Читать книгу Accepted! - Jamie Beaton - Страница 11

When it comes to love, you want to find the one person you care for so dearly, and connect with so completely, that you're ready to commit your entire life to that person. You want to be honorable, faithful, and sincere. With colleges, you need to be that kind of lover—just a lot more fickle.

US universities have invented a fairly complicated system of early admissions in order to try and unpack whether or not you actually like them. One of Crimson's partners is US News & World Report,¹ the leading global ranking organization for US universities. An important criteria to the all-important rankings for US universities is the “yield rate,” which is the percentage of students who accept an offer from that university. Harvard, for example, has a yield rate that hovers about 81%. This means that for every 100 offers Harvard gives to students around the world, 81 offers are actually accepted. This is a crucial statistic to study alongside acceptance rates when researching a university because it shows how desirable the school actually is to the competitive kids who have been able to get in. (See Chapter 15 for more explanation!)

If you're a university like Brown, you are in a very complicated situation. You are a prestigious Ivy League school so life should be easy—but it's not. Brown wants to reject all unqualified students who are not sufficiently talented in the eyes of their admissions office to attend the school. At the same time, they need to admit students who are good enough to go to their school. The problem is, many of these qualified students have options. Almost all of these students would rather go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, or Columbia over Brown. This means that when Brown admits a student, they can't actually be sure that student is going to turn up come the fall.

Every time they admit a student who turns them down it is reflected in their ranking because this rejection diminishes their yield rate. As a result, Brown doesn't actually want to admit all qualified applicants who are strong enough to get in. Rather, they want to admit students who are qualified enough to get in but also who are willing to commit to their school.

This means that if they come across a truly exceptional Harvard-quality student who they are confident is going to get into one of the most competitive universities ranked higher than them, they may actually consider putting them on a waitlist rather than accepting them because they think it is highly unlikely the student would actually end up coming. It seems bizarre: Brown would decline a Harvard-quality student. Yet, the most sophisticated universities know this as fact.

This dynamic has led to the creation of the early decision application process. Prospective applicants can choose to apply early decision to a university (and with the Ivies you can only choose one), which means applying on roughly November 1 of your application year. If you apply early decision and you are accepted, you've committed to go to that university. This is a hard guarantee. No more applications in the regular round. That's it. If they accept you, you are done.

Unsurprisingly, early decision application processes have become widespread across top universities because they enable the university to guarantee a pool of applicants who will definitely attend their school. Admitting a student from the early decision pool gives a university a close-to 100% yield rate over this pool of applicants.

Now—guess which Ivy League universities don't offer early decision processes? Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. They will say all kinds of things—like they want to give talented students options—but in reality, they don't offer the early decision process because they don't need to. They know that generally speaking, when they admit a student, the student will be so over the moon they've been admitted that they will usually accept with a very high probability. Princeton may lose some students to Harvard, but generally speaking, at this highest of tiers, these universities back themselves as the premium choice for most people applying. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton offer early action instead, which is a way for candidates to apply earlier than the regular round (similarly about November 1 of your last high school year) but you are not forced to go to the school and you can apply to other universities in the regular round.

This is the option I chose back in November 2012. I applied and was accepted early to Harvard, then applied in the regular round to many more schools such as Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and others. Ultimately, after doing the work to apply to many other universities and getting in, I still chose Harvard. They were right in offering early action, because in the end, it was hard to say no to Harvard.

The other Ivy League schools—the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and Dartmouth—all offer early decision processes. These are great schools, of course, but given it's highly likely the students applying to their school are also applying to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton (HYP), they want to know that in choosing to applying to them early, you are committed—just like that lover I spoke about earlier—and that they won't lose you to HYP or Stanford or MIT later down the regular decision line.

Some schools have become even more sophisticated in their early application process. My favorite example is the University of Chicago. Beyond their hilarious and complicated essays (in my application year, one question was “So where is Waldo, really?” requiring a 500-word response), they have optimized their early application process and in doing so helped boost their ranking significantly. As I write this, University of Chicago is ranked sixth in North America for best undergraduate universities, ahead of many Ivy League schools.

University of Chicago² offers several admissions rounds:

1 Early action (due November 2)

2 Early decision I (due November 2)

3 Early decision II (due January 4)

4 Regular decision (due January 4)

As of October 2020, UChicago has won 100 Nobel Prizes.³ A full 33 of these are Nobel Prizes for economics. Even my favorite Nobel Laureate, Gary Becker, who invented signaling, went there. It is no surprise that they have perfected the game theory and signaling of college admissions.

Both early decision rounds I and II are binding so if you apply in these rounds you are committing to go. Can you guess why UChicago does this? UChicago offers a binding and a nonbinding admissions option at each stage so they can filter you by level of seriousness. Twice!

If you are applying early action to UChicago, they know you are pretty organized and relatively interested in UChicago, but they also know that you're not interested enough to commit. This almost certainly means you like another early round university better or have higher hopes in the regular round. As a result, applying early action to UChicago is a death sentence. The admissions rate applying early action to UChicago is substantially lower than the early decision I rate.

