<p>I am curious about why the OP needs our input. The OP has nothing to lose by applying to those dream schools, and by writing the best essay possible. Whether we think the OP will get in doesn’t matter. What matters is what the admissions officers do.</p>
<p>From the article that hmom5 linked to:</p>
<p>" A son of Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, got into Princeton because the Frist family “had lavished tens of millions of dollars on a new student center” there. Margaret Bass, daughter of the oil magnate Robert Bass, got into Stanford after her old man gave the university $25 million. Jessica Zofnass’s Harvard-educated father endowed a scholarship in environmental studies around the time of her admission. Charles Kushner, a real estate developer who went to jail for witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions, pledged $2.5 million to Harvard — Kushner himself went to N.Y.U. — which did the trick for his son Jared (who recently bought The New York Observer). Golden is distressed by the notion that his book might become a buyer’s guide, but his answer to the question “What’s it cost to buy your kid into Harvard?” seems to be $2.5 mil, plus what you’ve contributed to politicians, legally or not, so they’ll make a follow-up call for you.</p>
<p>Golden tells us that the admissions process, at least at the 100 top colleges and universities, is not a meritocracy — and exactly who thought it was? — but a marketplace. Every spot is up for bid. Some people bid with intelligence, which has obvious worth to the institution; some with cold cash, with its certain value; and others with the currency of connections and influence and relationships that serve the institution’s interests. The ultimate result of trading limited spaces for ever increasing value is Harvard’s preposterous endowment of $26 billion. Golden, apparently quite the innocent, is hopping mad about this. If there were any doubt, Golden’s muckraking investigation — he’s the Ida Tarbell of college admissions — reveals that almost every word uttered by representatives of the top colleges about the care and nuance and science of the much vaunted admissions process is bunk.</p>
<p>Harvard may say it accepts 1 in 10 applicants, but, Golden writes, as many as 60 percent of the places in a top school are already spoken for by higher bidders, hence reducing, in the parlance, the “unhooked” applicant’s chances to . . . well, you do the math. "</p>