What does it take to get into an Ivy league?

Applying to College
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<p>Dartmouth for one reports the number of recruited athletes each year so the 17% is an actual reported stat.</p>

<p>It’s not hard to figure how how much lower athletes stats can be as I’m pretty sure the NCAA (is that the org?) has an open formula. At my kids’ schools, where many were recruited, the kids actually knew down to the point what their SAT score needed to be at each school to make it through admissions.</p>

<p>And then there’s ‘The Price of Admission’, which if you believe (WSJ Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, prize for this topic) says URMs and legacies can have 160 points lower on SATs. It also makes the point that this is not nearly the boost athletes get. Further, the book claims Asians need 50 more SAT points than white candidates.</p>

<p>Lots of info available, this is no big mystery!</p>

<p>My DS is also an unhooked Dartmouth student but he’s what you would expect, a val from a top HS with near perfect scores and good ECs who showed the love ED rather than holding out for a shot at HYPS.</p>

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<p>If the admissions process were “completely subjective”, there would be no admissions guides or College Confidential.
I have to say that on College Confidential I have read innumerable legacies and URMs post that they got in, in spite of their records, because they wrote wonderful essays or had incredible recommendations.</p>

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<p>ok, fine. objective to a point, then subjective on out.</p>

<p>not sure what the second part there is addressing, but it plays into the subjectivity. my writing style is different from someone else’s, yet they may get into X school because of that, even if i am smarter in every respect (except how i write an application essay). also, recommendations depend on not only how well the writer likes you, but how well he/she can write.</p>

<p>EDIT: and when i say “smarter” in regards to writing, i mean more interesting/catchy/fill-in-the-blank</p>

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<p>nodebtmom - First of all, it’s her future. She is an adult, and it is up to HER to decide where she wants to go to college. If you want her to go to the ivy, tell her either
A) she will have to take out student loans to pay for the EFC (that’s what I will have to do regardless for my parents, even though our EFC is considerably lower)
B) you will pay only up to what you have to pay for berkley, and she has to take out loans for the rest of the costs.</p>

<p>For me, at least offering this seems very reasonable. I mean, if you are willing to pay for berkley, why not pay the same amount for the ivy and let her pay for the rest? Please remember who’s future it is here. It is unreasonable to put a 40k per year burden on the parents, but if your daughter says she’s willing to take out loans to help pay for that, why not?</p>

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<p>Here’s an article that explains a lot about recruited athletes:</p>

<p>[TheDartmouth.com</a> | Ivy League recruiting practices: Does Dartmouth lower its standards?](<a href=“http://thedartmouth.com/2009/01/12/sports/recruiting/]TheDartmouth.com”>http://thedartmouth.com/2009/01/12/sports/recruiting/)</p>

<p>Here’s a response seeking to clarify parts of the article:</p>

<p><a href=“http://thedartmouth.com/2009/01/14/opinion/letter/[/url]”>http://thedartmouth.com/2009/01/14/opinion/letter/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>And I was a bit out of date on Dartmouth’s numbers, this article puts recruited athletes at 18-19%.</p>

<p>Here’s also some highlights for the class just admitted. Note the 14% first generation, a new institutional objective and the increasing number of internationals, another instuitutional objective. There’s very little space left!</p>

<p>Other highlights:</p>

<p>The numbers of men and women admitted were practically even: 1,091 to 1,093 respectively.
The College admitted 185 international students representing 59 nations.
The Class of 2013 includes 310 first-generation college students, comprising 14 percent of the admitted group.
Admitted students come from across the nation as well as around the world: 577 come from the Mid-Atlantic region; 455 from the West; 401 from the South; 337 from New England; 237 from the Midwest and 177 have a non-U.S. address.
The College admitted 162 students who are the children of Dartmouth alumni/ae.</p>

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<p>I’d say that there is no “formula”, just a criteria at which some is accepted.
Stats, I would say mean at most 20% of the app.
I got in with 1870/2400 on SAT I and that’s barely “average”
You have better luck with your essay, and they are human so that they can tell if you’re lying. The essay has to make you sound very very different and probably put a twist to that. No one wants to hear a generic essay.
There’s a whole lot more ways a person will choose a student to attend, it IS a person reading you application, and I DON’T THINK IT WOULD BE RIGHT TO MAKE A LIST OF THINGS TO INCLUDE IN AN APP JUST TO MAKE YOU IVY “WORTHY”, like try to beat the system.</p>

