Who gets into the Ivy League colleges?

[Glowpun]

My niece was turned down for admissions by Harvard (but was admitted to Stanford), despite a high IQ, top grades, etc. But GW Bush was admitted to Harvard under a special program despite the fact that the U. of Texas refused to admit him due to poor grades.

So who does get into the Ivy League schools?

 

[Sonic]

My niece was turned down for admissions by Harvard (but was admitted to Stanford), despite a high IQ, top grades, etc. But GW Bush was admitted to Harvard under a special program despite the fact that the U. of Texas refused to admit him due to poor grades.

So who does get into the Ivy League schools?

A few of my sons friends got into Harvard, Princeton, etc. There's a few different types that get in. The Harvard kids I know go something like this:

1) Recruited athlete. SATs in the range, great extracurriculars (class president), rigorous courses, basically excels at every part of the application.

2) Family is extremely well-connected. Something like 8 family members have gone there for undergrad, law school, etc. Family donated a lot. He's still exceptionally smart, you know high SAT, great grades, the works.

3) The insanely smart/active/normal kid. Pretty close near SAT like 2380. 4.0 unweighted, close to 4.9 weighted. Worked as an intern at at lab full time over the summer. Won some huge science award. President of science club, tutor cub, chess club. Top it off the kid has a social life.

Either you have to have be insanely smart with some sort of hook, or just amazingly smart. If you're the kid of a politician, huge business tycoon, etc, you have a better chance than anybody else right off.

 

[Guy Incognito]

(but was admitted to Stanford)

Congratulations to her, that's terrific!

 

[RepublicanMcDuc]

Stanford is as good as any Ivy League school, including Harvard. Also, the weather in Palo Alto is beautiful and the social atmosphere is significantly more relaxed than Cambridge, so your niece will have a wonderful experience.

With regard to admissions, both Stanford and Harvard receive many, many more applications from students with high GPAs and great test scores than they have slots available. Yes, connections will help get you in at ANY university, but a rejection letter does not mean there is anything less than ideal about a student. And to be honest, with affirmative action and other considerations at play, a lot of getting admitted involves factors entirely out of a student's control.

 

[imagep]

I have read on collegeconfidential.com that the ivy league colleges get so many applicants that they turn down tons of students who are nearly perfect in every way (perfect or near perfect test scores, perfect GPA, etc.) but they can only accept so many students, so lots of worthy students get turned down.

I suspect that extracuricular activities may often be the decision making factor. I mean they have to be able to screen out students some how, so why not screen out the students that have a lack of extracurriculars or special skills first?

My son's college is no where near as prestigious as those types of colleges. They have no official cut-off point as far as GPA or test scores, but on their website it is clearly implied that if a student doesn't have a particular minimum GPA and test scores that the student need not apply. That minimum test score is far below the average score of accepted students.

My son applied for a very specific program, where the admission process required an interview and evaluation of his skill level. About a week before my son got his official acceptance letter, he got a "heads up" email from the department chairperson who told him that his "admissions issue had been taken care of". We knew that my son's academics were just barely above the unofficial minimum, and that his academic stats would put him in the bottom 25% of accepted students, but we didn't know that there was an "issue". So I guess that is pretty much proof that sometimes special skills can override traditional academic performance (and it most certainly happens in athletics). He was actually accepted at one college where he would have been in the bottom 1% academically, down there with many of the athletes, his SAT score was 300 points (on the old two part scale) less than the average student - we were surprised that he was accepted, and can only assume that the acceptance was based upon his special skills.

One student peer of my son had good academic stats, but not top of the class stats. He did have a ton of leadership stuff, turns out that he was exceptionally active in Beta Club stuff on the State and National level, attending a ton of leadership events and he received the top national beta club leadership award possible, the one that they only award to one student in the entire country each year. I'm not sure exactly why he got that award (and almost every other award that the beta club offers), seeing how he wasn't in the top 1% in his class or anything, but he ended up getting several full ride offers to colleges that would have likely rejected him just based upon his academics.

