Yes, the answer is obvious.
If you don’t submit a score, you are immediately starting behind the similar students who do submit a solid score.
If a school was going to be a high reach even with a decent test score, the failure to submit a test score isn’t going to help.
That’s not quite how I would put it, it’s far more benign. Students who are taking the interest in deeply researching schools, aren’t the type that are simply looking for an auto-admit safety school.
This board brings a disproportionate amount of high achievers.
The logic here cuts equally (or more so) in the opposite direction.
If you have two students from the same school with similar GPAs, APs, ECs, etc. and one provides a strong SAT score but the other provides slightly less strong SAT score, then the school has every reason to take the kid with the higher SAT score. Why submit if doing so assures rejection?
You pose an excellent question, but I do believe it varies significantly from school to school.
Most colleges claim that the “hooks” count about the same as letters of recommendation, extracurriculars, etc.
But especially for the most competitive schools, where you need to be virtually perfect for acceptance, every extra little bit helps. So a 4.0/1600/20 APs who is a URM is going to get a boost over the 4.0/1600/20 APs who isn’t URM.
And I don’t look at it as an academic threshold. Maybe some schools do. But to me, it’s not a door that you either get through, or you don’t. It’s more a ladder, and you need to climb high enough to get accepted. And having a hook gives you a couple steps up on that ladder.
Now, the question is – How may steps?
Recruited athlete isn’t really an ordinary hook. It’s a class of its own. I’ve seen schools completely abandon their standards for a recruited athlete.
But I will fully admit the process is opaque in terms of just how much other hooks matter.
According to lawsuit data, Harvard’s admissions rate for legacies (who are disproportionately white) was five times higher than for non-legacies, and 36% of the class of 2022 were legacies. Seems more than minor to me, and its impact on overall admissions rates dwarfs that of the impact of URM admissions.
I found this… I don’t know how accurate it is, but sounds like the real deal…
Well, I can tell you one type of student that’s getting into the Ivy League…LAX players, at least male LAX players.
I’ve been looking at the TV listings on ESPNU lately and I noticed that it seemed like a lot of Ivy League schools were playing in the NCAA tournament. So, I checked out of curiosity the men’s bracket only and saw that SIX (6) Ivy League schools are/were playing in the NCAA LAX tournament this year: Brown, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Penn and Cornell.
Final Four: Maryland, Rutgers, Cornell and Princeton.
So, mommas and daddas, raise your kids to be LAX players. 
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I believe the Harvard trial data show that legacy, by itself, is a relatively minor hook. However, many legacies enjoy other advantages (both academic and non-academic) that make them more likely admits.
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Yes, there are many high achievers who post on this board. But schools for the high achievers are not limited to Top X schools. The hundreds of schools in the middle between the Top X and the auto admit schools are completely ignored here.
Say a student is interested in attending Wellesley (admission rate 22%). Perhaps the student might find likelier alternatives that have many similarities to Wellesley such as these:
- Macalester: A similarly-sized college in close proximity to major metro areas with, but with a 32% acceptance rate
- Bryn Mawr: A women’s college just outside of Philadelphia but with a 33% acceptance rate
- Simmons: A women’s college in the Boston area, but with an admissions rate of 73%
- Agnes Scott: A women’s school in a desirable area of another major metro, Atlanta, with an admission rate of 68%
- St. Catherine: A women’s college in a northern, major metropolitan area (St. Paul) with an admission rate of 76%
Or maybe a student is interested in attending MIT (admission rate 7%).
- Case Western: A slightly larger university in a urban location with an acceptance rate of 27%
- Stevens Institute of Technology: A tech-heavy school that is slightly smaller, but also has extremely easy access to an even bigger metropolitan city (New York City) with an acceptance rate of 40%
- Worcester Polytechnic: A similarly-sized university in Massachusetts with a strong tech focus, with an acceptance rate of 49%
- Rensselaer Polytechnic: Another similarly-sized tech-focused school, with an acceptance rate of 47%
- Wentworth Institute of Technology: A slightly smaller college that is located in Boston, has a strong tech focus, and has an acceptance rate of 69%
A school does not need to be highly rejective for a high achiever to receive a great education.
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I don’t know… I see lots of discussion of the types of schools you mention.
I do think it’s kinda natural for people to seek more advice on the reachier schools. Doesn’t mean they are ignoring the less reach-y schools. But I’ve certainly seen many threads with applicants including many of the schools you just listed.
In general I agree with you and you make a lot of great points!
I have a specific question/concern with Niche–the “chances” on their admissions calculator seems to just be able to give one sentence ,“You rank higher than __% of accepted students shown” and then lets you filter by specific major or just include all majors, which shifts the number slightly depending on major. However–though they mention “chances” , ranking higher than 85%-90% of accepted students based on TWO numbers does not correlate to admission chances at all. That website tool is very surprising to me , especially as every single top10 school lists “results” above 85% !
