Schools you thought were targets probably aren’t — at least not in the traditional way we've thought about safety/ targets/ reaches.

Let me explain.

I work with students every year in our consulting practice who have , and .

In one of our first meetings, they'll show me their list of schools and ask what I think. It's laden with the usual suspects of top-20s.

"Well, I’ve got a 4.0, maximum rigor, a 1560, and standout extracurriculars... so Tufts, Northeastern, and USC are all 'target schools' for me..."

But are they?

Here’s a quick example:

Say I have a different student with a 3.5, 1350, and solid ECs.

Their “target schools” should be schools that, roughly, admit students with 3.3 – 3.7 GPAs, 1300 – 1400 SAT, and solid ECs.

It’s not hard to find those schools. Or reaches that are a bit higher and safeties that are a bit lower.

That’s how lists of target schools have always been made.

But that doesn’t work when you have a 4.0, maximum rigor, 1560, and cracked ECs. And as grades and scores have inflated over time, that’s more and more of you. (In the , 38% of respondents had a 4.0. That tracks with what I saw at Vanderbilt.)

What schools would be targets? Duke, Stanford, and Yale? They all have those ranges of GPA and SAT. But obviously, these aren’t targets.

The most highly-selective colleges (let's say the top 20 and any with a sub-20% admit rate) are reaches for everyone. Including you.

BUT the next set of very selective schools—places like UVA, Michigan, NYU, Georgetown, a couple UCs, Boston University—all still deny way more students than they admit. I argue that the term "target" isn't a great fit for these schools, either.

These schools set up their admission offices and enrollment management departments to solicit as many applications as possible, deny as many (strong applicants) as they possibly can get away with, and . (Trust me, I literally studied enrollment management at a T15 under our VP of Enrollment, then turned around and worked in the same admissions office.)

In other words, these offices are set up in a way that they just aren't "target" schools in the way we used to think about that term.

OK so what do I do?

If who has a near-“perfect” application, the traditional way of thinking about target and reach schools doesn't apply well to your situation. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Instead, shift your mindset and your school list framing. You now have super reaches, reaches, and safeties. Congratulations.

The top, top selective schools are still reaches. Some are super reaches.

That next set of schools that I mentioned (the not-targets-anymore schools) should still be considered reaches—sorry. They still deny a large majority of students who look like you. Don’t look at their medians and get overly confident.

Definitely don’t say, “Safeties? Who needs to think about safeties when so many great schools are on my target list!”

In the last few years we’ve seen the “inflation” of these categories – where traditional reaches have become super-reaches, and traditional “top tier” targets have become reaches. For. Everyone.

You should still apply to both of these categories of schools—the super reaches and the reaches. And if you do it right, you will get into some.

But you need to have your safeties locked down too. Three safeties is good, more is fine. You should be well above their middle 50% for GPA and SAT/ACT, they should admit more than 50% of their applicants (one over 70% for good measure), and make sure you double check if you're applying to a really competitive major like CS, engineering, or business. Sometimes those are really selective programs.

Great news! This leaves a ton of awesome public flagships, liberal arts colleges, and other schools as safeties. You’ll probably get merit awards and honors program admits too.

If you do this, you'll have the right mindset and strategy to , and you'll have some great schools to pick from when decisions come out.

But for God’s sake, don’t treat reaches as targets. Yesterday’s targets are today’s reaches. Does that mean that yesterday’s safeties are today’s targets? Probably. 🤔

Tl;dr: You know that HYPSM aren’t targets for anyone—but that next tier of selective schools aren’t, either. Shift your sights a bit lower to find schools that may actually be “targets” in today’s admissions landscape.

Good luck out there ✌🏼

How many times have you heard the following from students on A2C who are wondering if they are at a disadvantage?

“I go to a super competitive public school – would I be better off at a private feeder school?”

“I go to a less-resourced high school where few of our students apply to selective schools, much less attend them.”

