A once-mighty reputation at Arizona State University, one sustained with pride and perseverance by generations of students, has seen its sterling status tarnished. ASU this week was ranked 17th among institutions of higher learning that party hard.
It is a sharp and severe tumble for a college that long has been among the elite. No less a reputable publication than Playboy named ASU the nation's No. 1 party school as recently as 2002, continuing a tradition that began in 1987 with that journal's inaugural ranking.
Complete article at:
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/arizonaliving/articles/2008/07/31/20080731asuparty0731.html
For college admissions advice go to: http://www.acollegeforyou.com
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
SAT Scores for Admission to Top Colleges
By Allen Grove, About.com
If you're wondering if you have the SAT scores you'll need to get into an one of the top colleges in the United States, here's a side-by-side comparison of scores for the middle 50% of applicants. If your scores fall within or above these ranges, you're on target for admission to one of these top colleges.
Realize, of course, that SAT scores are just one part of the application. It's possible to have perfect 800s for each SAT subject and still get rejected if other parts of your application are weak. Similarly, some students with scores significantly below the ranges listed here gain admission because they demonstrate other strengths.
To see a full profile of each college, click on the names in the chart below.
2007-08 data from
| | SAT Scores | |||||
| | | Math | Writing | |||
| | 25% | 75% | 25% | 75% | 25% | 75% |
| 670 | 770 | 660 | 760 | 670 | 760 | |
| 650 | 750 | 660 | 740 | 650 | 730 | |
| 630 | 740 | 620 | 720 | - | - | |
| 650 | 750 | 640 | 740 | 650 | 750 | |
| 630 | 740 | 640 | 740 | 630 | 740 | |
| 690 | 770 | 690 | 760 | 680 | 750 | |
| 680 | 760 | 630 | 710 | 650 | 730 | |
| 680 | 780 | 680 | 760 | 680 | 760 | |
| 660 | 750 | 640 | 730 | 660 | 730 | |
| 660 | 760 | 660 | 760 | - | - | |
Monday, April 14, 2008
Tough College Admission Season
As college applications soar, so does the pain of rejection
By Deb Kollars - dkollars@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, April 11, 2008
An unusual season of disappointment, confusion and heartbreak has settled over the nation's college-bound crowd this year.
In a domino process of memorable proportions, a record-breaking crop of high school graduates has led to a record-setting stream of applications to top tier universities. That, in turn, has triggered more students than ever being placed on wait lists or rejected.
For many, it hurts.
"I told my mom, no boy can ever break my heart the way the rejection letter did," said Stephanie Yu, a senior at Franklin High School in Elk Grove.
Yu has a 4.2 grade-point average and nine Advanced Placement courses on her résumé, along with a healthy lineup of activities including swimming. She applied to five colleges, four in the University of California system: Berkeley, Los Angeles, Davis and her favorite, San Diego. Her fifth application went to a state college, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
Three weeks ago, the rejections started coming. In the end, there were five.
The disappointed teenager is now regrouping. She is writing letters of appeal. She is considering starting at a community college and transferring to the University of California later.
And this weekend, Yu and her parents will visit UC Riverside, which has turned up as a new option because UC guarantees all eligible California graduates a spot somewhere in the system. This week, UC mailed invitations to students such as Yu to attend Riverside or UC Merced, which are less crowded.
Other students have found themselves in an academic limbo this year: They have been accepted by some schools and must send in an acceptance deposit by May 1. But they have been put on wait lists at others and won't know until after May 1 whether they can enroll.
Sofia Cortopassi is a senior at Davis High School navigating these uneasy waters. She has a 4.6 grade-point average, strong test scores and numerous extracurricular activities ranging from opera singing to an internship in the state Legislature.
She applied to 18 colleges with strong music and political science programs. Ten said yes. Four turned her down. And four – including her first choice, Wellesley College in Massachusetts – put her on a wait list.
When the word from Wellesley came, it was such a letdown that Cortopassi waited two days before telling anyone.
She has since chosen a path both practical and philosophical. Next week she will visit two colleges that sent acceptances and that she finds appealing: Wesleyan University in Connecticut and George Washington University in the nation's capital.
"I figure, if they didn't accept me right off the bat, maybe it's not a good fit," she said of Wellesley.
Others at her school have taken things harder.
"At Davis this year, there are a ton of wait lists and a lot of rejections," she said. "Some of my friends had to take time off school just to deal with it."
