Hey ya’ll! I was super lucky and admitted to UNC as an out of state applicant for this round of early action. It looks like the admit rate for us will probably be below 13% from last year. My question is that if you remove the athletes and legacies that are recruited heavily during the early rounds is it safe to say that I would be competitive for Ivies? My thought process is that the admit rates are probably close. The yield for out of state was around 20% for out of state admits last year which might suggest that those students were admitted to more prestigious schools. I love UNC but this acceptance makes me excited about my chances in March. Thoughts?
I would say yes you will, of course, be competitive for Ivies, but the pool is more competitive at Ivies.
You might be competitive for the Ivies…we don’t know a lot about you, and you don’t know what schools are looking for etc. The process is not as direct as you are making it out to be. The good news is that you will find out soon enough. Good luck!
@canoeriver123 From your other thread, you said you didn’t take many AP classes. This may have been a specific advantage for UNC, since they are on record as not giving preference toward schedules with more than 5 APs. Other top schools have their own standards for evaluating course load rigor.
The Ivy acceptance rates in RD are very low. You’ve given no information other than your acceptance to UNC (congrats BTW) to draw any conclusions on your chances at other schools.
2018 - 2.1 million kids took SAT; 1.8 million took ACT.
21,000 kids 99%tile SAT 18,000 99%tile ACT.
Average Ivy class size ~1600 (ignoring Cornell, huge)
the main unknown is how many kids took both SAT and ACT and were 99%tile on both?
So the entire classes of the top 20 schools could be filled with 99%tile kids IF they wanted to. (they don’t) At Ivies 15-18% of class recruited athletes; 10-15% URMs, donors?
Basically these schools only aim to have half of classes at most to be 99%tile scores. (except for Cal tech). All the top 15 schools as a result have 25% with perfect (36/1600) scores since there are enough of those to fill many classes.
So UNC EA pool for OOS IMHO looks a lot like non recruited athlete Ivy pool ; except for subject tests which most admitted unhooked Ivy kids will have.
my guess is except for Cornell - if kids don’t have national recognitions, grades/test scores aren’t enough to get unhooked kids into Ivies even with 4.0 and 99%tile scores. There just aren’t enough seats for pure academic merit at these top 20 schools. Look at threads for accepted/rejected results to get an idea… For example, just on the UNC thread there are multiple kids deferred from princeton with 35+ ACT scores and As… the snowboarding girl who won a gold medal and was homeschooled got into P’ton. I’d be surprised if she had 99%tile scores. The dude from Parkland got into Harvard with a 1270 SAT 83%tile but has 1 million twitter followers. Parents if you read this be aware only a fraction of seats at elite schools go purely to grades/test scores.