“I am a(n) [ethnicity] student in [area with a lot of other students like me]. How screwed am I?”

Some good news: in my experience in highly selective admission, these things don’t matter all that much.  And they certainly don’t matter as much as students on A2C seem to think they do.

Here’s what you should know about how admission offices compare students to each other when , and takeaways at the end of what you might do with this information.

(By the way, it bears repeating more than once that this information is most relevant at the most highly selective schools. I am sharing my perspective because I know many on A2C are applying to these schools and I worked for a couple. Spoiler alert: you don’t need to stress about the high school you attend.)

The concept of a school group

In my experience as an admissions officer, and in speaking with many other colleagues, applicants are generally competing most directly with the other applicants from their own high school.

Context matters: your school is one of the main factors AOs pay attention to.

So, you aren’t competing against “every other Bay area kid” or “every CS major in Texas” for a spot at a selective school, you’re competing against the students in your high school.

Admission officers (and me) often refer to the group of applicants from a particular high school as a “school group”.

AOs make an internal comparison within the school group, based on measurable criteria like weighted GPA.  I think weighted GPA is the way to go here — If a high school has 20 applicants to a university and seven have a 4.0 unweighted GPA, it is that weighted GPA that will help the AO determine where these seven students fall relative to each other.

Keep in mind that GPA isn’t everything.  Your application tells a story (ideally a cohesive one) through your extracurriculars, essays, rec letters, and transcript.  It is not always the student with the highest weighted GPA that get in, but it’s certainly more useful than listing students in alphabetical order.

OK, so AOs might list all the applicants from a particular school group by weighted GPA.  What do they do with this information?

How school groups help AOs compare students within a high school

Listing students by weighted GPA within a school group is helpful to AOs for many reasons.  Here’s a quick list. It:

• Allows AOs to see who in the school group is at the top of their class and when rank is not available, it may help them estimate relative rank in class.

• Get a sense of each student’s rigor in the high school by comparing the numbers of AP, IB, DE, or Honors courses taken.

• Makes an easy year-to-year comparison of students, which can also help…

• Determine if the top student(s) this year are on par with the top students from previous years. Is this year’s group stronger or weaker than last year’s? Is the top student this year the top we have ever seen from this high school? I would always bring this up in committee.

• Compare students across decision plans – how do our Regular Decision applicants stack up against our ED applicants?

So, can I stand out if I’m coming from a less-resourced school or a super-competitive school?

In short, yes.

Selective admission offices understand the relative resources and competitiveness across high schools.  They can admit “deeper” in the class of highly-resourced high schools — maybe selecting two, three, or four of the top applicants — while only the very top students at less-resourced schools may stand out as competitive at the most selective schools.

(You can read more of my thoughts on school context relative to ECs and academics in .)

Students at less-resourced schools might also simply apply to fewer elite universities than their private school counterparts. At a top private school in New York, fully 70%+ of the high school class might apply to top-20 schools.

This is why you might see a handful of competitive students at a top public or “feeder” private school admitted into a T20 university in a particular year.  But that doesn’t prevent the student who was the absolute standout at a less-resourced school from being viewed as super compelling to an admissions office. As a bonus, remember that selective universities are well-resourced — they are better positioned to fund low-income students and are seeking to enroll Pell-eligible students.

To be clear, I’m not saying what I have described is a perfect, fair, and equitable process. I am describing the landscape as I see it and offering my advice.

Ultimately, admissions offices are looking for students who bring diverse perspectives and experiences to their campus community. Colleges — of any level of selectivity — are looking for students who have bloomed where they were planted.

Takeaways:

Admissions offices compare students within the context of their high school using school groups.  OK, so what should you do with this information?

1. Don’t worry too much if you attend a competitive high school and plan to apply to selective colleges. Admission officers are experts at understanding school context and admitting the students – from any school – who are the best fit based on their institution’s priorities.

