College admissions

These are my thoughts about US college admissions, written approximately 1 month after getting into college. It is a mix of advice and reflection.

Edited Jul 20, 2023.
Epistemic status: true to the best of my knowledge, but could be updated.

Everything I know about college admissions is in this article. Probably. If I have referred you to this page, and it doesn't answer all of your questions to the best of my ability, then please feel free to ask.

I was always more interested in (1) understanding the college admissions process and (2) handling my expectations, rather than (3) crafting the best possible application. I am much more knowledgeable (and probably have better advice) about (1) and (2) than (3). But if you're only here for (3), feel free to skip down to the advice section.

Contents

Stress

Most of my friends got through college admissions relatively unscathed. I did too.[1] So will you. But if you're stressing about it now, the best thing you can do is to understand the college admissions process.

First, college admissions is random. One hundred percent. It's not about you, it's about them. They have all sorts of institutional priorities that you can't do anything about. If you are close to any upperclassmen, pay attention to their admissions results; it won't be surprising if they are rejected or waitlisted by many of their safety and match schools despite being accepted into very good reach schools.[2]

If you have the time, I recommend reading the following sources:

Second, college is not the end. At best, it's a means to an end. You have to be pragmatic about it. Quantify it.

  1. What will happen if I don't get into a T20?
  2. What will happen if I don't get into a local state college?
  3. What will happen if I don't get into a four-year university?
  4. What will happen if I don't get into college?

Notice that even the worst-case scenarios operate on a four-year time span. After that, you are absolutely free of the consequences (or rewards) of your actions. Whether you find existential satisfaction with your life is quite independent of those four-years you spent as a young adult in school.

This is a bit beyond the scope of this post, but college is arguably more about signaling than human capital formation. Caplan's The Case Against Education is one of the foundational texts on this topic, if you are interested in this topic. Your takeaway should be that people will to become successful regardless of where they get their undergraduate degree. College won't make or break your career. It's not even a major stumbling block. The most important thing to internalize is that you will be fine. Even if you have to console your parents at the end of the admissions season.

I recommend reading or watching:

Plus, one extremely important finding from Dale and Krueger's paper is that

... students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges. However, the average tuition charged by the school is significantly related to the students' subsequent earnings.

Regrets

Finally, some concrete advice! I was extremely lucky to get into my top-choice school after getting deferred, but there were definitely some things that I mishandled:

  1. After reading A is for Admissions, I realized that I never explicitly named my role in my extracurricular activities on my UC application. That was probably a massive mistake: admissions officers only have a few minutes to glance over your application, so you need to give them something to jot down. Don't be vague if you were the president or director of a club or program. I suspect that PIQs should be answered differently than supplemental questions, but I've never received a solid answer on this.

  2. I over-edited my common application essay. Here is the initial draft that I submitted to Brown, and here is the final copy that I submitted to the rest of the colleges. I'm not actually sure if one is significantly better than the other, since I'm still filled with the mortification of having written said essay...

  3. I shotgunned some schools that I knew would be expensive and that I was never really that interested in. Those include New York University, Boston University, Vanderbilt, and Northeastern. It wasn't worth it for me to apply to those schools since I was fairly confident that I would get into a UC, and I knew I would've gotten a good education at half the price there.

Advice?

Here is some straight up-advice. Things that I don't regret doing:

  1. My college list was extremely skewed toward "reach" schools in general. If you are an average "competitive" applicant like me, I strongly advise this strategy. Schools have different institutional priorities every year, so applying to more schools is like buying more lottery tickets.[3]

  2. I didn't apply to the top out-of-state public schools for computer science because of the cost. Actually, one of my friends had to decline their offer from UIUC (for CS) because they offered virtually no financial aid.

