Is your academically awesome kid too “mainstream?” The real odds of any “unhooked” kid (“unhooked” is admissions parlance for a kid without an exceptional, atypical angle or “hook”) getting into the Ivies are less than 1 in 100.
Let’s take a look, for example, at the composition of Princeton’s class of 2014:
37 percent minority students
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17 percent recruited athletes
13 percent legacies
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11 percent international students
These groups comprise 78% of approximately 1300 enrolled students. (And by the way, this does not take into account the preferences shown for children of celebrities, children of faculty, and students from “feeder” prep schools like Lawrenceville Academy, which sent over a dozen kids to this class.)
Seventy-eight percent of 1300 is 1,014. That leaves 286 “unhooked” slots.
Some 26,000 kids applied to this class, so let’s call 286 roughly 1 percent. Of this one percent, half of these will be male, half female.
With numbers like these, applicants and their parents need to get realistic. Students who are awesome but also “mainstream” and want to apply to the Ivies better do so with a detailed strategy to appear “less mainstream” AND have a detailed Plan B in mind. Or turn Plan B into Plan A: ditch the Ivies and make another elite private or top public alternative an early first choice.
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