What do highly selective colleges look for?
Wild College Admissions Myths
Here is a non-exhaustive list of myths I have heard from both students and parents about college admissions:
In order to get into college, students need to participate in Model United Nations and Debate
If a student’s Common App main essay is exactly 650 words (or even between 647 to 650 words) it is a red flag for admissions committees.
If a student’s Common App main essay is not exactly 650 words, it is a red flag for admissions committees.
A student’s Common App main essay needs to include [insert a number of formats, topics, or arbitrary values systems that got one student their family knows into an Ivy 5 years ago] for the admissions committee to admit the student.
A student’s Common App main essay should be about trauma (similar to the above, but deserves its own line).
Colleges don’t care about community service.
Colleges don’t care about grades very much anymore.
Colleges reject any applicant with a public social media presence.
Harvard splits the stack of admissions applications they receive into two piles and throws away one pile to weed out “the unlucky ones.”
Starting a non-profit will guarantee a student’s admission to an Ivy.
The more extracurriculars a student is involved in, the better.
If you don’t visit [insert Ivy League school here] to demonstrate interest, you will not be admitted.
Ivy League schools will reject an amazing applicant to protect their yield rate [FYI: This is sometimes true for lower-ranked schools, but no, Harvard does not reject applications that they find “too impressive”].
Only your junior year grades matter for college.
Sometimes I think there’s a College Admissions Myth Factory pumping these ideas into circulation to terrify and stress out both students and parents alike. The truth is, when colleges say they take a holistic view of a student’s application, they mean it.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you saw someone on social media celebrating their admission to the college of their dreams, so you innocently ask them to tell you their stats. They say they got into a T20 school with an SAT score of 1480 and a 4.2 GPA. They took 6 AP courses, including two in senior year.
If you walk away thinking that this is the requirement to get into the school, you’re missing vital context. Firstly, what if that student comes from a lower-income area, and their school is under-resourced? They may have taken only 6 AP courses because their school could not afford to offer AP courses in every subject. Plus, a 1480 SAT score is very different coming from a student whose income level might indicate that their parents could not afford them a tutor, and the student may have only had one shot at taking the test if they could not secure a second fee waiver for the exam. You also do not know the details of their extracurriculars. They might say they were president of their school’s Astronomy Club but fail to mention that as president, they led the members of the club in several community service projects that were relevant to the needs of their underresourced school district. Furthermore, maybe they included in their application that they had to take care of a family member or financially support their household when they became old enough to work a part-time job, so the school knows they had far less time not only to study but to also remain involved in as many extracurricular activities as they’d wanted.
When a very accomplished student applies to a top school, colleges consider what resources the student might have had that they did not take advantage of, which is why students should focus mainly on one thing: earnestness.
Narrative
When we say students should be earnest, here is what we mean: do you really love the subject you want to pursue, or did you just choose it because you were pretty good at it and know that it has a high-earning potential? When you look at the most accomplished people in their respective fields, they often have one thing in common: passion. To them, it’s not a sacrifice to forgo an evening binge-watching Netflix shows to spend hours learning about a subject; it’s a pleasure. That doesn’t mean you are doomed if you can’t think of a field of study that you love—it just means you need to spend the necessary time exploring until you find something that genuinely fascinates you.
Frequently, a student’s narrative brings them to their passion. Maybe a loved one suffered from a neurodegenerative disease, so they began researching it to try to understand it better, and that brought them to love neuroscience and medicine. Or, they immigrated to the U.S. as a child and witnessed their country and culture slandered by news outlets, so they pursued journalism in their school newspaper and their local community. An applicant’s narrative doesn’t have to come from life experiences, but there should be a clear reason why they chose the field they want to study
The same goes for extracurriculars. When a parent told me they had heard that volunteering “doesn’t matter” to colleges, I was sure that what she’d heard was actually about students who volunteer just to accumulate hours. If a student dedicates odd hours to several organizations that don’t seem to have a common thread, admissions teams can see right through it—it’s obvious the student only did these things for their college application and will likely cease their volunteer involvement the second they are admitted. In some cases, students do have several passions; however, there’s usually an underlying thread: medical equity, poverty, environmental causes. We review several successful student profiles in our College Application Crash Course to show students what these unique stories look like and offer inspiration for their own application narratives because, oftentimes, seeing examples of a good narrative sparks self-reflection in students of their own values and passions. That’s where the supplemental essays that schools require come in to allow the student to explain their passion.
Bottom Line
We’re not saying that students should change the world before college, or know exactly how they are going to change the world. We’re saying that students need to be genuine. Valedictorians are rejected from top universities all the time. Even when a student has done everything they can to demonstrate their academic prowess, community impact, and intellectual curiosity, admittance to schools with less than 10% acceptance rates often comes down to factors outside of our control: financial aid status, narratively similar candidates from extraordinary life circumstances, a new regional admissions officer with a singular focus on diversity. Therefore, we recommend framing the admissions process as one of self-discovery—one of the compliments we value the most from students and parents is, “No matter the outcome, this process has been invaluable for their growth, maturity, and self-awareness.”