 

[johnny_rebson]

My niece was turned down for admissions by Harvard (but was admitted to Stanford), despite a high IQ, top grades, etc. But GW Bush was admitted to Harvard under a special program despite the fact that the U. of Texas refused to admit him due to poor grades.

So who does get into the Ivy League schools?

So you're implying that people get into these schools based on their last name???

 

[imagep]

Stanford is as good as any Ivy League school, including Harvard...

Yes, there are a lot of colleges where the educational opportunities are just as good as the more famous schools. I suspect that schools like Stanford, Duke, Emory, Vanderbuilt, etc. offer just as good of an education as Ivy League schools, despite the fact that the academic stats (GPA/SAT/ACT) of their students may not be quite as high as Ivy League students.

Even schools that are relatively unknown, like Furman, Wofford, Elon, or many major state supported universities have many outstanding professors and amazing programs such as great study abroad programs, internship opportunities, etc.

It's probably more important to select a college that has a great program for the students specific major than it is selecting the most famous college. Just because a college is ranked at the top overall doesn't mean that a particular program is necessarally outstanding. Some of the fairly unknown colleges often hold claim to being the best for a specific major.

 

[imagep]

So you're implying that people get into these schools based on their last name???

I am fairly confident that this enters into the admissions decision for some students. Certainly a really poor student isn't going to commonly get into a top school, but I would think that it is fairly confident that a lot of kids of famous people, or large contributors, who would not otherwise be accepted, get accepted based upon their family status.

Again, when a college gets 30,000 well qualified applicants for just 5,000 spots, they have to make a decision based on something. Some top colleges even admit that "legacy is a consideration. Legacy preferences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[imagep]

There is probably also so reasonable logic and merit to giving preference to the children of famous and successful people.

Look at the GW Bush example in the OP. The guy ended up being POTUS. What college wouldn't want to list a POTUS in their alumni hall of fame. Successful people often ride the coattails of their ancestors. Money + Fame = Power, and Power = Success

It's unfortunate that all success isn't based upon one's personal merit, but that's life, it isn't fair, and isn't supposed to be.

 

[TurtleDude]

My niece was turned down for admissions by Harvard (but was admitted to Stanford), despite a high IQ, top grades, etc. But GW Bush was admitted to Harvard under a special program despite the fact that the U. of Texas refused to admit him due to poor grades.

So who does get into the Ivy League schools?

YOu are not being Honest. W was accepted at HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL where the admissions standards looks to business and executive potential

he was rejected from the very selective U of Texas LAW SCHOOL where GPA is far more important

He was accepted at YALE UNDERGRAD at a time where graduates of top PREP SCHOOLS LIKE ANDOVER sent MOST OF THEIR GRADUATES to the IVY league

competition for Harvard is far far far tougher now than 50 years ago

so your post is a silly rant that has no real basis in fact


DOZENS of people I went to college with were able to get into TOP business schools with GPA of less than 3.5 because they had done stuff that the BUSINESS SCHOOLS found promising. LAW SCHOOLS are far more NUMBERS oriented

No white male I knew was accepted into Harvard law with a GPA less than a 3.6 and that was a 3.6 from YALE. at least 15 white males i know were accepted to Harvard MBA with a GPA less than a 3.5


Understand?

 

[TurtleDude]

A few of my sons friends got into Harvard, Princeton, etc. There's a few different types that get in. The Harvard kids I know go something like this:

1) Recruited athlete. SATs in the range, great extracurriculars (class president), rigorous courses, basically excels at every part of the application.

2) Family is extremely well-connected. Something like 8 family members have gone there for undergrad, law school, etc. Family donated a lot. He's still exceptionally smart, you know high SAT, great grades, the works.

3) The insanely smart/active/normal kid. Pretty close near SAT like 2380. 4.0 unweighted, close to 4.9 weighted. Worked as an intern at at lab full time over the summer. Won some huge science award. President of science club, tutor cub, chess club. Top it off the kid has a social life.

Either you have to have be insanely smart with some sort of hook, or just amazingly smart. If you're the kid of a politician, huge business tycoon, etc, you have a better chance than anybody else right off.

