What are my chances?

Tina Fey in the film Admission

Princeton University: What are my chances of getting into Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, etc.?

I have a 3.6 gpa, 4.7 weighted. I have been in the varsity orchestra at my school for 3 years and dance competitively outside of school. I am part of french honor society, music honor society, key club, french club, Spanish club, model un, the officers for my class, and am currently the president of my schools mariachi band. I also volunteer in my community tremendously and have a steady job where I work anywhere from 4-10 hours every weekend. I scored a 1730 on my SAT and a 27 on my ACT. I am currently a junior, Hispanic, female and live in Texas.

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I was asked to answer this question on the website Quora.com

First of all, congratulations on your many successes in and out of the classroom. It’s clear you have done a great deal to prepare yourself for success at a selective college or university.

I am not exactly going to duck the question, but I am going to try to outline why “chancing you” (as it is called on College Confidential, a site I have any problems with including all the people who respond to “chance” threads anonymously) is anything but a science. I would not even call it an art, although some call the holistic admission process in and of itself by this term . It’s really mostly guesswork that can either lead you to raise your hopes or dash them depending on what the writer says. I will try, instead, to point out some things that will come into play, some of which you have not mentioned.

The information you have included is useful in that you should be looking at selective schools, but as to what your chances are for getting good news from Princeton (I will focus on this one  but what I write applies to the other schools you have listed too), is really anyone’s guess at this point, simply because there are too many unknown variables. Let me try to list a few.

1.    You have listed your GPA weighted and weighted. Clearly your grades have been good, but it’s hard to know where you stand within the context of your school. In some schools, your GPA would put you at or near the to of the class; at others, you might not even be in the top 10%. Schools like Princeton look carefully at how you have performed compared to your peers. Virtually anyone offered admission to an Ivy or other top 25 university is ranked in the top 10% and most are ranked a lot higher than that. Of course there are exceptions, but not many. The exceptions often are those with special talents (athletes mostly) or those who have a compelling story (they have grown up in difficult circumstances and have overcome them), or they might be a development case or a legacy applicant who has been flagged by the administration as former or potential big giver. In addition, schools do practice affirmative action and you are a member of an under-represented group and this will be a factor in your overall evaluation. 

2.    Given your weighted GPA, it would be my guess (and that is all it is) that you have taken many honors courses. You may have taken many AP courses too if your school offers them. I can say if you have not taken APs and your school offers at least some, even with your good grades, you will be facing an uphill battle when it comes to getting in to elite schools. Academic program in combination with performance are two of the best predictors for academic success at a highly selective university. Even one without the other often results in a student not being admitted.

3.    Essays: You have not included your essays as a part of the information you provided and essays are an important part of the selection process. If you have done a great job with them, then this will help you to get accepted. Essays do not make up for significant academic gaps, but they do weigh heavily for those students who have the numbers and overall academic credentials that the school looks for to determine academic success. You are, however,   more than just numbers in a holistic admission process, but the numbers are important too. I have written a lot about admission essays. This link addresses the importance of essays in selective admission in a fairly detailed way.

4.    Testing: Here are the test results that Princeton has on their admission page (the range is the mid 50% of test takers): 

       

Test                                 Applicants  Admits        Enrollees

ACT                                       30-34        31-35              31-35

Critical Reasoning           640-760     700-800     690-800

Math                                   670-780     710-800      710-800

Writing                               650-770     710-800      710-790

  SAT II                               690-790     730-800     720-800

Your scores are significantly below their mean. What this should tell you is that all other things being equal, your scores may well be the thing that will hurt you the most. I will be politically incorrect and go ahead and say this. If you were white or Asian and not a legacy or someone with a special talent, or some incredible life story, then for all intents and purposes your chances would be not good at all for getting into Princeton. Overall,  the acceptance rate in under 10% which means that almost all who apply don’t get in,  but a student who is white or Asian and who is not hooked in some way (legacy, athlete etc.) has very little chance of getting in with scores that are not at or above the mean. (One of the reasons Asians have sued Princeton and now Harvard is that they in fact have, on average, much higher  scores than whites).

Several years ago, when Princeton was investigated for turning down an Asian student with perfect SATS, top academic grades and a whole host of strong extra curricular activities, the school refused to give data about the differences in standardized testing between different racial groups. What this means is that there is likely a significant difference between the scores on of non under-represented students and under-represented students (if not, they would have released the figures).  Only those who work at Princeton really know how significant this difference is and unless they are ordered by a court, they won’t release the stats. I say all this because although your scores are low compared to the average, they may not keep you out, because they wish to enroll a diverse class with students of all races  and ethnicities significantly represented. 

