College admission essays are crucial because that is how admission staff gets to know applicants without ever meeting them. Bear in mind that admission essays are fundamentally different from essays that applicants normally write in high school. Here are several pointers to help craft a memorable essay:
In our opinion, no. As it is, getting admitted is going from difficult to very, very difficult. Perversely, the test optional movement may have contributed to that phenomenon, by significantly increasing the number of applications. In turn, acceptance rates plummet since the number of available spots did not increase accordingly (if at all). Low acceptance rates make elite colleges look more exclusive and it is easy to see how the cycle of increasing difficulty keeps going. One could argue that the elite colleges are the big winners. We believe that applicants should take the ACT (skip the essay) and the SAT, especially now that all testing centers are back in operation. Otherwise, a very compelling substitute narrative would be required.
In order for an applicant’s extracurricular activities to impress admissions committees, he/she should show spike(s), activities where the achievement level is undoubtedly excellent. Such level shows not only passion but also discipline. A spike that carries national/international recognition or in some cases regional/state recognition (e.g. ranked in national competitions or state champion) would boost the applicant. In the absence of very distinctive spikes, the next best thing would be to combine spikes of lesser significance. For admissions purposes, activities are not created equal. The following are our observations:
There is a LOT of online chatter about ‘finding the right college’ and what factors to consider. One factor that we do not hear a lot about: core curriculum requirements.
(Nothing to do with April Fool’s.)
The Ivy League is an athletic conference comprising of eight colleges in the northeast with seven of them founded before the United States. Their long history and well-placed alumni have turned the name of an athletic conference into a popular cultural term for elite colleges. These eight schools are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania & Yale. In recent years, the emergence of elite colleges outside the group of eight gave rise to a new group: Ivy Plus, which is the Ivy League plus Duke, MIT, Stanford and University of Chicago.
