Hey, there's Andy Lockwood. And here's another question from the virtual mailbag. Can my kid get into Harvard? Or insert other super competitive school, Yale, Princeton, whatever. Answer, probably not. Thanks a lot for watching and talk to you soon. No. So here's the deal. I have many comments on this. I'm going to try to keep this short. First of all, Harvard's published admissions rate as of when I'm recording this in the spring of twenty twenty four. early spring is that somewhere around three percent and that's pretty daunting so what a lot of kids and parents don't fully understand when they have a top-notch high achieving student at a certain high school is exactly what the competition looks like so you can be a standout at a certain high school but when you throw your hat in the ring to get into a harvard yale princeton etc it's a whole nother ballgame. So someone who is a standard at a high school at a local level may be a dime a dozen at the national level or even international level. Speaking of that, who else is applying to Harvard and what do they look like and where do they hail from? So Harvard and every competitive school has a practice of reserving spots for non-academic reasons. If you paid attention at all, to the scandals that happened. And if you pay attention to the Supreme Court case about affirmative action and its use in college admissions, it was pretty instructive to peel back the curtain and see exactly how Harvard's admissions process worked. So let's say, hypothetically, you're working with a 3% admissions rate. And let's say they take, I don't know, 1,000 kids a year, right? So what you have to understand is, they give preference to these special categories or tags, as they're called at Harvard. Other colleges call them selects. But they're basically special categories. So international students is actually one, because they are very highly favorable. They get special treatment. But what came out in the Supreme Court case were other tags. So for example, legacies, you know, people whose parents went there, that's pretty big at many colleges, although some of them are backing off this. I don't think Harvard has announced this yet, but most of the other IVs have, but legacies. Whether you're a recruited athlete, they get a pretty, pretty big preference. Whether you're an underrepresented minority, whether you are a low-income family. That's actually helpful because those are all very desirable to colleges. So there's a few other ones, but those are the main ones in terms of the special categories. So if they admit 3% and you are not one of those special categories... then it's a lot harder than what the odds say on paper for you to get in. So your real odds might be less than 1% if you're not a special category. Does that mean that you shouldn't apply? Of course not. Oh, wait, one more category, sorry. This was not necessarily in the Supreme Court opinion, but your high school, what high school you attend matters greatly in terms of your chances of getting into a certain school. So Harvard, Yale, Princeton, even all the way down to Cornell, down to Cornell as a lower Ivy, quote unquote. I'm not bashing Cornell. My daughter goes there. But they actually did a study to, I think they felt guilty about the lack of diversity and all that. And they determined results that I think are in line with virtually every other competitive school that 80% of the kids who got admitted to Cornell came from, quote unquote, feeder high schools. meaning high schools that send something like 20 or 30 applications to them each year. And it's usually, not always, but it's usually these prep schools. be local private schools it could be boarding schools like in the new england area you know the massachusetts connecticut new hampshire maine uh sort of wheelhouse but that matters also so if you're not in one of the special categories and you're not from one of these feeder high schools it's a lot harder to get in so does that mean it's impossible it's definitely not impossible what you need to focus on is the stuff that you can control starting as early as ninth grade You should be thinking strategically about your extracurriculars, what's going to stand out, the most rigorous course load, et cetera, et cetera. There's about 20 or 25 factors all in that college admissions officers consider, and I'd say about half of them are things that you can actually control. So I hope this is not disappointing to you. I hope it is actually helpful to you just so you understand how the rules of the game work behind the closed doors of the admissions offices. And I hope this encourages you to construct a strategic and balanced list and understand who your competition is because that's really the first step in being successful in the college admissions process is understanding how you stand and analyzing you know, how you look in relation to everyone else that you're competing with. Thanks a lot for watching. If you want to get in touch with us, if you're watching or listening to this somewhere, like on a podcast or on YouTube or something, go ahead and subscribe, and you'll be sure to never miss any of these tips that we send out periodically. And you can visit our website, LockwoodCollegePrep.com, if you want to get in touch with us. All right. Thanks.
