What do colleges look for?

Recently I posted a thread asking if college admission really were a “crapshoot” or not. Something I picked up was that it isn’t so long as you understand what specific colleges look for. So now my questions is what do the following colleges look for? When I ask this I’m looking for ECs, specific courses they’d like students to take in hs, personality, interests, and so on. Anything advise helps. Also I aim for majoring in accounting or finance. My dream is to work for Goldman Sachs as a financial analyst or mostly and place on Wall Street in case this helps in anyway.

Carnegie Mellon
U of I Urbana- Champaign
Indiana University(Kelley Direct Admit hopefully)
UMich(Ross preferred admit)
NYU(Stern)
UPenn
Purdue
U of T Austin
WashU

Thank you in advance for you comments!
P.S. This isn’t my list, I realize over half of these are reaches for virtually every student.

For Kelley, if you have a 3.8 Weighted with a 30ACT or the equivalent for SAT, you automatically get in. If not, you have to petition to get in which is a harder more unlikely thing to do

You should take time to organize. Google the common data sets for all those. The info you need is in Section C of each. Then READ the items on their admissions pages – that’s not too much to ask.

I can tell you that the evaluation criteria for them vary (e.g. Purdue only recently started accepting an essay-- they’re not that holistic and are much more stats based). You should make a spreadsheet and look at them in aggregate.

Asking for peoples’ anecdotes is not a good way to go about this. If you’re a wannabe top business major, start making a habit of gathering data to analyze. Good luck!

Typically, what I have heard from top schools’ Adcoms with holistic admissions is that the following are most important in order of preference:

  1. Rigour of academic schedule

  2. High School Grades

  3. Essays

  4. ECs and other soft factors (location, diversity, etc as they fill out the class

  5. SAT/ACT scores

Although some schools may rank 3, 4 and 5 differently.