The fun continues in the regular round. Most schools offer a purely regular admissions round where you can apply, get an offer, and then choose whether you want to go. But not the smart economists at UChicago. They want information from you—how much do you really like them? In the regular round, if you apply early decision II you have a dramatically higher admissions shot than applying regular decision. I recently saw a student with 15+ AP 5s get declined from UChicago regular decision. He was incredibly qualified, a very strong applicant, and UChicago knows that. But why is he not applying early decision II? Because he thinks he can do better and doesn't want to commit to UChicago. UChicago, by designing this system, knows this as well and denies that highly qualified applicant, keeping their high yield rate intact.

UChicago uses their complicated admissions options to filter the surges of qualified applicants into two buckets: qualified applicants who are prepared to declare their love to UChicago and want to commit, and qualified applicants who are not ready to sign on the dotted line. They decline the flighty prospective lovers in droves and focus on those who are ready to show their commitment.

Talk is cheap and action means everything, but UChicago hasn't finished having fun with you just yet. They even want to see whether you will profess your love for them in writing and test just how cheap your talk is. UChicago has one of the most complicated admissions essays of any of the major US universities. They ask two questions:

1 How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.They then require you to answer a second question. In the 2020–2021 admissions cycle, they ask you to choose at least one from the following essay choices:

2 Who does Sally sell her seashells to? How much wood can a woodchuck really chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Pick a favorite tongue twister (either originally in English or translated from another language) and consider a resolution to its conundrum using the method of your choice: math, philosophy, linguistics … it's all up to you (or your woodchuck).What can actually be divided by zero?The seven liberal arts in antiquity consisted of the Quadrivium—astronomy, mathematics, geometry, and music—and the Trivium—rhetoric, grammar, and logic. Describe your own take on the Quadrivium or the Trivium. What do you think is essential for everyone to know?Subway maps, evolutionary trees, Lewis diagrams. Each of these schematics tells the relationships and stories of their component parts. Reimagine a map, diagram, or chart. If your work is largely or exclusively visual, please include a cartographer's key of at least 300 words to help us best understand your creation.“Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”—Eleanor Roosevelt. Misattribute a famous quote and explore the implications of doing so.Engineer George de Mestral got frustrated with burrs stuck to his dog's fur and applied the same mechanic to create Velcro. Scientist Percy Lebaron Spencer found a melted chocolate bar in his magnetron lab and discovered microwave cooking. Dye-works owner Jean Baptiste Jolly found his tablecloth clean after a kerosene lamp was knocked over on it, consequently shaping the future of dry cleaning. Describe a creative or interesting solution, and then find the problem that it solves.In the spirit of adventurous inquiry (and with the encouragement of one of our current students!) choose one of our past prompts (or create a question of your own). Be original, creative, thought provoking. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk, and have fun!

Many US universities offer supplementary essays as a way of enabling applicants to express why they like the university. The real reason they want to give you extra essay questions relates to the concept of the early decision round. They want you to “reveal your preferences” and show how seriously committed you are to the school.

If you write an essay to a college like Columbia about why you want to go to that school and you offer generic diatribes about New York, their core curriculum and the need for broad exploration, diverse classmates and other generic answers, they know you really haven't researched the school in detail. The really winning supplementary essays (which take a long time to write!) have to be so specific that what you can say literally ONLY apply to the single college you are applying to.

Some application essays are quite generic from school to school. They might ask you to describe the community you are from, for example. Unsurprisingly, high schoolers in the frenetic rush to apply to college, who have procrastinated writing application essays, try to copy/paste answers from school to school. This is the death cross! A university that can detect you are just answering with generic responses, and not customized to their university, knows that you are just spraying across multiple universities hoping one admits you. And let's be honest—they are usually right. For every one student I meet who genuinely loves a certain single university and is head over heels in love with it for a set of specific reasons, I would literally meet more than one hundred students who choose based on rankings a set of prestigious schools (and my previous arguments justify this as being rightfully so, in not all, but many cases).

University of Chicago wants to handbrake the spray-and-pray, copy/paste application essay strategy and force you to use your time to answer their truly cryptic prompts. I consider myself reasonably sharp holding several degrees in applied mathematics and have written academically in law school and doctoral programs but answering a question such as “what can actually be divided by zero” is very difficult. It is difficult by design. UChicago wants to force you to do a bunch of extra work that will only be relevant to their school. They do this so that they can shake off all the candidates who aren't that committed and who can't be bothered to write their complicated essays.

Between testing your willingness to “talk” through the difficult supplementary essays to testing your “action” through their binding admissions process, UChicago has mastered the game theory of admissions for a school that is highly prestigious but not considered in the upper echelons of competitive colleges. In doing so, they have shot up the rankings in recent years, artfully manipulating their yield rates and reading through the masses of college admits to find the kids who are really willing to commit. Good on them—but I hope for your sake that the other colleges don't copy UChicago!

