How US college admissions actually works
Advice written for a Guatemalan high schooler interested in biology research who was beginning to put together applications to US universities. The questions she’d asked — which schools, how to weigh financial aid, how much to write about herself — are the standard ones; the answers below assume someone who is academically strong but unfamiliar with the unwritten rules of the American admissions game.
First important thing to know is that the US admissions system is not fair or impartial or mostly based on academic achievement or any of that; to be specific, here’s a chart of admission chances vs SAT scores at MIT, Harvard and Princeton: stevesachs.com/imgs/hoxby.jpg .
Historical background if you’re interested — the book is long but you can find good summaries online: Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton .
On the one hand, this is kind of depressing. On the other, it can work to your advantage, because it means the system can be hacked.
Of the top colleges, the ones which place the most emphasis on pure academic achievement (as opposed to sports, extracurriculars, leadership, family background, etc.) are MIT, Caltech, and I think the Carnegie Mellon computer science department (which has separate admissions from the rest of Carnegie Mellon). Harvey Mudd is less of an elite school, but is also famous for their emphasis on student intelligence. It might also be worth looking into going to Oxford/Cambridge in the UK; they have a different admissions system which is totally unlike the US one, and which is probably better at identifying skilled people, rather than people from the ‘right’ backgrounds.
In general, there’s little reason not to apply to places unless you know you definitely won’t go there, since the cost of applying is low and the benefit is potentially very high, which is why I applied to so many. If you want to do bio research specifically, I sadly don’t really know what the best schools for that are, although there are a bunch of people I can ask if you like. (You might already know this, but don’t just look at how prestigious the professors are; when I was at Yale I took a class from a Fields Medalist, but they had since become senile and no one in the class got much out of it.)
If your standardized test scores are too low (for most elite schools like Harvard anything above 90th percentile is probably fine, but for MIT and Caltech and so on every extra point helps), there are a bunch of tricks you can use to get them up that children from rich families make use of by having tutors. Our friend Nick Greene started a company called Ivy Insiders (now Revolution Prep ) which has been very successful at this. Can refer you to people if you like.
For financial aid, internationalstudent.com has the list of US schools which are need-blind for international students; U.S. News has some more info on other colleges, but double-check before you base important decisions on it (US media can be unreliable on college information). I can of course dig around more here; I’m usually very good at finding info online.
In general — and this is also true for things like employment and startup investment, not just college admission — people applying will make the best-sounding statements they can without being outright false, and the people judging the applications will know this, and will interpret any ambiguity in what you say against you. (Paul Graham writes about this some in A Word to the Resourceful .) Just to pick one example, if you say that you were part of club X, the admissions people will probably assume that you went to a few meetings of club X, but didn’t really do anything important (because if you had, the thinking goes, you would have said so). So if you were the president of club X, or the founder of club X, or raised a lot of money for club X, it’s really important to say that clearly and explicitly, because otherwise people will assume it didn’t happen. Likewise for extracurricular activities, any research you did, any obstacles that you overcame to come to the US from Guatemala, any projects you worked on, any jobs you had, etc.
In most cases, I think it’s best to write down everything that could possibly be relevant for the application, and then cut it down after you’re finished writing, rather than only writing down things you’re totally sure about. Anyone who’s helping you apply can advise you to take out something that you included, but they can’t tell you to include something that you didn’t put in, because unless they know you really well they won’t know what it is.