that basically broke acceptance rate down by GPA and test scores by 0.1 range for GPA (UW) like 3.9-4.0, 3.8-3.899, etc. and 2350-2400, 2300-2349, etc. and then again by overlapping those categories and you could then see more easily what percentage of “qualified students”, at least based on stats, did and didn’t get offers. I suspect that if you looked generally at the group of students that had both SAT above 2300 and GPA above 3.8, the acceptance rate would still be no better than about 10-12%. Just a semi-wild guess of course.</p>
<p>Based on our HS Naviance data, where we have many Harvard applications every year and manage to get someone in most years, but not this year, I estimated the acceptance rate for highly qualified US applicants at around 15-20%, probably closer to the 15% side, so say 16%, or about 1 in 6. I think I defined highly qualified as UWGPA 3.8+ and ACT of 32+. I didn’t perform the analysis, but stats higher than that didn’t seem to increase your chances all that much. I did not have access to things like ECs, course rigor, APs, SAT IIs, etc, just the basic scattergram.</p>
<p>Many of the Harvard applications are also international, which drives down the overall acceptance rate, but US students don’t generally compete with that pool.</p>
<p>I think I read somewhere that Harvard rejects about a half of perfect scorers so if you get a 2400 or 36 your chance skyrockets to around 50%, statistically speaking of course. This is also probably because perfect scorers tend to have other good ECs or grades</p>
<p>fallenchemist…take a much closer look at the chart. Virtually 90% of those accepted were in the 3.8 to 4.0 range for GPA. Same for ACT 30+. Those who land in both categories make up 95% of the chart with the amount of 4.0 accepted rates increasing with ACT scores rising. So basically unless you are beyond exceptional in another area unless you have at least a 3,8 AND 30+ ACT you are in the reach category. The question then becomes how many falling into the both category of 3.8 AND 30+ are accepted and how many aren’t.</p>
<p>I think this is a question that many people have wondered about for a long time. You do a good job of starting to quantify it. Unfortunately, I think the admission offices prefer more of a mystique to what they do so we are unlikely to get any more data to analyze this further. If you do find it though, please keep us posted.</p>
<p>Don’t forget that there are students admitted not because of their academic excellence. There may be someone admitted with GPA 3.5 due to athlete recruitment. I bet you GPA 3.5 does not make one really qualify for Harvard when they are looking at academic data. Not even in a dream.</p>
<p>Just ran across this Washington Post article from 2000 about how a certain politician’s son got into Harvard in 1965. Just amazing how the admissions game has changed - but then again, it probably works this way for some still.</p>
<p>moscott … I basically believe the Harvard pitch … and there is an ambiguity in your analysis. When looking at the chart for many of the spots there are many students …for example, I’d bet there are a ton of 2400/4.0 applicants. And I’d also guess there are more repeats on spot for Harvard as you move to the upper right corner (many many more 4.0/2400 applicants than 2.9/1930 applicants.for example. both because of self-selection and also because the measures are truncated. Looking at these graphs gives a pretty good idea of the minimum stats required to have a shot … but not of the odds of admission unless numerical data is provided.</p>
<p>You also don’t know why the outliers are outliers. Students come to Harvard from all over the world, and so some might test poorly on the verbal portions of the ACT/SAT,but have perfect Math scores and excellent TOEFL results. If your stats aren’t close to perfect, there should be a compelling narrative (or “hook,” if you will) explaining why not, in order to interest Harvard’s admissions office. I’d say that if Malala Yousafzai wants to go to Harvard, they will find a place for her, even if her standardized test scores are below the mean. A school like Harvard accepts the exceptional, and will prefer someone truly exceptional over someone who simply hits all the right numbers.</p>
<p>Outliers are just that, they would make up a minute amount of students. I’m no actuary but there are some interesting numbers I’ve come across. Apparently the “average” Harvard student has an AI of 225. Thus a 3.9 and 33 ACT would fall into the 50% of students accepted into Harvard. Obviously the above median student would then have a 3.9 AND above 33 ACT or a 4.0 AND 33+ ACT would significantly increase the acceptance rate for applicants as the chart also shows. Based on the stats it appears that “qualified” applicants would fall in the 210 -240 range with obvious exceptions(very few). Thus the students who apply without showing exceptionalism in a particular area/field will draw the acceptance rate way down.A 3.7 29 ACT applicant has slim chances of being accepted but certainly heavily contribute to the low rate of 7% portrayed.</p>