  3. I applied EA to Northeastern, and I made Brown my ED pick. It was super relieving to get into a college at the beginning of the admissions process. And even though I didn't get into Brown, I can't help but to feel like my decision to ED nudged me over the line during the RD round...[4]

Application essays

Application essays! Let me start off with some context. My obsession with the college application process began when my parents handed me a copy of 100 Successful College Application Essays to read over my 8th grade summer. Since then, I have read many college application essay books, including:

I had a blast reading these books, and if you have any interest in personal narratives, I recommend getting 100 Successful College Application Essays. But after loaning my books out to several of my friends during the application season, I've become convinced of one thing: reading these books will not help you write your essays.

First, you really have no clue if some of these essays were a net positive or a net negative on the application (despite the "expert reviews" included in 'em). Nor can you borrow any of the topics or narrative structures from these books, because they won't be tailored to your application. In fact, you should probably emphasize your authenticity over just about anything (even passion and uniqueness and whatnot).

Do a bit of reflection. Do a lot of writing.

... But can I read your college application essays?

Oh, fine. You can read the ones I submitted to Brown here, since they didn't get me rejected. Feel free to email me if you really want to read the not-so-good essays.

College lists

Creating a college list can go very badly. For reference, here was my spreadsheet:

Massive spreadsheet of colleges

(I don't know why I looked at 96 colleges.)

Generally people will have a lot of preferences and not many hard filters. Maybe you want to optimize for "good teaching," "happy students," and "cheap" but aren't willing to limit yourself to schools that are "urban" or "in-state" or "small (<2000 students)." If you are like me, I would like to suggest the following strategy:

  1. Apply to your state schools. I think Californians know this advice already. UCs and CSUs are pretty affordable, and that's where most of your upperclassmen are off to. Heck, that's where your classmates are probably going too. That's basically all you need for safety and match schools unless you are applying for CS.

  2. Sprinkle in a few dream schools. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, or Stanford. Take your pick. In this case, it's much better to be overconfident than realistic.

  3. If you have a major in mind, look for schools that are particularly strong in that field. For CS, it's CMU and a few other public schools. I only applied to CMU, since I figured that OOS public schools would be extremely expensive. My parents think that I didn't have enough match schools because of that decision, but I think it went fine.

  4. If you think you might be interested in liberal arts college (LACs), research a few of 'em. You probably missed them the first time around, since they're not large research universities. But students get more attention because of the smaller sizes, and they tend to produce a lot of PhDs. An even more niche field are small STEM colleges like Harvey Mudd and the Olin College of Engineering.

  5. Shotgun the rest of them.

But honestly, as you do more research, you'll start to identify the factors that matter the most to you. Personally, I wanted to go to a school that valued learning. This meant that I applied to schools with open curriculums and avoided schools that were too pre-professional. I also read the graduation requirements from top to bottom.

Actually researching the college

College websites are almost never helpful. What I did, which I do not recommend, was read a lot of general college lists and guides. Specifically:

Even though I bookmarked a bunch of colleges from those guides, those that made it on the final list would have made it regardless. (But hey, I can recognize the top 100 colleges in the US now.) Plus, they're not especially informative, either. No one needs to know the SAT range for MIT to decide to apply there. If you really want to know what college students think of their school, go check out what Reddit has to say.

  1. To be clear, I did cry. Once. Parents, especially stressed parents, have a way of poking at all your weak spots. I dare say it is almost inevitable that your parents will hurt you, even if they don't mean to. The important thing is that you don't listen to them. In my case, I did the research, and I knew the odds far better than either of my parents. I was clear on how I felt about my waitlists and rejections, which was not that devastated at all. Only the Harvey Mudd rejection gutted me; the rest I hung up on my teacher's Wall of Rejections. ↩︎

  2. My most surprising rejection was that from Cal Poly SLO, and honestly I'm still unsure why they rejected me. ↩︎

  3. To be fair, the tickets are $100 apiece. Only apply to schools that you have a nonzero chance of getting into, and that you have a nonzero chance of wanting to go to. Most people who say they regret shotgunning actually regret this. ↩︎

  4. Complete speculation. Might as well be anti-advice. ↩︎