2. If you’re in a competitive region or metro area, stop worrying so much about being from the Bay Area, etc. Where you live is something you can’t control — not worth your time to fret over it. But more, it just doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.

3. Don’t lose sight of yourself and the rest of your application trying to calculate your academics compared to the rest of your class. The written components matter a lot and there are so many other that go into the final decision process that are within your control.

4. High-flying students at less-resourced schools shouldn’t write off selective colleges and universities because of the school they come from or the sticker price. AOs can understand their school context and, in fact, lower-income students stand to benefit the most from their financial aid packages!

Instead of over focusing on admissions competition, focus on being yourself, engaging in activities that interest you, and building a balanced school list. Give yourself permission to enjoy high school. Let me know if this brings up questions.

Peace ✌️

Your application to most highly selective colleges and universities will boil down to a few scores that the admissions office assigns to you based on their perception of your achievement in and out of the classroom.  Typically, these scores revolve around academic performance, personal achievements, and fit for the school or major.

You can’t know your audience unless you know their criteria for passing judgment on your application, so here’s what you should know.

Let’s talk about the “personal” score, the mysterious fulcrum of holistic admissions.

(By the way, this isn’t new or secret information.  Harvard’s methods for documenting personal scores are well-known, especially since the lawsuit. You can read their internal papers on how these scores are assigned. Also, I was looking for an article to reference it and the first Google result was about it… from 1969!)

What is a personal score?

For decades, selective colleges and universities have looked for students who have both excellent academics AND a high propensity for success in areas beyond the classroom.  Excellent grades and scores are necessary, but not sufficient, for admission to these schools.

Enter the personal score.

The personal score isn’t about personality, gregariousness, or extraversion.  It’s a measure of context, impact, and duration in pursuits beyond – or well beyond – the four walls of a classroom.

It also is usually grounded in the context a student comes from – their hometown, family, and high school environment. That is, personal scores are not tabulated on the national or international scale, where every student in the universe of applicants is used to grade personal scores on a curve. Instead, schools look at local contexts to evaluate and assign these scores.

Note that schools might vary in criteria or use a different internal name for this score, but assigning a personal score is part of the process at most highly selective schools.

What elements of an application contribute to a personal score?

Here’s what Harvard says about their personal score :

The personal rating reflects a wide range of valuable information in the application, such as an applicant’s personal essays, responses to short answer questions, recommendations from teachers and guidance counselors, alumni interview reports, staff interviews, and any additional letters or information provided by the applicant. Harvard uses this information to understand the applicant’s full life story… and what impact they might have both here at Harvard and after they graduate, as citizens and citizen-leaders of our society.

So if the academic score is quantitative and comes from grades, test scores, rigor, class rank, APs, etc., the personal score is much more qualitative. It’s assigned based on the all-important qualitative aspects of your application – essays, the extracurricular section, letters of recommendation, and any other additional information you supply. The personal score is a major part of holistic admissions.

In my view, personal score and fit for major/school are the two elements of the application that students have the most control over in their application.

It’s not just “what extracurriculars did you do?” It’s how you talk about these experiences that matters—because an AO will read what you tell them and score you accordingly. In other words, the way you articulate your experiences can influence a literal quantitative score assigned to your application. To be deliberately redundant: It matters how you talk about these things!

We’ll come back to this in a moment. But first, what goes into a personal score?

What are schools looking for when assigning a personal score?

Different offices will have different priorities for what they want to see.  Drawing from the language of a few admissions offices and in my experience, I would boil down a student’s personal qualities to context, recognition, magnitude, and duration.

Context: Context matters—especially for students who have faced some disadvantages. If you took care of your 3 siblings throughout high school, they’re going to evaluate your “average” ECs in a very different light. If you’re a first-generation student coming from an under-resourced high school, they’re going to factor that in. If you attend a top-10 university prep private school—or are a well-resourced student in a competitive public school—they’ll still want to see stand-out achievements within that context. Local context—the context of your school—really matters for assessing personal scores.

