The Importance of Being Honest With Yourself

Level 3 - Advanced Concepts

Welcome back!

Today is a “tough love” post focused on those considering competitive colleges.

For many applicants, April is a month of disappointment. By definition, selective colleges will reject more than they accept. Many students will be reminded that college admissions, like many things in life, is a game of probabilities, not guarantees.

What does that actually mean?

1. You cannot guarantee acceptance to a college or university no matter what your academic profile looks like

2. Acceptance profiles give you insights into what an accepted student looks like, which provides you with “likelihood indicators”

3. Probabilities are driven by your actions, which require you to understand your pain tolerance

You cannot guarantee acceptance

As we have said many times, college admissions is usually misunderstood in one of two constructs:

1. College admissions is a formula (do X and Y and you will get into Yale)

2. College admissions is all about acceptance rate

College admissions is not a formula. If it were, you could guarantee admissions by simply fitting into specific criteria. But there are people each year who are rejected that many thought would get accepted, and students who may not have had a high chance of acceptance who are accepted.

Even if you isolate for a factor (say race), not every person of that race profile is automatically accepted. If you look at UPenn’s college admissions, assume the following profile:

• African-American

• 1450 SAT

• Tennessee

• 3.9 GPA out of 4.0

If you look through their data, you will see some students accepted with that background and others rejected. Could there be some underlying reason for the difference? Perhaps, but again, it only highlights what we have mentioned before - you cannot follow a specific pattern to guarantee success.

The opposite view is also problematic. Simply seeing a 4% acceptance rate for a college does not tell the full story. Not every applicant is equal, and certain kinds of applicants will have different acceptance rates than other students. For example, legacy students tend to be accepted at Ivy League colleges at higher rates than non-legacies.

Beyond that, the acceptance rate of a student with a 1600 SAT will be higher than that of someone with a 1300 SAT, all other things held equal. Just because every 1600 SAT score does not get accepted does not mean the 1600 SAT score is irrelevant.

If you understand these axioms, then you begin to see the truth of admissions - it’s a blend of art with science.