(2022-04-21) To Get Into The Ivy League, Extraordinary Isn't Always Enough These Days

To Get Into the Ivy League, ‘Extraordinary’ Isn’t Always Enough These Days. Harvard University received a record 61,220 applications during the current admissions year and accepted 1,954 (3.2%).

A reason applications were so inflated is because more than three-quarters of colleges and universities have stopped mandating entrance exams (standardized test). With that barrier removed, more students tried their luck at selective schools that placed greater emphasis on grades, academic rigor and racial and socio-economic diversity. (But did that significantly change the odds for the "classic" applicants?)

Nearly 55,000 students applied to the University of Pennsylvania—about 15,000 more than applied two years ago. Many applications contained “national and international accolades for research that is already pushing the boundaries of academic discovery,” wrote Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions on the school’s website.

For students such as Ms. Younger, the odds are particularly long. She is a middle-class white female from a public high school in Texas who wants to study business. Each characteristic places her in an overrepresented group.

Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research. At Harvard, low-income students with top academic scores had an admit rate of 24% compared to 15% for all other applicants, according to a 2013 study by the school. Harvard has said it believes enrolling a diverse student body is important because the school wants students to learn to work with people from different backgrounds. “The middle class tends to get a little bit neglected,” said Hafeez Lakhani.

During her sophomore year, joint pain and depression exacerbated her anxiety. She enrolled in a two-month, outpatient mental-health program that limited her academic work to two hours a day.

Ms. Harberson said Ms. Younger’s accomplishments on the stage at her high school and with her community theater troupe—as well as for the accounting club—were impressive but wouldn’t stand out among Ivy League applicants.

Of the 12 schools to which Ms. Younger applied, she was wait-listed at Rice University and accepted at the University of Texas, Austin—but not to the business school. She plans on attending Arizona State University to study business on an academic scholarship. The acceptance rate there last year was 88%.