Recognition: Have you been recognized for your efforts?  This might be an honor or award in athletics, an academic competition, or a major scholarship.  Perhaps you have achieved success off the beaten path by designing video games, starting a popular podcast, or selling original artwork.  (See my piece on distinctive ECs ).  It’s helpful to spell out the level of achievement by using numbers when possible.  How much money did you raise?  How many people are on the team you lead?  How selective was the program you joined?

Magnitude: Have your efforts outside of the classroom had a large positive effect on others?  Have you positively impacted your household, school, neighborhood, city, state, or country?  As an admissions officer, I would often describe standout students with high impact as “change agents” or “natural leaders.”  The magnitude of one’s actions, and their impact on others, stand out.

Duration:  This one is pretty self-explanatory – how long have you been engaged in these activities?  Look, I get it.  If you’re 17 when you apply to college you haven’t done anything for 20 years.  But it’s a nice bonus to demonstrate a trend of commitment or interest in a topic over time.  Still, don’t worry if you only recently discovered your current number one passion.  Heck, that will continue to evolve throughout the course of your life.  But know that AOs want to know what you’ve been up to for all four years of high school and it’s always nice to see longer-term commitment.

Now, I want to provide some bad news and some somewhat good news.

Bad news first. At many of the most highly selective schools in the country, the reality is that many students who are admitted have national or international levels of achievement in their ECs. These students have BIG impact and, often, demonstrate dedication over time.

The good news: Many students don’t have the resources or opportunities to have a national-level impact, and that is okay.  AOs understand this and often value outsized local impact similarly to national achievement.  Also, schools have gotten way better in the past decade at understanding and awarding value to family responsibilities.

However, the students who might be in a tight spot are those in the middle—those who come from well-resourced communities, have typical backgrounds and life experiences, but who lack high-magnitude or high-recognition ECs and achievements.

These students are likely to be passed over in the extremely nitpicky holistic process at many selective schools. was talking to someone at a super selective private university in California (👀) who told him that, even ten years ago, national or international-level achievements were the par for admitted students. In that admissions office, because there were so many over-the-top qualified students, the true job of the AO was to look for reasons to rule someone out—not reasons to accept. Things are crazy at the top.

This is something that most schools won’t say out loud. But it’s really important to know.

(We’re going to tell you what to do with this information at the bottom. But spoiler alert: build a more balanced list of less-selective target and safety schools.)

What is the weight of the personal score in the overall evaluation process?

As we’ve written , and as Joel R. Kramer wrote in the Harvard Crimson in 1969, academics drive your application’s trajectory in admissions.  If you have a 3.5 GPA and a 1350 SAT and apply to Harvard, your application might not even progress far enough to receive a personal score.  But, if your academics are deemed competitive enough, the admission office will dig further into the qualitative side of your application.

(Smaller schools like LACs may assign personal scores—or some analog to them—to every student, regardless of their academics. Plug for LACs—especially for students who have less competitive academics but relatively stronger ECs and stories.

But assuming your application does pass the academic thresholds, the real weight of personal scores becomes clear. We know that personal factors – again, stemming from essays, ECs, and recommendations – play a major role in your chances of admission.  Just look at these articles from students who reviewed their admissions file at and .  Notice all the mentions of those personal qualities and other qualitative factors I wrote about. AOs notice these factors and how you write about them.

Ultimately, successful applicants to the most competitive schools demonstrate excellent academics in addition to standout extracurriculars and essays. Academics = necessary. Academics + personal score = sufficient.

Takeaways

The information above is most relevant at only a relatively small handful of colleges and universities in the US. While it is true that academics drive the admissions process at nearly every college, the vast majority of college students at the vast majority of institutions have much more average/ normal/ good-but-not-off-the-charts grades and ECs.

So what do you do with this information?

For one, I hope you have a clearer understanding of how and when qualitative holistic review enters into the picture. The personal score is important to understand because it makes up one element of the trinity of admissions evaluation: academic competitiveness, personal factors, and institutional/school/major alignment. We’ll be talking about institutional alignment in our next post to complete the circle.