Obviously, it isn’t supposed to be accurate using only GPA and SAT as we have discussed at length on here, but I am still surprised it pops out such misleading numbers. The numbers may be true–but it feels off that D could have stats “above 85%” of accepted students for this type of school (or higher for some) . However–if the results/data are even majority correct, the Niche scatterplots do highlight what many have been countering–that UW4.0/above 1550 does NOT represent the majority or even close, of the applicant pool.
Thing to remember about Niche, it’s congregating self-reported data. Massive crowd sourcing. Thus, it can potentially be much more accurate than Naviance which is school by school. And it can also be far less accurate, as it is relying on self-reporting with questionable accuracy.
But I do think it does fairly demonstrate that admission chances are most closely tied to objectively measured academic performance. Yes, lots of other “holistic” factors get weighted. But objective academic performance is still the single biggest issue.
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While legacy admits are generally high stat applicants, these legacy applicants have much better chance of gaining admission than non LDC students with similar stats. For example, according to @Data10, here are the rates for students with a high academic rating:
Admit Rate Among High Academic Rating = 2 Applicants
Non-ALDC – 10% admitted
LDC – 49% admitted
Athlete – 96% admitted
So if legacies (which make up most of LDC) make up over a third of the class (as they did for the class of 2022) and have an almost 5 times the odds of being accepted as compared to similarly academically qualified students, that seems to be more than a minor hook.
Comparing admit rates without knowing the differences in the underlying applicant pools is misleading. Legacy applicants tend to be a stronger group than non-legacy applicants (Note: not legacy admits vs non-legacy admits). They tend to have stronger applications (better essays, better LoRs, etc.) beyond stats. Moreover, a much greater proportion of them apply REA than non-legacy applicants and therefore enjoy higher likelihood of admissions (at least at Harvard) on that basis alone.
Chicken or egg. Not sure we can know the answer. Do more legacies get admitted because they apply REA… Or are REA admit rates higher because they consist of so many athletes and legacies.
On a related note — A prediction – The Supreme Court is likely to prohibit race as an admission criteria, at least in public universities and possibly in private. If that happens, I’m guessing more schools will also voluntarily stop giving legacy preferences. (To help fix the optics). The new hook will simply be “underprivileged” without direct consideration of race.
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Table 6 in the Arcidiacono Study on ALDC’s is pretty informative as to the relative strengths of the LDC vs URM hooks chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w26316.pdf
| Admit Rate for top 4 Academic Index deciles | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| White | African American | Hispanic | Asian American | Total | ||||||
| non ALDC | LDC | non ALDC | LDC | non ALDC | LDC | non ALDC | LDC | non ALDC | LDC | |
| 7 | 4.79 | 36.04 | 41.12 | 82.43 | 17.28 | 48.49 | 3.98 | 40.45 | 6.61 | 38.51 |
| 8 | 7.53 | 47.49 | 44.48 | 75.01 | 22.93 | 49.85 | 5.12 | 53.17 | 8.22 | 47.66 |
| 9 | 10.77 | 56.94 | 54.59 | 99.90 | 26.16 | 43.98 | 7.55 | 56.45 | 10.4 | 56.67 |
| 10 | 15.27 | 57.07 | 56.06 | 83.43 | 31.32 | 95.10 | 12.69 | 63.02 | 14.58 | 60.64 |
From this data, it is clear that for Harvard, legacy provides a big boost, especially for White and Asian American relative to other members of their racial group with similar academic index ratings. There is also a good boost for legacy URM’s, but the magnitude is reduced by the big boost they got as URMs. Non ALDC African Americans had about the same admit rate as White LDC’s. Hispanics were at about 50% of the admit rate of the White LDC’s.
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Let’s all agree that Harvard is a reach got most. Let’s also move on from (mostly) the same users parsing the lawsuit documents for the 897th time.
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I’m comparing similarly qualified students. Legacies have a huge advantage over similarly qualified non-legacies. That’s why when you look at a pool of highly qualified students, say a top prep school or magnet school, most of the admissions to the top schools will be ALDC, with a large portion of these being legacies.
Focusing on the topic of this thread, that has to be taken into consideration when determining reaches, matches. If the student is from an overrepresented demographic which is also rich in legacy and athletic hooks, the odds of are admission are slim even for students with excellent qualifications. And not just at Harvard, but at any selective school which advantages legacies, etc.
Probably won’t be that much of a hook (and it is probably already considered at colleges with subjective evaluations, since achievement from a disadvantaged situation implies greater achievement, some of which was used up overcoming the disadvantage), since it would be expensive to the colleges in terms of financial aid costs. In contrast, legacy preference at highly rejective private colleges tends to reduce financial aid costs (it also tends to help keep White student enrollment from declining too quickly).
Back to the original topic, it is most prudent not to assume that common hooks like legacy or URM will move a college to a less difficult category (e.g. reach to match or safety). Better to be pleasantly surprised with more than expected admissions in April than to overreach and get shut out.
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