There Are No Guarantees in College Admissions

The internet is overflowing with “hacks” about how to “package” your child to waltz their way into this country’s most revered institutions. But anyone who says they can guarantee getting your child into a certain school or schools is lying to you. Just as you wouldn’t trust someone in a dark alley promising to get your kid into Yale, you shouldn’t trust these charlatans either. The truth is, there is no secret sauce. No check you can write (unless it’s of an amount that will get your name on a building!). No sacrifice at the altar of the Ivy League you can make. And I think that is what is most frustrating and anxiety-inducing about this process. It involves relinquishing a great deal of control to a room of other (fallible) human beings. The college admissions process is neither truly meritocratic nor fair. Admissions officers are not some dark cadre of individuals scheming about how to ruin thousands of young people’s lives; they are hard-working individuals who care deeply about higher education and making their school the best place it can be. Students who are admitted into America’s most selective universities are accepted because they are exceptional and it shows. It’s as simple as that. No tricks, no sleight of hand, not even the best college counselor! There are literally thousands of students with perfect grades, high test scores, and a dozen AP classes, who are rejected from these schools every year; I know, because I have worked with many of them! Harvard could fill their class 15 times over with every valedictorian in this country. Literally. There are around 25,000 high schools in the US and Harvard admits a class of 1600. Not great odds! 

So where does that leave us? There is a huge bottleneck at the top 50 or so most “highly rejective” colleges. Every top student in the country believes something anywhere from “I should want to go to these places because they are ‘the best’” to “I deserve to be in those places because I have earned it.” But when tens of thousands of students every year vie for a scant few thousand spots at a small handful of colleges (which make up less than one tenth of 1 percent of all colleges in this country!), we continue to see many people convinced that these schools are “the best”. I urge my students to reject that premise. To embrace colleges they might not have even heard of where they can get a world-class education in a supportive academic and social environment, and not be strapped with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. To end up at a college or university that suits them and nurtures their growth into adulthood, not a place where they had to twist themselves into a pretzel to try and belong.