For two, I want you to understand that the essays, ECs, LORs, and other soft factors aren’t just important—they’re decisive. Meeting academic standards is necessary. Beyond that, the main thing determining your admissibility is the content of these other application elements and how you weave them into .

Finally, we want you to get a better sense of where to apply. Highly selective admissions isn’t competitive simply because of academic cutoffs—it’s also tough because so many students have such outrageous levels of EC achievement.

Our eternal—and hard-to-hear—message is that most applicants should build a list that places its eggs in non-T20 schools. The T20 represents only .04% of schools in the US. Many, many of the other 99.96% of schools have great ROI outcomes and are much more attainable to attend.

Whew, that was a monolith of a post. Hope you understand personal score now! As always, feel free to ask questions in the comments.

—

P.S., If you're interested in any of this "inside" information about admissions, there are so many books that you can take a look at, some of which served as a basis for these posts. Here are a few:

• , by Jeff Selingo. "One of the most insightful books ever about “getting in” and what higher education has become, Who Gets In and Why not only provides an usually intimate look at how admissions decisions get made, but guides prospective students on how to honestly assess their strengths and match with the schools that will best serve their interests."

• , by Becky Munsterer Sabky. "Witty and warm, informative and inspiring, Valedictorians at the Gate is the needed tonic for overstressed, overworked, and overwhelmed students on their way to the perfect college for them."

• , by Michelle Hernandez. "A former admissions officer at Dartmouth College reveals how the world's most highly selective schools really make their decisions."

• , by Mitchell Stevens. "With novelistic flair, sensitivity to history, and a keen eye for telling detail, Stevens explains how elite colleges and universities have assumed their central role in the production of the nation's most privileged classes. Creating a Class makes clear that, for better or worse, these schools now define the standards of youthful accomplishment in American culture more generally."

Note for 2026:

Hello! This is one of my most popular posts and has gotten a ton of traction in the months since I wrote it. I hope you find it helpful. I want to quickly share some other resources my team has put together to help families navigate the college admissions process. You can also find relevant links in my bio.

I'm a former admission officer at Vanderbilt and University of Mary Washington. I've been doing admissions work on the university and private side for about ten years. Part of my work now with our small team at Sierra Admissions and Admit Report is to create free content around admissions strategy.

Reach out if you need support!

Now, back to your regularly scheduled Reddit post...

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“How the heck do you review 5, 10, 20... even 50 thousand applications a year?”

I was asked this question countless times as an admission officer.

When file volumes get so high it’s natural for most parties to be concerned. Students look at these numbers and think, “I spent 40, 50, 60+ hours crafting my application and now you’re going to read it for, what?  5 minutes?  10?  Maybe 15 if I’m lucky?”

Colleges use terms like “holistic admissions,” but the reality of tens of thousands of qualified applicants and a sub-10% admit rate can make decisions feel random.  The system can seem to resemble a machine that churns through thousands of applications and spits out decisions that, taken individually, might not make a lot of sense.

You’ll find that it’s (mostly) not dark, smoky rooms with mysterious decision-making.  And it certainly isn’t random.

I wrote this post to pull the curtain back a bit on how admissions offices deal with this volume of applications. I want you to understand what happens after you click submit on your application. Plus, if you’re on A2C, there’s a decent chance you are like me and find this stuff pretty interesting.

This information is drawn from conversations with AOs at many schools, my graduate degree in higher ed/enrollment management, and 8+ years in admissions/higher ed at three schools.

Edit to say the obvious -- different schools approach admissions with their own variation of much of what you will read here. This post is meant to help applicants and their families better understand the admissions process, not perfectly describe one process used by every university. I reference public and private schools here, and check out my book recommendations at the end. That being said...

Buckle up.

First, applications are sorted by academics

(To make this easier to understand visually, that shows all of the steps I’m about to go through in more detail.)