According to college admissions directors and school counselors, the number of high school graduates has grown steadily as children of the baby boom era reach adulthood. The trend was expected to peak this year or next, but the intensity this winter came as a shock.
"It was the magnitude that surprised us," said Susan Wilbur, UC's director of undergraduate admissions. She said the growing count of graduates has been accompanied by an increase in students meeting UC's tough entrance requirements, creating even more competition.
Overall, freshman applications to UC rose 9.2 percent this year, from 87,213 to 95,201.
The University of California, Davis, which last year admitted nearly 60 percent of freshmen who applied, had the biggest jump – 15.6 percent. UCLA, where fewer than a quarter of applicants were admitted last year, saw freshman applications exceed 55,000.
At elite private schools across the country, the story has been the same.
Last week, Princeton University announced the most selective "admit rate" in the school's history – 9.25 percent. Princeton had a record 21,369 applications for the class of 2012 and offered admission to 1,976 individuals.
Stanford University said 2,400 students were chosen for admission out of 25,298 applicants this year, the largest candidate pool in the school's history.
Mary Hesser, guidance director at Christian Brothers, a private college preparatory school in Oak Park, said it has been a roller coaster year for seniors.
"We got some amazing admits," she said. "UCLA. UC Berkeley. West Point. Stanford. Duke. Georgetown." The big surprise, Hesser said, was how many rejections UC sent.
"There were lots of tears in my office," Hesser said. "It was heartbreaking. These kids are well qualified. I've been writing a lot of letters of appeal."
Besides demographics, applications also have been pushed upward by the ease of applying online and the growing popularity of the "common application," an online system accepted by 300 colleges.
"Kids can apply to 20 schools as easily as 10," said Scott Hamilton, whose Future Stars College Counseling Center helps students through the application process.
Students are aware of the growing competition, so they apply to more places, he said: "Part of the frenzy is feeding itself."
It creates a tricky situation for colleges, Hamilton said. Schools typically send out more letters of admission than available slots, knowing some students will decline. The goal is to match up the number of seats that need to be filled and acceptance deposits from candidates. Admission types call this their "yield."
With so many students applying to numerous schools, predicting an accurate yield gets tougher. As a result, some colleges are expanding their wait lists.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, increased its wait list from 499 students last year to this spring's 739. Freshman applications to MIT were up 8 percent over last year – 13,396 for 1,040 slots, said Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions. He sent 1,554 acceptance letters; if that pool proves too small, he will turn to the wait list.
Walt Wild oversees college and career centers in the Roseville Joint Union High School District. He noted that the admissions crunch is only playing out in a top tier of about 75 schools. Most of the 3,000 colleges in the country have a more balanced entry equation, he said.
"The opportunity for college is definitely there," Wild said. "It's not that kids aren't getting into college. It's just more difficult with the more prestigious schools."
Despite the fierce competition, the past few weeks have brought joy and relief to many high-achieving students.
Vinh Bui, a senior at Franklin High and friend of Stephanie Yu's, was accepted at four top schools, including Stanford, and is on a wait list for Columbia and MIT.
When he learned Stanford said yes, Bui was jubilant: "I jumped around for 10 or 15 minutes."
At school, though, he hesitated to tell his friend because he knew how sad she was.
-From the Sacramento Bee
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Admissions Season
Student agony grows along with top colleges' wait lists
Like jittery investors scrambling to hedge their bets, selective colleges and universities are placing far more applicants than usual on their waiting lists this spring as a safeguard against an unusually murky admissions season. But while the policy gives colleges some peace of mind, it plunges students into an admissions purgatory that could string out the stressful selection process for weeks to come.
Colleges have typically been able to estimate the percentage of accepted students who will enroll in the fall with a fair degree of confidence. This year, several factors have conspired to thwart their projections: a shaky economy, record numbers of applications, and sweeping financial aid expansions that make it harder to predict what colleges middle-class families will choose.
Faced with so many variables, colleges are wait-listing more students to fine-tune the numbers and makeup of their incoming freshman class. Lengthening the waiting list creates a crucial buffer of students in a year of deep uncertainty about how many will eventually show up, college officials say.
"Students are applying to more colleges because they are worried about not getting in, and colleges are wait-listing more because they are worried about how many will come," said Brad MacGowan, a longtime college counselor at Newton North High School. "They feed off each other."
