While most colleges worldwide accept students based on grades (or class rank) and scores on a standardized test, top American colleges are unique in how they select their future students.
Grades, admissions test scores (SAT/ACT), the strength of curriculum (performance on Advanced Placement exams, for example), and recommendation letters are all carefully evaluated. An essential part of an application is often comprised of the non-academic portion of your profile – extracurricular activities, examples of leadership, community service/volunteering, internships, research, work, talents/awards. Along with listing them, you would humanize your experiences in college essays that are designed to explain how you grew and contributed; and what you learned.
Admissions factors updated for the test-optional world
During the pandemic, many colleges were forced to experiment with test-optional policies as students could not physically take the SAT or the ACT. Many institutions continued with the policy subsequently as a social justice matter, although some elite schools, such as MIT and UT Austin began requiring SAT/ACT scores.
NACAC updated its admissions factor table in 2023 to reflect this development. Test scores do not appear in this table:
Race, gender, and ethnicity
As American colleges and universities move to equalize opportunities to help create a more diverse society, all of the above merit factors begin to pale in comparison to the one metric that is so hard to measure: a student's background. This huge catch-all umbrella includes various measures that a student can't control, such as gender or race, and the so-called adversity score, which measures such intangibles as family structure, housing, educational attainment of the community, and the likelihood of being a victim of a crime.
The theory is that students who overcome disadvantages and still do reasonably well in high school deserve a shot at admission to the best colleges over those students who are more privileged and may even have a better student profile overall, partly because of the privilege. Studies have shown that regardless of a student's background during high school, graduates from an elite institution such as Harvard or MIT all do equally well, get the best positions in business and industry, and continue leading productive careers.
Elite Schools' Supply & Demand equation
Demand: There
are 26,000 high schools in America, and each has a valedictorian, the
student ranked #1. Besides the salutatorian, the student ranked #2 also
deserves nearly the same recognition because, over four years, these two
students would have often traded places with each other. This makes the
group of over-achievers a total of 52,000 students. There are also
15,000 National Merit Finalists (NMF) — admittedly, some who include the
class valedictorian and the salutatorian — who are chosen based on the
highest scores achieved on the PSAT-11 test. The finalists must also go through additional scrutiny and a review of supplemental essays, school recommendations,
and overall academic merit. This means that there are nearly 67,000 academic over-achievers across America. And our simple model here omits every other merit student outside of the valedictorian, salutatorian, and an NMF finalist.
Supply of seats: The
combined freshman acceptance of all eight Ivy League schools is about 16,000
students. Discounting this number by international students, who
comprise about 25% of each incoming Ivy League class, the effective
number of elite seats available to American students is only about
11,000.
During the last 25 years, the number of elite college admission seats
has remained the same. So, at a macroeconomic level, this is a classic
supply and demand imbalance problem, tilting heavily to the demand side
while the supply stays the same.
And
there's brutal competition for these prized seats. Consider
Asian-American students, some of the most high-performing teenagers
striving to enter elite institutions. According to the Census Bureau,
the Asian-American population increased from 10.4 million in 2000 to
18.9 million in 2017, an 80 percent increase in a generation.
For
the class of 2023 and in recent years, many of these superstar high
school students never made it to even one of their choice Ivy League
schools.
How to increase your odds of elite admission
High-school students must start carefully strategizing about their roadmap to an elite school four to five years before submitting their college applications. Students must have outstanding academic metrics: GPA, SAT/ACT scores, strength of curriculum, and class rank.
They also have to be the best in school and extracurricular activities. They must demonstrate character by being on the school's athletic or debate teams or representing their school in band, orchestra, or drama. They should show leadership by being elected to a position of importance in student government, being selected as ambassadors, or working on the school's newspaper or yearbook team. They also should demonstrate a passion for a skill or talent, such as playing the violin or creating art.
And they must engage in community service, such as serving those in need or older adults.
Most students from privileged families strive to build impressive overall profiles, shunted from activity to activity by caring parents.
Applying Early Decision is a crucial strategy to help lift an application over the top, but doing so comes with its own drawbacks. Also, it may be better for Asian American students to not disclose their race on the Common App.
The new definition of 'student promise': Overcoming adversity factors
Americans of all stripes and colors want a fair shot at their pipe dreams. Income inequality is a real issue, and elite colleges are trying hard to address decades of systemic injustices to look at students and evaluate merit differently.
For
students who face adversity at home — and who belong to
under-represented minority populations — colleges generally exempt them
from having to build their extracurricular profiles in the manner
described above. For these students, taking care of a sibling and doing
chores around the home when a single parent goes to work are far more
relevant than perfecting skills on the violin. Even work experience —
earning a paycheck at a McDonald's to support the family income — is
weighted significantly higher than many traditional extracurricular
activities pursued by "privileged" white or Asian-American students.
Because decades of data show a strong correlation between adversity and race, colleges have used adversity as a code word to admit more students from under-represented minority Black, Hispanic, and Native American populations at the expense of white and Asian American students.
Until twenty years ago, America's elite colleges largely considered only an applicant's accomplishments. In that sense, American institutions were more like professional sports leagues. Imagine if the qualifications to be ranked as a Top-100 tennis player had a "race" component in addition to matches won or lost. Such an idea would have been immediately dismissed.
This conflict is at the heart of the Supreme Court case against Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill, brought about by Edward Blum, founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiffs in the court cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In a landmark 2023 decision outlawing affirmative action, the United States Supreme Court ruled that colleges should not admit students based on race or any other factor common to a group. Individual merit should prevail.