High-volume admission offices typically begin by assigning a score to your academic achievement.  This helps them quantify and sort every applicant on a common scale.  This score is based on the school’s own formula and will likely use your unweighted GPA, test scores, class rank, and rigor as variables.

Some schools, and , have even publicized parts of their process for rating files.

That score will determine how much time will be spent on your application moving forward.  A student with a really high academic score is going to get a thorough review.  A student with a score that is deemed uncompetitive in the applicant pool is likely to get only a quick second look.  More on this in a minute.

So, applications move “up” to a full, holistic review or “down” to a “likely deny” pile.  I am simplifying a bit for clarity – schools will have different methodologies that may be more complicated.

Part of this comes from conversations has had with former AOs and readers from Stanford and the UC system in his network, so this type of approach can apply to public schools as well.

Remember the reason why this happens: highly selective schools simply receive way too many applications from ridiculously highly-qualified students.  They must make tough decisions and spend the majority of their limited time on the most competitive applicants.

In this way, academics are necessary but not sufficient to stand out in highly selective admissions. By the time the academic sort is over, the pool may shrink by as much as 50% or more, depending on the school.

Then, there are rounds of holistic reviews

This is where the “reading” happens.  Admission offices assign their AOs applications to read, often based on the applicant's geographic region.  From some time in October to some time in April (or whenever they are done…), admission officers hunker down and read, read, read for hours a day and often on nights and weekends.

Excuse me while I have flashbacks of 4 - 5 months of nonstop application review in the cold dark winter.  AOs often review dozens a day, hundreds a week, thousands a year, and never see the sun…

Okay, I think I’m good.  Moving on.

Different schools review apps in different ways.  The most traditional form is an AO reviewing an application in its entirety, making their ratings, notes, and recommendations, and passing it on.  Often another AO would give it another review to check their work.  (This would now be the third set of eyes on it.  One for the academic score, another for the initial review, and then the third reviewer.)

A handful of years ago, UPenn introduced (CBE), where two AOs review each application in tandem.  CBE has since blown up and is used at a couple dozen highly selective colleges and universities.

And what about the applications with lower academic scores that are slated for denial?  Those will, at best, get a second quick look.  This is your last chance to move “up” from the deny pile.

If your application winds up in the deny pile, it is critical that your extracurricular activities section POPS with your most compelling ECs within a couple of seconds.  That might be all the time your AO needs to confirm that your application is in the right place and send it into the fiery pits of hell deny pile, where you will be sad, but then go on to find a school that wants you there and is an amazing fit and makes you happy 😊 Keep your head up.

Big cut this round.

Committee & recommendations

Admissions committee is where some final (or almost final) admissions decisions are made among a group of AOs. At some schools, every file goes to committee. At others, not every one does because at this point many are consensus admits. The files that the admissions office wants to spend more time reviewing will go on to receive another holistic review in committee.

In committee, the AOs in charge of the files will give a quick presentation on the application to a group of senior AOs who will vote on whether to admit, deny, or possibly waitlist the applicant.

If a file makes it through earlier rounds and to committee, it’s already admissible.  This is where the cohesive narrative of your application needs to shine.  Every admissible file can’t be admitted, so only the applications that stand out will get in.

The AO’s job is to sell you to the admissions committee.  Your job is to make that AO’s job as easy as possible.

Tell a compelling story in your essays that makes them want to go to bat for you.  Connect the dots between your interests and experiences and the major or school you’re applying to.  Describe your ECs in a way that showcases your achievement, impact, and longevity of engagement.  Feel free to be yourself and, as I’ve written before, .

Committee was one of my favorite parts of the job.  Honestly, it was an honor to review and retell applicants’ stories and see them admitted in real time. 

Once the applications are reviewed and the committee has voted, there is one more “check” on the crafting of the new class. You are now entering the data zone.