You are, therefore,  part of a group that Princeton and other schools wish to enroll. The percentage of minority students admitted in the previous incoming class at Princeton is 8.6% which is low (although higher than the acceptance rate for all applicants, which is 7.4%). What is impossible to know at this point and what I imagine you cannot find out (unless you get a court order) is whether or not Asians are lumped into this group. If so, then the percentages are very misleading. The acceptance rate for Asians would, if Princeton does what some other schools do, be the lowest of any racial or ethnic group (hence the lawsuits). Therefore, if Asians are included in the overall minority student acceptance figures, then it is likely that being in another group such as African American or Latino/Hispanic would mean that these two acceptance rates would be far higher than the overall acceptance percentage. If I had to guess (and again, it is only a guess) I would say that Princeton did include Asians in the minority acceptance rate so that as a whole it looks similar to other groups such as male/female (except for legacies which is far higher than any other group they publish statistics about). Princeton may do this so it does not look, at least on the surface, that there are significant differences in acceptance rates for certain subgroups. It also means, as a consequence, that it is very hard to tell from the outside if your scores will be good enough to keep you in contention for a spot. Since Princeton does not report scores for racial subgroups and does not report acceptance rates for racial subgroups, there is not enough data that has been released publicly that would help give anyone on the outside information that would help in estimating your chances of admission.

Coda: Princeton, like many highly selective schools, does not release a lot of data that would be useful to students, families, and to the public at large, when it comes to knowing whether a student should apply or not.  If the data were published that showed the acceptance rates for certain subgroups-- by race, ethnicity, income, geographical location (both domestic and international)-- it would give a much clearer picture of what goes on behind closed doors and would be much more helpful that watching Tina Fey act as a Princeton admission officer in the movie Admission. (I actually think the book the film is based on does contain some good information.)

Why then do schools like Princeton and other highly selective schools guard data that would prove useful? I cannot presume to know what the administration says about this behind closed doors, but I can put forward a few things I would think would be part of the reason for the reticence.

Princeton, like any highly selective school, has its own institutional goals it wishes to meet. These goals include many things, but one of them is to select those students that they believe will most benefit from the education and who will graduate and go on to become leaders in their fields. The problems arise, however, when those on the outside do not agree with the institutional priorities. Given that so few get in, the vast majority of people look at Princeton and other highly selective schools as places that are elitist and unfair. What is difficult for the schools is that no matter what they do, they will always make far more people and groups unhappy than happy. For example, elite schools are under a lot of external pressure to diversify their student bodies. There are stories that come out every year about how Princeton enrolls  few low income students or only small percentages of African Americans or  Latino/Hispanic students compared to other groups. The school is in fact committed to diversity, but the sad fact is that many who are members of these under-represented groups have, in the aggregate, weaker academic programs, and weaker tests scores. Part of the disparity is tied, at least in some cases, to income,. The higher the income the students come from the higher the average SAT. of the aggregate group.  Students who come from the high income brackets often attend great public schools, or great private or boarding schools, and often have taken SAT prep and have access to private counseling and many other intangible things that help the student prepare well for the intense competition of getting in.  Colleges and universities try, to some degree, to even the playing field, by taking students from under-represented groups who may not have the same academic rubrics, but who will still add to the mix of successful students in and out of class. 

On the other hand, there are many students who have virtually perfect academics (remember the student who tried to sue Princeton had 2400 SATS and was in the top 1% of his class) and see that others with lower numbers get in. According to this group of students, it is not fair that they are held to higher standards. If the school published all the data that showed that some groups are held to significantly higher standards than others, then lawsuits would start to come in more often than they already are. Unfortunately, it also means that some students don’t apply who look at the average test scores and say they are not in the running, but if the school wanted them for a particular reason, then they still might have offered admission to that student had he or she applied. 

I believe (but have no data to prove this) that if Princeton published the average scores of low income and under-represented students, more students in these groups would actually apply and get in. In other words, some students Princeton would like to enroll won’t even apply after looking at the average scores that are well above what they have received. On the other hand, if they did publish these scores and they were far below the other groups, then they would also be risking lawsuits from those in middle class and above and those who are Asian or white. It is, as they say in the UK, a sticky wicket.

The problem with things like average scores is that they leave out the individual students and leave out the highly complex set of issues that are a part of shaping a class of students. The average ends up not being all that useful to many individuals. 

As I said at the beginning, I really can't really answer your question because I don't have access to enough data to do so in meaningful way. I hope, nevertheless, that what I have written might still be helpful.

I hope too that Princeton and the other schools find your application compelling and that you will have wonderful choices when decisions go out in a little over a year. Best of luck.