As a result, both colleges and applicants are muddling through an admission season in which many conventional assumptions have been thrown into question.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has wait-listed 739 applicants, up nearly 50 percent from last year. Northeastern University has wait-listed 1,400, a 17 percent increase, while the University of Vermont has wait-listed more than 3,000, a 22 percent rise. Dartmouth will wait-list 1,500, up 15 percent. The increases are roughly in line with the rise in the number of applications.
Typically, selective schools accept a very small portion of wait-listed students. Those wait-listed will usually not find out whether they have been accepted until at least May, when colleges receive word from initially accepted applicants on whether they will attend. In some cases, the process extends into the summer.
Echoing concerns at other schools that have seen sharp increases in applications, Kristin Tichenor, vice president for enrollment management at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said student interest has become increasingly difficult to pin down.
The school, which has seen applications surge 72 percent over the past three years, plans to wait-list more than 800 students and, for the first time, will allow entering students to begin college next spring because of the potential wait-list implications.
"It's nerve-racking trying to determine how many students will take you up on the offer," said Tichenor. "My counterparts and I are on pins and needles, so there's something of a hedging of the bets."
That leaves students dangling.
"It's a tough time," Cheng Ji, a Newton North senior, acknowledged with a sigh. He has been accepted at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but is holding out hope that he will land at Northeastern, where he has been wait-listed.
"I really hope they accept me," he said. "I told them I will definitely go if they do."
Financial factors are complicating the outlook. Students find out about financial aid packages shortly after learning of their acceptance, and the slumping economy is likely to force more families to base college decisions on cost. At the same time, many families will find it easier to afford high-priced institutions, as many selective colleges reduce or eliminate loans and sweeten financial aid packages.
"It's always tricky to predict, but this is probably the trickiest year yet, because the landscape has shifted so radically," said Dick Nesbitt, director of admissions at Williams College.
For colleges, "it's like picking the brackets in college basketball," Nesbitt said. "You might think you're being scientific, but then you get blindsided."
Williams, which received more than 7,500 applications for a class of 538, will accept about 100 more students than last year, but will not significantly increase its waiting list beyond last year's 500 students, Nesbitt said.
Further muddying the admissions cycle is the continuing rise in the number of applications that students submit to highly selective schools, to boost their chances for an acceptance. This risk-hedging strategy makes it harder for colleges to predict where students will wind up, which in turn prompts the schools to protect their interests by wait-listing more students.
"We really don't know what's going to happen," said Stuart Schmill, MIT's admissions dean.
The end of early admission at Harvard and Princeton is also altering predictions of where the nation's top students will ultimately attend.
Adam Goldberg, a college planner based in Braintree, said the swirl of variables and the increased competition among students and schools have intensified an already stressful process.
"You have this perfect storm going on," he said. "It creates this chaotic scenario that manifests itself in much greater anxiety on both sides."
Colleges have long used the waiting list as a way to round out their incoming classes after students have responded to admission offers in early May. It is also the point at which many schools select students to meet certain demographic goals.
Selecting students who have already expressed a strong interest in attending also helps boost what colleges call their yield, a key measure of desirability and standing that refers to the proportion of students who accept a college's offer of admission.
Still, college officials are cautioning wait-listed students that it is too early to tell whether any of them will ultimately get in. Most students hop off waiting lists at some point in favor of a definite offer at another school, but some stay on and will rescind an acceptance elsewhere if they are eventually chosen at their first choice.
Almost 80 percent of highly selective institutions use waiting lists, and while most enroll relatively few students from them, such lists provide a comfort zone to make sure classes are not underenrolled.
Colleges say they do not use the waiting list lightly and are sympathetic to the stress it causes students. They say they are fielding many inquiries from counselors and students about the deferred applicant's chances of acceptance, but cannot give them much guidance until after the May 1 response deadline.
"It can be very disappointing for them," said Susan Wertheimer, interim admission dean at the University of Vermont.
All the uncertainty can benefit some students. Some schools are admitting more applicants because they expect a smaller proportion to attend.
But MacGowan of Newton North cautioned against false hope.
"You have to proceed as if you're not going to be taken off the wait-list," he said. "You can't rely on it, psychologically or practically."
Monday, March 24, 2008
If I ruled the admissions universe
 | (Ward Sutton Illustration) |
By Elinor Lipman March 24, 2008
I LOVE the humble fact that Mike Huckabee graduated from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark. In fact, I think I'll go teach there if they'll have me. I'd be making a statement that was neither pro-Republican nor pro-church, but something closer to woman bites dog, college-admissions style.