Our initial pool of 50,000 applications has now been winnowed down to:

• Files slated for admit: 3,000

• Files going to committee: 1,000

• After committee, additional files slated for admit: 500

• Average time spent reviewing each of the 1,000 committee files: 5 minutes per file

Decisions are holistic + data

Everything up to this point has been holistic in nature.  Starting with academics and digging into each viable file to find ones that are compelling fits for the college or university.  But, hey, it’s 2022.  With 50k+ applications, universities aren’t going to leave it all up to us fallible humans.

Enter big data and predictive modeling. 

In his last gig, worked with about 100 colleges and universities to help them with enrollment management. He remarked to me how much he learned about the role of data in admissions decision making. It is, in his words, almost totally ubiquitous.

Top-ranked schools with billions of dollars in their endowment often employ a team of data scientists on their enrollment management staff.  They have a lot to do with the final shaping of the class.  We aren’t talking about one CS intern with a spreadsheet here.  There is some serious predictive modeling to balance institutional goals and priorities – think gender balance, geographic distribution, and filling spots within majors.

By the way, especially in the post-Varsity Blues scandal era, universities’ General Counsel and outside auditors have audited these systems and models at these schools to ensure that they are both legal and ethical.

Beyond that, there are literally hundreds of millions of the university’s dollars at stake.  Universities have to get this right.

Take Vanderbilt for example.  Vanderbilt invested in scholarships for its incoming class last year.  And that’s just one class of four!  Vanderbilt totals well over $210 million per year in scholarships.

You had better believe there’s some fancy modeling taking place.

Sure, well-endowed top 20 institutions are need-blind and meet full need (hence the millions in aid).  But they still have financial aid budgets – however huge they may be. Financial aid budgets must be informed by enrollment data.

That’s about all I can tell you about this part of the process, but I hope you find that insight enlightening.

Final admitted class: ~3,500

Admissions Rate: 7%

With a yield rate of 45%, this would enroll a class of 1575 students...

But! What if our Hypothetical University wanted to enroll a class of 1620 students? Good thing we waitlisted 6,500! We are thrilled to announce we can admit 45 students from our waitlist this year. 🤪

OK, so what?

Phew, that was a lot of applications and a lot of information!  Boiling this all down, here are what I see as the most important takeaways:

1. Super selective universities receive tens of thousands more applications than they can admit. They must make decisions about which are most viable and warrant the time it takes to fully review them.

2. Strong academics are necessary, but not sufficient, in admissions. After academics, it’s your essays, EC, and other written components that tell your story – and stand out in committee.

3. If you don’t “pass” the academic review, your application will likely be denied. Typically, only clear standout files move back up to a full review after missing an academic cutoff. You want your ECs and essays to pop.

4. You need to understand how academically competitive your application is likely to be at the schools you’re interested in. Learn how to identify reach, target, and safety schools.

Feel free to ask questions about this stuff in the comments. I know it’s a bit wild.

P.S., If you're interested in any of this "inside" information about admissions, there are so many books that you can take a look at, some of which served as a basis for these posts. Here are a few:

• , by Jeff Selingo. "One of the most insightful books ever about “getting in” and what higher education has become, Who Gets In and Why not only provides an usually intimate look at how admissions decisions get made, but guides prospective students on how to honestly assess their strengths and match with the schools that will best serve their interests."

• , by Becky Munsterer Sabky. "Witty and warm, informative and inspiring, Valedictorians at the Gate is the needed tonic for overstressed, overworked, and overwhelmed students on their way to the perfect college for them."

• , by Michelle Hernandez. "A former admissions officer at Dartmouth College reveals how the world's most highly selective schools really make their decisions."

• , by Mitchell Stevens. "With novelistic flair, sensitivity to history, and a keen eye for telling detail, Stevens explains how elite colleges and universities have assumed their central role in the production of the nation's most privileged classes. Creating a Class makes clear that, for better or worse, these schools now define the standards of youthful accomplishment in American culture more generally."