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<p>To get off the topic, Ivy League doesn’t mean automatic success. Just look at Wall St</p>

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<p><a href=“tokenadult:”>quote</a>
I think there is a lot of double-counting of athletes who are also legacies in some of those estimates. One person is still just one person, even if the person belongs to multiple favored categories.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>That defies all logic. There is essentially no correlation between athletic ability and legacy status. If being a recruitable athlete means being in the top couple of percent of athletic ability (in whatever sport the candidate plays), take that percentage of the legacy admit pool to set a limit on how large the intersection could be. If legacies are 15 percent of the class and recruitables are 2 percent of all athletes, that’s 0.3 percent – assuming that all legacies play sports. Adjust downward for the fact that not all legacies play sports, adjust upward slightly for boutique sports of the wealthy where the selectivity is lower. The result is quite small.</p>

<p>There would be plenty of legacies for whom participation in athletics was a contribution to admission, but the numbers under discussion were the recruited athletes, a much more restricted group.</p>

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<p>…
Why?
This has to turn into a debate over percentiles of acceptances based what “hook” you may have. That’s just sad.</p>

<p>In any case, this is less about moi and more in general (for the few people throwing advice for me to go to my “perfect fit”). I’ve got a few schools in mind already regardless of Ivy league status just thought I’d ask what it really takes to get into one (and as I mentioned in my first post, any school of similar academic caliber).</p>

<p>And yes, I enjoy my share of Douglas Adams.</p>

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<p>Back to the OP’s question, yes, Harvard really exists. It admits about 2,000 students per year, of which about 1,600 enroll. I know of a few quite amazing students from class of 2009 who were not admitted even though they applied, so I suppose it is quite hard to get into, and I don’t have a particular formula for you. (I just learned the admission results of one high school I track closely last night, which is why I can amplify this answer today.) </p>

<p>How do the sizes of the group of admitted students compare to the sizes of the enrolled classes at the other seven Ivy League universities?</p>

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<p>Token, I know you were looking at ivies and wrote a lot about what you were told at information sessions. In hindsight, do you feel the schools were honest? How did it play out for you and the school you know?</p>

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<p>Tokenadult: Are you talking about Edina? They get in almost everywhere…</p>

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<p>Agreed. So much for the Ivy education!!!</p>

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<p>I’m not talking about Edina, although my son has friends there (and I do), so I should hear Edina’s news soon. Yes, Edina High School students usually fare well in Harvard admission (and there are quite a few Harvard legacy students attending Edina). </p>

<p>Yes, I think the colleges largely tell the straight word about what their process is. But they don’t go out of their way in regional meetings here to emphasize the point that a sizeable part of the applicant pool gets in with “hooks.” I’m more convinced, now that I’ve raised the issue and read the replies here, that the favored (“hooked”) applicants are as numerous as has often been said about Dartmouth and comparably numerous (adjusted for total enrollment) at other Ivy League colleges. The sources mentioned since I raised the question are nearer in time to today and nearer to the data than earlier sources I had heard about, so I’m more convinced than I earlier was. </p>

<p>Returning to the OP’s question, I don’t think there is quite a sure-fire way to get into any Ivy League college, especially Harvard, but I think the legacy advantage consists at least as much in knowing what the probability-increasing things to do during high school are as it does in direct, overt legacy preference. One reason I say this is that I have seen a statement by another CC participant that the base admission rate for Princeton or Yale legacies in Harvard admission is as high as the rate for Harvard legacies. Harvard would, I would hazard the guess, only systematically favor its own legacies as legacies, but if it has preferences for certain levels of sports involvement or certain kinds of secondary education, those preferences would also improve the chances of other Ivy-League-legacy applicants, insofar as the parents of those applicants know how to advise high school students to do that which raises their chances of admission.</p>

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<p>Most kids who are unhooked, and get into ivy league schools have some characteristics that are very similar:</p>