In 2006 I was at my 25th Reunion and met with the AD. In that year Yale has about 1300 kids in a class. Less than 10% were admitted of the applications (around 20K since they let in more kids than those who accept offers). 256 athletes were on coaches' lists and 206 were accepted (about 80%)

athletes recruited at Ivies have to

be less than 2 deviations within the "average" accepted student

no team can be more than one standard deviation in average from that norm

the ivies rank a student athlete on a 240 point scale

Perfect SAT=80 points
Valedictorian=80 points
Perfect GPA=80 points

average at Yale was the highest in the ivies at the time around 221.7
Harvard was 221.5 or so


I do not recall what a standard deviation below that was

so the kids they recruit are very strong but many are "below average"

a girl I coached was recruited to BROWN but the coach only had "two slots"

so he didn't give her one because she had a 235 score. he knew she would get in anyway so he used his two slots for weaker students. all three of them started all four years

some of the top student athletes are both. the best football player in my class went to Yale Law school. The captain of the squash team the year ahead of me was a phi beta kappa, Rhodes Scholar and went to Harvard Medical school. The captain of the Lax team the year behind me was summa cum laude and the captain of the tennis team my freshman year won a Marshall scholarship and was summa cum laude.

 

[Sonic]

In 2006 I was at my 25th Reunion and met with the AD. In that year Yale has about 1300 kids in a class. Less than 10% were admitted of the applications (around 20K since they let in more kids than those who accept offers). 256 athletes were on coaches' lists and 206 were accepted (about 80%)

athletes recruited at Ivies have to

be less than 2 deviations within the "average" accepted student

no team can be more than one standard deviation in average from that norm

the ivies rank a student athlete on a 240 point scale

Perfect SAT=80 points
Valedictorian=80 points
Perfect GPA=80 points

average at Yale was the highest in the ivies at the time around 221.7
Harvard was 221.5 or so


I do not recall what a standard deviation below that was

so the kids they recruit are very strong but many are "below average"

a girl I coached was recruited to BROWN but the coach only had "two slots"

so he didn't give her one because she had a 235 score. he knew she would get in anyway so he used his two slots for weaker students. all three of them started all four years

some of the top student athletes are both. the best football player in my class went to Yale Law school. The captain of the squash team the year ahead of me was a phi beta kappa, Rhodes Scholar and went to Harvard Medical school. The captain of the Lax team the year behind me was summa cum laude and the captain of the tennis team my freshman year won a Marshall scholarship and was summa cum laude.

Thanks for this, extremely interesting!

 

[Simon W. Moon]

My niece was turned down for admissions by Harvard (but was admitted to Stanford), despite a high IQ, top grades, etc. But GW Bush was admitted to Harvard under a special program despite the fact that the U. of Texas refused to admit him due to poor grades.

So who does get into the Ivy League schools?

My understanding is that they select the best of the best and then pad w/ some folks who are there so that the best of the best still have someone to be better than. I forget what the phrase is which describes this practice. But I learned about it from a Harvard alumnus.

 

[imagep]

Thanks for this, extremely interesting!

I agree. There is just something inheritantly interesting about the inner workings of top universities, and education in general.

 

[TurtleDude]

My understanding is that they select the best of the best and then pad w/ some folks who are there so that the best of the best still have someone to be better than. I forget what the phrase is which describes this practice. But I learned about it from a Harvard alumnus.

actually what really happens is two things

top schools want a well rounded class as opposed to "well rounded students"

that means Yale accepted several Chess Masters (Mike Rohde, Evan Michaelides, Joel Benjamin, MIke Wilder and Jon Tisdale) who may not have been "well rounded" but were all 2400 level or higher players. It accepted Brad Simmons who was a gold Medalist at the world shooting championships and a member of the 1976 Olympic team. David Hyde Pierce was in my class, Jodie Foster a few years behind us. Jennifer Beales was in my brother's class (Flashdance). In other words, students who had world class talent in one area. Combine them all and you have a well rounded class-chess masters, Skeet Champions, and future Oscar and Emmy winners. Legacy admissions at Yale had higher entering GPA/SAT scores than the average student They also were a reason why chess masters, actors, musical prodigies and just plain smart lower middle class kids could go there: legacy families have given yale billions for blind scholarships


The difficulty involves the fact that plenty of kids who are rejected are equally as talented. How do you choose between a kid with a 4.0 and a 1600 SAT and a kid with the same board scores but only a 3.8 because he spent 4 hours a day studying chess and is an International Master? or a kid who is all state in swimming but those 5 AM practices and travel every weekend probably is why he was not valedictorian of his class?