<p>No need to focus on Harvard. If you look at the other links, it looks like if you have high stats (>2250 SAT and >3.8 GPA), acceptance in to Dartmouth, Cornell, Chicago, and Northwestern appears to be more likely than not.</p>
<p>Duke seems to loooove 4.0 GPAs and high test scores.</p>
<p>If you actually use the app and take out everything but the red dots, you’ll see denials all over the place. The chart only seems like that because one or two overlap toward the “unqualified” area, while hundreds overlap in the “qualified” area. You’ll know what I mean. Get an account under cappex.</p>
Yes, but you cannot tell how much red is hidden beneath those dots at the top, as the text below the graph says. This chart doesn’t make it at all possible to tell you what your chances are with those scores because we cannot accurately estimate how many got denied. So you cannot really use it to answer your original question. It would be simpler if Harvard just produced a few tables, but of course they don’t really want to reveal that kind of detail.</p>
<p>Just a question, why DON’T universities like Harvard reveal that kind of detail about their admissions? To not deter people from applying? I am sure they have the data on hand, and they probably look very closely at it. What would make Harvard withhold information?</p>
<p>Ok, well I’m not an Ivy League expert or anything, If I applied to Harvard I would definitely be one of the unqualified students. But here is my two sense on this topic.</p>
<p>To be academically qualified to attend a University at the level of Harvard (or any Ivy League School) and you are attending a high school that gives you decent opportunities (as far as AP classes and EC’s and such) you would need these stats minimum to have a chance (You also need to be a standout as far as EC’s obviously to get into Harvard) These would be absolute minimums by the way.</p>
<p>A Weighted GPA of 4.15 or Higher
An UW GPA of 3.85 or Higher
A SAT of 2150 or Higher
An ACT of 32 or Higher
A class rank in the top 3-4% or better.</p>
<p>Again, this is very general, and this would be for somebody attending a decent high school that provides a decent amount of AP classes in a middle class school district. The minimums can go up or down depending on the school. The minimums might even be too low. But for someone to be academically qualified to be a Harvard student, that would be the minimum I would think. Not to mention you also have to have exceptional EC’s on top of that.</p>
<p>Yes I know there are exceptions for people who get accepted with lower stats than these, but they are usually extremely special and rare cases and these are for the average Harvard applicant. Obviously if you are one of the top ranked High School athletes in the nation or something then your grades probably wont have to be near as good.</p>
<p>Football recruits in the Ivy League have a slightly different set of rules than recruits in the other sports. An Ivy League football coach can recruit up to 30 players and those recruits must fall into one of 4 academic bands based on their academic index. Band 4 is the highest, which seems counter-intuitive, but that’s how they label it. A Band 4 athlete must have an Academic Index that falls within 1 standard deviation of the Academic Index of the general population of students at that school. So if the general AI is around 220, the Band 4 guys must be around 207. 8 of the coach’s 30 recruits must be Band 4. Next is Band 3 which goes down to 2 standard deviations off the mean index. Approximately 13 of the 30 recruits must be Band 3 or higher. That’s an index around 194 or better. (Standard deviations can’t be calculated precisely without knowing the exact distribution of all scores which is not public knowledge- so these benchmarks are educated guesses). 7 more recruits can be in band 2, which is 2.5 standard deviations. That’s around 180. Lastly, the coach is allowed to bring on 2 players that are at or above the 176 index floor. So it’s:</p>
<p>Band 4: 8</p>
<p>Band 3 (or higher): 13</p>
<p>Band 2 (or higher): 7</p>
<p>Band 1 (or higher): 2</p>
<p>Total: 30</p>
<p>That makes up a minute amount of students at the school. But in comparison to other schools still top of the line.</p>
<p>How low can they go? The absolute floor in the Ivy League is 176 AI. To put it in perspective, the average kid going to college across this country would have an A.I. of about 150.</p>
<p>These guys are true student athletes, Kudos.</p>