An admissions case study from the WSJ, part 1
This article is about a young woman from Texas with ostensibly sterling qualifications who got rejected from Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Penn, Stanford, UC Berkeley, USC, and Yale. I’m not going to mention her name because I don’t want to Google-sandbag her. I don’t intend any of this post as a criticism of her or her high school career.
Rather, I want to point out that this article misses what I think is the bedrock principle of college admissions: that colleges’ incentives – not students’ merits – drive admissions.
This unfortunate girl and her parents seem not to have known this either. They didn’t hire an admissions counselor.
All of my work rests on colleges’ self-interest. With each of my clients, we find answers to the question: how can we make this kid meet colleges’ needs?
Let’s examine this particular young woman’s accomplishments and traits through this lens.
Academics
We’ll start with her academic record, because that is what colleges do. She got a 1550 on her SATs, had a 3.95 GPA, and took 11 AP classes. Excellent. Above reproach. That record gets her into the “good pile,” but there’s nothing sufficiently out-of-the-ordinary here (e.g. a patent, a published novel) to get her in at hyper-selective schools on academics alone.
Her transcript and test scores were the best part of her application, and they would have been enough to get her into schools like Boston College, Reed, Villanova, or plenty of other places that are much more prestigious and selective than ASU. She needed better advice.
Extracurriculars
First, the good. We see that she performed in 30 plays and sang in the school choir. That shows sustained involvement. Nearly all colleges have drama and singing clubs. Had she been my client, I would have encouraged her to name specific groups at each school in each “why us?” essay.
One little concern here is whether choir counted as a class at her high school. If so, it might have eaten into the time available for the academic “solids.” To learn more about those, you could sign up here for the online seminar on academics.
She founded her school’s accounting club. Okay, that shows initiative and leadership, which probably racked her up a few points on the extracurricular and personal scores.
But how many colleges – especially the elite ones she applied to – have accounting clubs? How is that experience going to help her maintain a college’s thriving extracurricular programs? Will it help her slot into an existing niche in a team, band, group, etc. that the college wants to stay afloat as the senior class graduates?
Her last two activities were work. She helped run a summer camp and had a part-time job. Those were not optimal ways to spend her time outside the classroom. Don’t take my word for it; college admission officers said so themselves in the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s 2019 State of College Admission survey.
I’m not saying high schoolers shouldn’t work. I did! Maybe this young woman’s family needed the money or thought it was a useful lesson in self-reliance. Or maybe she just liked the pocket money. Those are all valid goals. But if her goal was to spend her extracurricular time optimally for college admission, work was the wrong choice.
There is one giant, glaring omission from her extracurriculars. If you’d like to know what, register here for the online seminar on extracurriculars.
We’ll discuss her demographic identity in the next post.