I don't mean to pick on OBU (ranked number two "Best Value" in the South, according to US News & World Report. Congrats!). My mission today is to celebrate the safety over the reach, to say to high school seniors, "You who are waiting anxiously for that fat envelope, please know that you'll enjoy the same success and happiness whether you end up at Bates, Bowdoin, or Ball State."
When I was 20 an older friend predicted, "Ten years from now, no one will care where you went to school. In fact, no one will ask." Ridiculous, I thought. She turned out to be right. Where you live between the ages of 18 and 22 won't define who you are. One day soon, the proud new college decal on your family car's rear window will start looking a little uncool.
I miss the good old days of relatively relaxed college strivings. During my own college outreach, my father drove me to Medford for a Jackson College (now Tufts) interview. On the ride home he said wryly, "I picture a letter that says, 'Dear Miss Lipman, due to a shortage of desks, we are sorry to inform you. . ." I laughed. I was rejected, but can't remember the sting. So different were those times that never once did he, a Harvard grad, suggest that I might want to found a club or play for a basketball team more prestigious than Lowell Hebrew Community Center's (chief rival, Pepperell Methodist) or work harder because I was a legacy.
In 1987, a friend's son wrote to admissions officers explaining that he had fallen in love and was therefore distracted, so could they please excuse the C in physics? They did. He went to Yale. If he hadn't? I daresay he would be the same hero he is today, getting the wrongly convicted out of prisons through the Innocence Project.
I'm thinking of a fix along these lines, a lottery: put the names of the top 1 percent in a hat. There are your future Phi Beta Kappas. Another hat for the A-minuses with charisma who will run the country and the board rooms; another for those who test high, but get Cs in physics who will write the songs and choreograph the Broadway shows; a smaller hat for the medium-smart who promise to study and keep up; then one for the slackers every campus needs, a la public school, who show the geniuses how to get along with regular people. A blindfolded admissions officer would then pick names from each hat.
Athletes? Maybe the coaches could pick them the way they do now. Orchestras? At Lowell High School in the 1960s, you joined the band and Mr. Notini taught you how to play, talent and experience not required, and you sounded fine.
It would be a brave new yet happier world. The question, "Where'd you get in?" on the day of the national college lottery would carry no suggestion of success or failure. It would be them and not you, the defanged luck of the draw.
If I ruled this new admissions universe, I would study the applications and sniff out the resume padders whose parents could afford the semester in the rain forests. I'd want good smart kids, including the ones who didn't shine as brightly as the alleged stars at this moment in their high school lives. After all, my favorite life lesson is that Biff, the high school bully and big man on campus in "Back to the Future," ends up working under the car of his old victim, Marty McFly.
I wouldn't care what you looked like or how many teams you captained. I might require at your interview, as they do in a bartending course's final exam, that you tell a joke. Maybe I would go with the lottery, or maybe just take the first 1,000 who applied. Studies would have shown that you are all excellent, and in the end, I couldn't go wrong.
Elinor Lipman, a guest columnist, will publish her ninth novel, "The Chaperones," in spring 2009.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
UC panel seeks to drop extra SAT tests from admission requirements
The exams add little useful information on applicants, critics say.
The University of California may offer some relief to test-weary applicants by shedding part of a 40-year-old requirement for freshman admission. And many high school students are saying amen to that.An influential faculty panel wants to drop two of the standardized exams that all applicants now must take for acceptance at UC's nine undergraduate campuses.
Under the plan, high school students still would need to sit for the basic SAT exam (or the alternative ACT test) but would no longer have to face two additional SAT tests in specific subjects, such as world history, Spanish or chemistry.
Subject tests, previously known as achievement tests or SAT II, have been required by UC in various forms for four decades, even if their existence might surprise and befuddle some parents and students.
Critics of the subject exams allege that they have added little useful information to applications and that missing those subject tests is a major reason that potential applicants with otherwise good grades and SAT scores are ineligible for UC. Disproportionately affected are blacks and Latinos in large urban and rural schools who might not be advised by counselors to take the exams, according to recent studies.
Michael Brown, chairman of the UC systemwide Academic Senate, said discussions indicated that most faculty were convinced that the subject test requirement is "cutting people out of at least a shot of consideration for no reasons that have to do with achievement." He said he is optimistic the mandate will be dropped as part of an overhaul of admissions standards that is under consideration but will not go into effect for two years or so if approved by the UC Regents.