<p>If your a val/sal, and you score a 2250+ with a 1550+ on reading and math, you need lots of A.P.s…(academic side of it) you have a good shot at A ivy league school…you need to be at least need to be top 5 percent of your class, if you can’t be val/sal…</p>

<p>You need leadership positions in school clubs/organizations, tons of volunteer work, do research in professional labs…join academic teams like the academic decathalon, or join non academic activites like karate and get your 2nd degree black belt, or do both…just do stuff that you enjoy and would make you stand out…</p>

<p>Essays and recs have to be stellar…</p>

<p>Of course sometimes it doesn’t work out no matter how hard you try, and you shouldn’t live your life with the sole intention of getting into an ivy-league school…work hard in life, but work hard because you enjoy working hard…</p>

<p>Our valedictorian got into princeton and yale, waitlisted at harvard, and rejected at stanford, her sat scores were around a 2240… she was really involved in research…</p>

<p>Our salutorian got into brown, upenn, cornell, and columbia, she had around a 2270…her parents were alumni at columbia…</p>

<p>^^ valedictorian was unhooked, her recs and essays must have kicked butt…salutorian was not urm or athlete…</p>

<p>My friend goes to Wharton(sophmore there now), had a perfect Sat score (single sitting), he was getting calls from Harvard over the summer of his junior year telling him to apply, but he didn’t(lol), he was top 5 percent of his class at a top prep school…and he was really, really involved in his school activities…I think he was the chief editor of his school newspaper, he did a internship with a major coporation in downtown phildelphia, president of this student body, and he spent 2 months in south america doing economics research(something about developing economies in the third world) and community service, and he went to rap battles in the suburbs(lol, rap battles in the suburbs? lol)…
^^^^ he was also unhooked…</p>

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<p>What I have observed is quite different. Having had 3 kids go to 3 different legacy filled high schools, I’ve seen year after year of ivy legacies getting into only the ivy where they were a legacy. Don’t get me wrong, all non development legacies I’ve seen that got in had reasonable stats for the school, certainly higher than the athletes, but most did not have the earth shattering resume to get them into the others.</p>

<p>Princeton takes more legacies than any other ivy, about 50% of legacy applicants are accepted, no way most in this group are getting into HYPS.</p>

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<p>AlexE, read your comment above. My D would have to take out about $100K ($25K per year) in loans if she were to go to the ivy she was admitted to. I would be paying $100K ($25K per year). Berkeley would cost $25K per year so she wouldn’t have any debt if she went there. The ivy is Columbia. Which would have greater potential for admission into a good grad school, undergrad from Columbia or Berkeley? From what I am hearing, grad school is more important than undergrad (she would like to major in English/business).</p>

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<p>Well I’ll make it clear that I have 0 knowledge of Berkeley and very little about Columbia. Though I know that grad school is not exactly necessary, especially for a business field (for example, at Wharton, where I’m most likely going, a huge amount of its alumni don’t go to grad school at all). I don’t know about the career prospects coming out of Berkeley over Columbia, but that’s something to consider as well. For example, if by an “english/business” job you mean she wants to write and sell fiction, perhaps it would not be the greatest idea to go into an ivy league school simply because people reading your books don’t give a crap where you went to school. On the opposite side of the spectrum, if she wants to help write reports for an investment banking company or something like that, it is likely she would make a lot of money and the rep of an ivy league like Columbia could help a lot with this. Ultimately, though, it is entirely up to her. It is her future, and I know I’d be very mad at my parents if they “made” me go to a particular school or didn’t “let” me go to my first choice (I say it in quotes because it is ultimately her decision as an adult, assuming she’s 18 but regardless it is still her decision where she wants to spend her time in college). It is not unreasonable, it is in fact understandable for you to not pay for more or much more than you would at the cheaper school, but for me she should be presented the option to take out loans and such.</p>

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<p>Well, yes and no. Having great stats is not by itself enough to get you in. But having mediocre stats will almost certainly keep you out. </p>

<p>Think of high-end admissions as a card game. Having excellent stats gets you a seat at the table; whether or not you win and get admitted depends on what cards you are dealt (legacy, URM, rich) and how well you play the game (essays and ECs).</p>

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<p>Where did you get this data, Hmom5 ?

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