 

[choiceone]

Yes, I agree with TurtleDude. There are several criteria in addition to great SAT, great grades, and great recommendations.
1) Quota for particular high schools.
2) Legacy policy.
3) Applicants' special talents (this includes more than just athletes).

The Ivies (which as far as I'm concerned also include U of Chicago - and possibly Northwestern - in the Midwest and certainly include Stanford on the West Coast) do not want to privilege graduates of only particular high schools. I went to one of two public high schools in the suburbs north of Chicago where a rather large number of students got very high SATs and had impressive recommendations as well as great grades and records of lots of extracurricular activities. Some brilliant graduates of those schools were not accepted by some Ivies because of the sheer number of people who applied from those schools. The way around this is to go to some other university for a year and then apply to transfer into the Ivy of choice, as transfer students are not subject to the quotas.

Next, most Ivies have legacy policies. If your parent (and sometimes grandparent) graduated from a particular Ivy, you are more welcome than a student whose parent did not go there and the school will make some exceptions to accept you over a non-legacy. That is how Bush, Jr., first got accepted at Yale, as a legacy, and his SATs, etc., may have been inferior even to the lower limit and he could still have gotten accepted.

In addition, if you have some unusual special talent, you are more welcome than a student who does not. The rarer the special talent, the more welcome you will be. The school is prepared to make some exceptions to accept you over other people even if the latter are brilliant but not as rare. This special talent policy is also subject to departmental and other school politics. If a school is heavily dependent on its football team for contributions, the football coach has more power to get rare athletes. If a certain department has a lot of clout, as does the drama department at Yale, it can get its favored applicants accepted more easily than a department with less clout.

In addition, student body diversity policies vary. For example, Princeton has a much lower quota limit for foreign students than any of the other Ivies, while Cornell courts foreign students for international diversity. Granting institutions for grad students can also apply such policies. For example, one East-West Center grad student at U of Hawai'i told me that, when he first applied for an EWC fellowship, he was rejected, so he applied the following year, too, and he was then accepted. That institution takes certain percentages of Americans, Japanese, Indians, etc., males and females, applicants in different disciplines. My acquaintance was prepared to keep on applying until the applicant population composition favored him for a grant.

 

[Khayembii Communique]

My experiences are mostly with research about MBA program admissions, so it might not be as applicable to undergrad but IMO it is to a significant extent

I'm at a point in my life where I'm trying to position myself to apply to top-10 MBA programs in about five years. My past few years haven't been that outstanding, so I'm going to try to really apply myself in the next few years to improve my odds. I've been reading a lot about admissions criteria, too. Now obviously the criteria is different between undergrad, grad and MBA programs. But I think a lot of criteria is common, and that is that these colleges are looking for people that have unique stories, that have proven themselves as leaders, and stand out from the crowd.

Yes, these schools do commonly reject people that have essentially flawless resume's, but that's because they get 1000 people with similar flawless resumes and have to choose 10 of them to accept. MBA programs commonly get people with finance backgrounds who have an ivy league undergrad, did internships and full time jobs at bulge bracket banks, legit extracurriculars, volunteer experience, etc. So many people go through this "standard" finance track that they all get lumped into one large group, and then they have to pick 5% of those applicants for admittance.

So when you're applying to grad school (or even undergrad), remember that you are not really competing against everyone that applies, but rather the small group of similar applicants with whom your application will be lumped in. What will greatly increase your chances of acceptance, then, is to recognize very early on what group that you are going to be identified with, and then structure your work and life experiences to make yourself stand out from that group, to make you unique.