The subject tests generally are required by only the most elite campuses nationwide. According to the College Board, 71 colleges mandate them and 50 recommend them, both small fractions of the college universe.
For example, Columbia University and Pomona College require them, Stanford University and USC recommend them and the University of Michigan and University of Texas do neither. Last year, 1.5 million students took the SAT and 287,000 took subject tests.
Around Southern California, many students say getting rid of the subject tests would be like lifting one of the rocks from their chests. They say they still would have plenty of other pressures with class work, SAT preparation and, in some cases, the additional and unrelated Advanced Placement tests that can garner college credits.
The subject tests, which involve high school-level material, usually do not lead to college credit.
"I definitely think it would be a good idea," Andrew Santana, 16, a junior at Loyola High School in Los Angeles, said of the proposal. Teens can feel overwhelmed by repeated testing, he said. He plans to take the SAT and three AP exams in May and then subject tests in U.S. history, English literature and Spanish in June in hopes of landing a spot at UCLA, UC Berkeley or another top-notch school. "I would say the transcript and one standardized test should speak for themselves," he said.
Laurence Bunin, the College Board's general manager for its SAT programs, said he wouldn't argue with UC's right to set its own admissions policy. However, dropping the subject tests would take away an extra chance for students to "show everything they can do," he said, explaining that some students do better on subject exams than on the main SAT and some vice versa.
Under the UC proposal, individual campuses and majors could recommend certain subject tests, such as math for engineering schools, and applicants could submit scores on their own to possibly garner attention. But Bunin said that recommending is not the same as requiring.
"Students are kids, after all," he said. "If any college doesn't require something, it is less likely the students will do it."
The main SAT reasoning exam is a three-hour, 45-minute evaluation of more generalized critical reading, math and writing skills in multiple choice and essay form. In contrast, the 19 subject tests that UC allows are one hour each, all multiple choice, and assess mastery of high school courses, such as biology, math and French.
Students can take as many as three subject tests in one day, and the fees can range from $28 for one test to $56 for three, including a foreign-language exam with a listening portion. Fee waivers are available for low-income applicants. Before 2006, UC applicants had to submit scores from the main SAT plus three subject tests, including one for writing. But under pressure from UC, the main SAT was changed and a writing portion was added to it. That took away from the subject tests what many considered to be the most reliable predictor of freshman academic success.
Now students usually choose their two strongest subjects, hardly a level field for admissions decisions, say UC faculty arguing for the change.
Each UC campus makes its own admissions decisions, also using grade-point averages, tests, student essays, extracurricular activities and other factors. A student deemed eligible for the UC system might be denied at the campuses he most wanted but will usually be offered enrollment by at least one other campus with space.
Counselors say they repeatedly remind students about the subject test requirement far in advance. Yet, inevitably, some teenagers contend they were never informed, others forget and some are just unwilling to spend another Saturday morning in a test hall. A few avoid it and focus on campuses, such as those in the California State University system, that don't require subject exams.
Eileen Doctorow, a college counselor at North Hollywood High School, said students who claim they never heard about the UC requirement "had to be living under a rock." However, because "they're kids and they don't pay attention all the time," she and other counselors help register panicky procrastinators for last-minute tests in their senior year.
The students who are scrambling at the end "are generally first-generation, lower-income kids who aren't that astute in the process and don't have parents guiding them through it," she said. Dropping the subject test mandate would eliminate an obstacle and "create greater access and greater equity," she said.
Some UC professors privately wonder whether the proposed change is a way around California's Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative passed by voters in 1996. Academic Senate Chairman Brown and other advocates of the proposal say it is not designed to boost any particular group, just to take down an unnecessary hurdle.
Ironically, some of the subject tests' biggest fans are minority families who speak a language other than English. Students who are fluent in a foreign language for which there is a subject exam, such as Chinese, Spanish and Hebrew, are allowed to take such a test and many count on doing well on it.
Denis Furlong, college counselor at Fairfax High School, said he knows that affirmative action is "a thing of a the past" but that the foreign-language tests are an "opportunity to diversify the campuses."
For example, Fairfax junior Sherry Yi, whose family speaks Korean at home, said she is going to take the Korean-language subject exam, along with other ones. She expects the Korean test will help her UC application but understands why the subject test requirement is debated.
"There are people who are bad at some basic SAT stuff but good at the SAT II," she said, referring to the subject tests. Any change "is going to benefit some people but not some other people."
