FAQs

Level 2 - Admissions 101

Welcome back! We have received quite a few questions and comments on recent articles, and wanted to provide an FAQ since we saw common themes among them. 

Below are our most common questions that have been asked:

Question: Will colleges limit how many students they accept from a given high school? 

The short answer is yes. No college will accept 100% of a given high school, no matter how many qualified students were to appear in a given high school, no university will accept 100% of students that apply there unless the college itself is non-selective. 

Why?

For several reasons. 

The first is that colleges and universities value diversity. Most people believe this to be in a purely racial background, but as usual, they miss the larger point.

Diversity is not just about race. It is holistic in nature, spanning geographies, income, and other demographics. 

Taking 100 students from one high school does not contribute to that. It detracts from it.

In other words, you could take 100 students accepted into Harvard and if you made a graduating class from the same school with those students, not all 100 would be accepted. In the best case, maybe 25 get accepted.

Do not believe that? Statistically, the high schools with the best admissions statistics to the Ivy League have a 35% acceptance rate. 

While that is amazing, it is nowhere near 100% acceptance from a given school. 

Secondly, it makes little financial sense to accept a lot of students from any given school. Think of it this way:

• School A accepts 100 students from 10 different schools

• School B accepts 100 students from 100 different schools

School B has a diversified student body financially - they are not reliant on any one or two schools to be feeders into them to maintain financial viability. 

That may seem odd to you, but remember that if you have a lot of concentration among a handful of colleges, you open yourself up to a school suddenly no longer preferring that college or university. 

The relationship works well the other way as well. If a high school as viewed as a feeder into a specific college or university, that is great as long as everyone wants to go to that college. But the moment your interests go beyond that one college or university, you suddenly find yourself not needing to attend that high school. 

Question: How is your high school viewed if it has no report card?

Great question. Sometimes, a high school is so new that it does not have complete information to provide colleges. For example, it cannot provide a full report card because it does not have enough years of juniors taking the SAT. 

In these situations, it is common for a college to get a little bit creative.

For example, are there other comparable high schools in the school district? 

This often is done by evaluating other high schools that have a longer track-record to see how they perform. If those schools have historically been rated highly, the new high school with a similar curriculum will probably receive the same standard. But that can also be a negative. If the other high schools are weak in the school district, it can often be assumed that your high school will also appear to be weak, especially if there is nothing academically discernible from the others (e.g. you are offering the same AP courses at School A as at School B).

The other way that you are evaluated is that there is greater focus on your individual performance, particularly in things that are more nationally recognized. For example, how did you do on the AP exams? If you are crushing them, then chances are the school you went to is probably pretty strong, at least in the eyes of an admissions office. 

If you do not have a report card, the best way to counteract it is to make sure you score well in things that can be quantified outside of the school (e.g., ACT scores). 

Can I reuse college essays? Is it a good idea?

This probably bears a longer article, but one of the challenges we are seeing with students who work on college essays is that they are often submitting them for multiple colleges and scholarships. 

This is not necessarily inherently an issue, but understand that essays have to answer the question or prompt that is provided. 

In other words, you do not make a prompt fit an essay. You make the essay fit the prompt. 

That is the real challenge. Most individuals write an essay with one school in mind and then try to float that essay to as many different colleges and scholarships as they can. That can work, but if prompts are different, even slightly, the essay can seem as if it does not flow.

Some of the essay prompts will say that you can use an essay from another college - in our opinion, that is a bit of a trap. 

Not because you cannot reuse an essay, but because there are aspects of the application that require a level of personalization to help achieve stronger outcomes.

In other words, your essay is an opportunity to connect yourself directly with the university of your choice.

If you choose to use that opportunity to use a copy and paste essay, you lose points. It does not mean you will be disqualified from consideration, but it means you have to be realistic with which essays are most important. 

Our advice? Prioritize the essays you write for the top schools and make those unique. 

Then leverage the essays you have written and modify them for target and safety schools.