This is both good and bad. Good in the sense that for most people this group is easy to identify, and therefore also easy to stand out from. Bad in the sense that you need to be at least as good as others in your group, meaning that for top schools very high GPA/GMAT/GRE will not put you ahead, it will just keep you from falling behind.

Also keep in mind that, and I absolutely hate to admit this, TurtleDude is 100% correct. Every program is going to have different qualifications that it looks for, not only based on what it does (business vs. law is his example), but also based on the school's philosophy (Harvard adcoms love the bleeding heart change-the-world crap a lot more than Wharton so that kind of stuff will go much farther there).

Now also this means that if you do have some areas where you are worse off than your competition, you might be able to make this up in your story. Just yesterday I was researching HBS admissions with mediocre grades, and I came across a story about a guy that had a bad GPA and worked at UPS who got into HBS without an interview because he so eloquently stated his leadership and mentor experience in his essays.

This also means that you can make up for something like a poor GPA by doing other things, creating an alternative transcript for example, or succeeding in business. Or you might be able to simply explain a poor GPA away by talking about how involved you were in EC's which is why your grades weren't as high. This is seriously a completely legitimate explanation for business schools because they want somebody who is a leader and who is going to go out and be social and get stuff done. This means they are more receptive to the story about the person that didn't want to stick their nose in a book for four years but rather got out and volunteered to go build houses in Africa, or who ran in student government and become student body president while being involved in varsity sports or something.

Also, it's true, being a URM or coming from a very "challenging" situation (e.g. extreme poverty, escaping a war-torn country, etc.) does wonders for your application.

 

[digsbe]

Undergrad really doesn't matter. It's graduate admissions into competitive programs that is hard.

 

[Aunt Spiker]

My niece was turned down for admissions by Harvard (but was admitted to Stanford), despite a high IQ, top grades, etc. But GW Bush was admitted to Harvard under a special program despite the fact that the U. of Texas refused to admit him due to poor grades.

So who does get into the Ivy League schools?

Honestly - they're over rated . . . a bunch of rich well off fratties and idiots who glided in by parental connections? I think students are better off when half of their classmates actually earned their way in with brain power.

Congrats on getting into Stanford - I hope she proves my negative opinion of ivy league schools wrong with intense success and makes me look like an ass

 

[The Giant Noodle]

Kids care about where they go to college. They SHOULD care about learning what they need to, getting the best grades they can, being well rounded and getting a job.

 

[Khayembii Communique]

Kids care about where they go to college. They SHOULD care about learning what they need to, getting the best grades they can, being well rounded and getting a job.

They should care about both. You have advantages at well known colleges that you don't elsewhere.

 

[Andalublue]

The desire to attend an Ivy League college can be as much about prestige and kudos as about academics. Getting into Stanford is a great achievement and a great choice. If you look at any of the three major university ranking systems (QS, THES and Shanghai) you'll see that Stanford out-rates most of the Ivy League universities.

In the THES and ARWU rankings, only 2 of the Top 10 schools are Ivy League. In the QS it's three. Stanford appears at position 2, 15 and 2 in the respective rankings. Not bad at all.

 

[Northern Light]

I don't know about other schools but a girl at my high school applied to Harvard and got in. She had top grades and everything, but she told a mutual friend that Harvard also picks people based on their background. Their classes are made up of people from all over the place who are original thinkers. They care just as much about originality as they do top marks. It made me kind of want to apply there, but too bad about the tuition fee! Holy cow!

 

[Andalublue]

I don't know about other schools but a girl at my high school applied to Harvard and got in. She had top grades and everything, but she told a mutual friend that Harvard also picks people based on their background. Their classes are made up of people from all over the place who are original thinkers. They care just as much about originality as they do top marks. It made me kind of want to apply there, but too bad about the tuition fee! Holy cow!

Background or original thinking? How do you suppose they judge the latter?

 

[soccerboy22]

Background or original thinking? How do you suppose they judge the latter?

They do it by reading the essays apparenlty. There is a running joke at MIT among some of the departments is the only thing hard about Harvard is getting in.