Sunday, March 16, 2008
How To Get Into an Ivy League School
APPLIED SCIENCES
HOW TO GET INTO AN IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL
By JOIE JAGER-HYMAN
March 16, 2008 -- Waiting for a response to your college application can sometimes be more painful than getting rejected, especially for the current crop of high school seniors, who have been repeatedly warned that this will be the most selective round in college admissions history. With just a few weeks to go before the Ivy decisions come out, it's no wonder that many students are expecting the worst. Approximately 27,300 students applied to Harvard in January, a significant jump from last year's record of 22,955. Applications to Dartmouth are up 10 percent once again, and about 20,000 students are competing for around 1,230 seats in the Princeton class of 2012.
These astonishing statistics have ambitious students and anxious parents across the country looking for anything to help them in their quest for a coveted fat envelope from a top college. Inevitably, when it comes to Ivy League admissions, bad information about what works and what doesn't is being swallowed like snake oil and applied like bogus wrinkle cream. As a former Ivy League admissions officer, I'm taken aback by the abundance of conspiracy theories and urban legends permeating high school hallways and PTA meetings across the country. No, Brown doesn't hate your high school. Colleges don't hold grudges like that because they always want the best students and, if for nothing else, there's a high turnover in admissions offices. And, no, your
Getting into an Ivy isn't like Buddhism or Alcoholics Anonymous - there's no set plan of steps you can take to enlightenment. With so many amazing students knocking at the doors to these colleges, it's hard to get in. Period. However, knowing what doesn't work might save you time, money, and sleep. I'd like to present you with several important don'ts-things you should never do if you want to get into an Ivy League college.
Don't take easy classes because you think that the grades you get are the most important thing on your transcript. A straight-A student in non-honors classes is like a talented minor leaguer with oodles of potential that never materializes. Ivies want to see that you can perform under pressure. Admissions officers will scan your transcript looking for a long list of AP and honors courses. They also read your high school profile, which explains your school's curriculum, and ask your guidance counselor whether or not you are taking the most challenging courses available. If the answer is no, great grades won't save you, so take as many difficult courses as you think you can handle without letting your grades suffer.
Don't listen to the rhetoric about how SAT scores don't matter. While it's true that SAT (or ACT) scores have absolutely nothing to do with success later on in life, they do count in college admissions. Admissions officers may tell you that they don't matter, but it's hard to justify taking a terrific student with low scores over a terrific student with high scores. With so many outstanding applicants, the SAT makes a convenient tie breaker.
Don't pass up your chance to apply Early Decision, if possible. Sally Rubenstone, Senior Counselor at collegeconfidential.com reminds her students that "even though Ivy admission odds are daunting for all applicants, applying Early Decision does provide a statistical boost." Several Ivy League colleges offer students this option whereby they may submit one application to their first choice school by early November (as opposed to the January 1st deadline for Regular Decision) and agree to enroll if admitted. Studies have confirmed that colleges prefer to admit students who will definitely matriculate.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that a killer essay will make up for lackluster academics. No one - I mean no one - gets into an Ivy League school because of their college essay. Kids that don't have the academic credentials to back up their awe-inspiring prose will get comments like "strong essay but weak scores" or "seems like a great guy but the goods are not there" written on their files next to the infamous R for rejection.
And, speaking of essays, don't rely on gimmicks. You know that story about the kid who got into Harvard because he had the guts to send in a blank piece of paper instead of answering a "what's the biggest risk you've ever taken?" essay question? Never happened. It's okay to have a sense of humor or take a unique approach to your college essay, but now is not the time to play games. Follow directions and be sincere in your writing. If you don't take yourself seriously how can you expect colleges to take you seriously?
Don't blow off your teachers and/or guidance counselor. Most Ivies ask for two teacher and one counselor recommendation, and contrary to popular opinion, not all recommendations look the same. Aside from asking for a letter, colleges provide teachers and counselors with a lengthy checklist of credentials and require every evaluator to rank the student they he or she is recommending according to categories like "academic promise" and "leadership abilities." So be nice to these people. What they say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself.
Don't stress about college so much. The truth is that whether or not you get into an Ivy League college is really not up to you. Plenty of great kids don't make it and go on to accomplish amazing things. Life is short. Save yourself an ulcer. Besides, there's always graduate school.
Joie Jager-Hyman is a former admissions officer at
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