Distinctive

By Victoria Tillson Evans, Ph.D.

Many people sent me a copy of the Wall Street Journal article, “To Get into the Ivy League, ‘Extraordinary’ Isn’t Always Enough,” the day it came out. I obviously couldn’t not read it given the panic it was causing. So I sat down at the kitchen table with my morning coffee to review the story of this “extraordinary senior” from Texas who was rejected by all the Ivies and heading to Arizona State University.

While I sympathized with the student, the author’s lack of understanding of what makes a successful Ivy-level applicant made me view this piece as nothing more than an attempt to fearmonger. The author left out a lot of information about the featured student’s applications, including the content and quality of her essays and letters of recommendation, if she demonstrated interest, or how well she communicated any of her achievements in the applications themselves. While I tried to clarify for you what it takes to get into a top-tier school without a hook in “Prove How Good You Are” (if you need a refresher on what a hook is, check out “The Magical Admissions Gift – The Hook 2.0”), the story I believe the journalist actually missed was how so many schools, including those that used to be Safety or at least Target Schools for many, have now entered the rarified realm of being Reach Schools for everyone.

Skyrocketing application numbers, test optional policies, a heavier reliance on Early Decision, and more sophisticated implementations of big data have led to a perfect storm in college admissions, especially over the last two years. Just to give you examples of what I’m talking about, here are the acceptance rates of a few such options:

Northeastern University: 20% (2020) down to 7% (2022)

Boston University: 20% (2020) down to 14% (2022)

NYU: 21% (2020) down to 12% (2022)

Colgate: 27% (2020) down to 12% (2022)

Georgia Tech: 21% (2020) down to 17% (2022)

For more comprehensive lists and charts, check out this article which aggregates nearly 100 examples.

Forget about Harvard admitting only 3.2% or MIT only 4%. If you’re a star candidate, your chances of getting in may have dropped a tiny bit due to those schools’ current efforts to increase the enrollment of low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented minority students, but your chances haven’t decreased to the same degree that most students now face at other schools. What can you do when you enter freshman year loving Northeastern University, expecting that you’ll get in if you keep your grades up and do well on the SAT or ACT, only to find out by senior year that it’s only admitting 7% of its applicants? What if you need the financial safety of an in-state school, but suddenly Virginia Tech’s School of Engineering is almost impossible to get into for Virginia residents? How do you react when you’re a strong pre-med candidate to Case Western Reserve University, but discover that they’ve refined their accepted-student algorithm so that it banishes all overqualified applicants to the purgatory of the indefinite waitlist?

In reality, this shift across many college tiers is what everyone needs to pay attention to. This is what has become unpredictable and frustrating for everyone. And this is why you need to do everything in your power to ensure that you don’t end up disappointed like the Wall Street Journal’s “extraordinary” student.

You should remember, above all else, that there are many pieces of this process that are within your control to shift the odds in your favor, though some require more effort than others.

1. Prioritize your school performance. Getting top grades from the moment you start high school has been and will continue to be the most important part of your college application process. The better the grades you earn in the most challenging course load that you can handle, the more college options you’ll have down the road.
2. Build a balanced list with Reach, Target, and Safety Schools. It has always been a fool’s errand to apply almost exclusively to Reach Schools. Instead, make sure that you have an even number of options in each category just in case any of them see a massive influx of applications or change how they admit students.
3. Show every single school on your list that you care about getting in by demonstrating interest. More often than not, students ignore their Safety Schools (and sometimes some of their Target Schools), and they do so at their own peril. Visit, connect with your admissions rep, interview wherever possible, and talk to other members of the community! Include some of these details in your applications. Making a strong effort to show you’re serious about getting in makes a difference (even at the colleges that claim that they don’t track demonstrated interest).
4. Make an impact and achieve. Whether it’s in your extracurricular pursuits or community, being an active member who seeks to excel is so important. Just showing up won’t help you, and admissions reps can tell the difference in your activity descriptions. Having a leadership title also won’t matter either if you don’t really do anything. Instead, you need to seek ways to introduce positive contributions. The larger your impact or the higher your level of achievement, the better colleges will perceive you as an applicant.
5. Be thoughtful in your applications. Answer everything fully (unless you very truly cannot), and ensure that you present the best picture of yourself. You can choose which activities to include or exclude. You can use the Additional Information section to provide explanations of unfortunate situations or to highlight achievements that don’t fit elsewhere. You can keep your presentation organized and easy to interpret. You can take your essays seriously by putting your full effort into your writing and digging into your growth and motivations. All of these efforts will put you on the path towards getting stronger results.
6. Study for the SAT or ACT. While some of you may eventually apply without test scores to schools that offer score optional policies, take your test prep seriously. Not every college is seeking a 1500+ SAT/34+ ACT score. Plus, you’ll give yourself more options if you can submit a score in the top 50th percentile to at least some of the choices on your list.
7. Use Early Decision (ED) well. Since the 2008 Great Recession, colleges have relied more and more on Early Decision to fill their classes. Some schools, like Tulane, now pull over 2/3 of their students from that well. You could say that it has now reached the point where ED has basically become Regular Decision (RD) for many schools, while the official RD round has become “You’re too late.” This is why it’s important to apply ED if you can accept whatever financial aid package you receive, and to choose a school that isn’t too much of a Reach School for you (low Reaches where you’re almost in the middle 50th percentile are great options for ED). If you don’t use your ED card or waste it on a school where your academic record is well below the accepted average, you may find that you won’t get into any Reach Schools at all.

There is no single strategy or action on your part that will prevent you from having to weather this particular storm. Shielding yourself from the current disruptions to college admissions requires a multi-pronged, longitudinal, and mindful effort on your part. You may still face some disappointing news down the road despite your best efforts, because no one can control other people’s decisions, who else is in the applicant pool, or a mediocre letter of recommendation. The goal, however, is to do everything you can to protect yourself during this perfect storm, so that you not only weather it, but find yourself safely and happily docked at a college on the other side.