You'll notice that nowhere does UChicago publish the specific acceptance rates by the stream of binding versus nonbinding. They never will (unless they are forced to under massive public pressure). This is intentional because they don't want you to actually think about this too deeply and try and game their attempt to game you. On their Class of 2024 admissions page⁴ for example, they list only that they accepted 2,511 students, enrolled 1,848 students, and had 34,372 applicants. This translates to a mind-blowing yield rate of 73.6%. This is only beaten by Harvard and Stanford with 81–82% yield rates. UChicago beats MIT, Princeton, Yale, UPenn, and Dartmouth on yield rate. Arguably, all of these other colleges are usually more desirable for applicants than UChicago, but through designing an application process that ruthlessly filters kids, they have been able to game their yield rate and shoot above their peer schools landing at an enviable US News ranking.⁵

I hope UChicago doesn't get too angry at me for revealing their strategy, but power to the student I say!

UChicago aside, what are the key learnings for you?

First, almost every student reading this should apply early decision. We all want to have a shot at applying to Harvard and Stanford, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that every year when I look at most applicants, they really have no realistic shot and shouldn't waste their breath applying. Giving up an early decision option to have a shot at applying early action to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, or MIT is usually crazy. Most applicants cannot get into this tier of school but try anyway, and in doing so, end up getting to a far worse eventual university than the school they could have been admitted to if they had committed early decision.

If you miss the early decision opportunity, and then have to apply in the regular round, you will find yourself swimming in an ocean of talented kids who are all bombing out applications to eight-plus schools each. So unless you have a very strong profile, you'll be submerged by the competition.

Generally in life you should be optimistic, but when it comes to university early decision time, you need to swallow your pride and be pragmatic. Wipe your tears if your dream school is Harvard but your SAT score is 1490. It probably isn't happening. That is okay. Don't let your ego stop you from not committing early to one of the many brilliant choices that require a binding commitment and locking in your offer. This is an important critical decision. Make sure you ask an expert which college you can realistically get into in the early round.

Second, be a flighty lover and preach your love to everyone (bad advice in life but good for college admissions!). What am I talking about? In your supplementary essays you need to hit each school with crafted essays that highlight exactly why you love their school with super-specific examples that only apply to their university and no other. This makes it more credible that you actually sincerely love their university beyond all others, and that's why they are more likely to admit you, assuming that you will, in turn, take their hand when they offer it.

Let me give you an example. If you apply to Harvard, the crowd favorite, you can tell them that you love them because they are a high-ranking, prestigious university. You can tell them they have myriad classes to choose from, offer a wonderful liberal arts education and many extracurriculars like debating and Model UN that extend your passions. You can tell them you want to take advantage of unique research opportunities and meet inspiring, diverse classmates.

But that would be a terrible essay.

Go back and read that last paragraph. Scratch out Harvard and you could say the same thing about Yale or Princeton or any other reasonable university. That is the test you have to do. If a single sentence of your supplementary essay can apply to another university, try again—it probably isn't specific enough. I've sent more than 50 students to Harvard alone and any opportunity we have to showcase their specific interests in Harvard, we focus on communicating what Harvard, as a magnificent institution of learning, offers uniquely as Harvard.

Let's say you like economics, business, and finance (a good portion of applicants). What could you talk about when applying to Harvard?

You could mention Harvard Student Agencies, the world's largest student-run business organization that lets you as a freshman manage retail stores and get practical hands-on management experience.

You could talk about the unique Statistics with Quantitative Finance track. This was introduced in the last decade as the interest in students going into quantitative trading has grown enormously. Very few other universities offer anything like this.

It might be nice to mention the legendary Professor Blitzstein who teaches the wildly popular Statistics 110 who makes even the most abstract statistics concept fun and understandable with his thought experiments.

You might want to mention the Harvard i-Lab. This is an entrepreneurial launchpad that lets students launch their own company, find mentors, gives them an office space to work from, and opportunities to meet investors. It is a relatively well developed incubator compared to most colleges.

You could mention popular student-run finance extracurricular organizations such as Black Diamond Capital, a student-run hedge fund that lets you trade the market with your “partners” or Harvard Financial Analyst Club (HFAC), which will train you up on how to value a stock in no time.

You could even mention the unique full-course exchange program with MIT that lets you take literally any class from the MIT catalog giving you access to MIT Sloan School of Management's fantastic finance and accounting coursework, while enjoying the benefits of Harvard's amazing liberal arts foundations.

You could talk about Professor Edward Glaeser's legendary Economics 1011a, one of Harvard's hardest undergraduate classes, with alumni like Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. This gives you a rigorous training on Lagrangian optimization and economic modeling, which will be useful for any aspiring econ PhD students.

The list goes on. I expect this level of detail for any supplementary essay you write for any school you are serious about. This is the standard I hold my Crimson students to and support them to reach.

Do all those love letters (supplementary essays) sound a little bit difficult? Remember for the price of true, binding early commitment, UChicago might even accept you … and put you out of your misery!