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[Music] hey guys welcome back i'm jeffrey with achieve ed today we're going to be taking a look at this article that i read in the wall street journal this was published last saturday and i've read this and i found this actually really interesting and i wanted to basically share this article with you guys go over kind of what it talks about and then give my analysis at the end on what this article means to you as a college applicant so the article is titled the secrets of elite college admissions in the final shaping of an incoming class academic standards give way to other more ambiguous factors so i mean this essay is kind of long i'm not going to read the whole thing but pretty much it starts off by saying how the admissions process at a lot of top schools is very secretive however the author of this article jeffrey solingo was actually able to be in that admissions office with the admissions officers at a few colleges so he talks about how every year especially at these top colleges he uses emory university as an example uh the amount of applications far exceeds the amount of available space in that class so for emery uh he says the school received a record 30 000 applications for fewer than 1400 spots in its incoming class so that's a lot of people that aren't going to be making it into emory now a lot of college applicants and their parents like to think that you know the college process is mostly an objective process all based on sat scores and based on grades and stuff like that but according to the author of this article by interviewing dozens of admissions officers at other schools everything is much more ambiguous the lack of simple standards was most pronounced when i watched admissions officers complete their shaping of the class the last sorting of applicants before final decisions are sent out in the spring shaping is the step at the very end of the process that most teenagers and their parents are unaware of it's where selective admissions is the most unfair the point at which a decision based on traditional criteria such as grades and test scores gives way to one based partly on other factors such as money race gender and major next he talks about what he observed inside the admissions office of emory university so according to him uh you know after their initial kind of screening of all the applicants uh they realized that they had too many applicants they needed to cut down on some of them uh in order to shape their final class right so they said they had to shift a thousand applications from the thin admit stack to the much larger deny or waitlist piles and this article basically details what that process looked like so for example one student they moved him to deny after looking at his senior year grades lots of bees noting that they had already rejected four other academically stronger students from his high school they even switched a legacy applicant to deny after noting that he had kind of light extracurricular involvement and then it actually goes into detail about this one case uh where this applicant was the child of an emory employee and typically if if you have that kind of relationship um you know you get perks in the admissions process but this particular person uh they were kind of you know on the edge about this applicant so one admissions officer in the room there were three in total one said move him to deny let's reject him a second one said let's waitlist him instead the third one hedged and there this article basically says like they literally discussed this application for 12 minutes believe it or not the longest amount of time according to this article it says their longest deliberation about any applicant that morning so 12 minutes is actually a really long time uh usually it suggests that you know they're spending much less time on an applicant but basically okay so one said deny once a waitlist one hedged okay so then they eventually voted and you know after a lot more voting a lot more deliberation they finally admitted this student now this article has an interesting sentence it says the high school senior uh referring to the person the child of the emory employee who was just admitted the high school senior never knew how close he had come to a rejection and how much the college's priorities in this case for children of employees rather than for any particular aspect of his academic or personal life played a role in getting him over the finish line never knew he just got that admit letter he doesn't know how close this was i mean you can read the article if you want this was like a very long deliberations he finally like put him in the emit pile but this applicant had no idea so this article goes into more detail about other schools i wanted to read another quote right here that they actually highlighted this quote in the article so they were so admissions officers were kind of deliberating over this uh female applicant who wanted to major in pre-law she ran track in middle school and made the varsity soccer team as a sophomore one admissions officer found the recommendations lacking because they focused on her personal qualities instead of what happened in the classroom i like her if we have room someone said well we don't said another and you know basically this is saying that there's a lot of people you know that they'd love to admit if they had space but they don't have room and that's why they have to do this kind of last minute kind of uh you know last round of uh you know moving people from the mid to deny uh because they just don't have the space in the class now so anyways they go through you know a few more colleges talk about davidson college in north carolina uh they talk about lafayette college in pennsylvania uh more specifically about how financial aid actually played a process at that school uh because you know at a lot of top schools like the ivy league schools and including emory university um their need blind but lafayette college was a need based college like they take into account how much you can pay when they decide whether to admit you or not um so you can read the article if you want i definitely recommend it but i wanted to focus in on this very last paragraph in the article i thought it was really powerful in the end it's unclear if an incoming class would be much different if admissions officer is worried less about shaping it the simple fact is that the freshman class at any top ranked college is eerily similar to those at other highly selective schools most applicants will never know how close they came to either the admit or the deny pile at some point many qualified students were probably in both [Music] and that's the end of the article uh once again i recommend you read this entire thing i kind of just uh got the parts that i wanted to highlight but there's a lot of good stuff in here so basically my point or my kind of takeaway from this article is that first right this is not a purely objective process i mean i'm sure uh sure a lot of you already know that like it's not just all about grades not all about test scores but this article really highlights just how much of it is just based on subjectivity right just based on what the admissions officer thinks will you know who is going to be a good fit in the class that's what shaping is all about just creating that class right so if they think you know you're qualified but you know we're not really looking for this type of applicant then you know you're gonna get put in the deny pile and uh that's just you know unfortunately what happens at a lot of these top schools now my second takeaway is that this really shows i guess how like random i don't really know a better word to use but i guess random uh that the admissions process is like you could be a very qualified applicant but still get denied and i talked about earlier about the legacy applicant who usually have you know huge advantages yet they're denied so there's really no like set kind of guideline like it's not like oh you know if you are legacy your chances increase by 30 like of course you can use empirical statistics to kind of make that kind of connection but it's nothing like like very concrete right and really not much about the emissions off uh process as concrete it's all subjective uh so i guess um i guess like if you're watching this video you want to you know like what did you learn from this i would say that um like when you're applying to a school just recognize there's that kind of random factor to it so uh if you get rejected from a school that you really thought you could get into like there could be many reasons you didn't get into that school don't uh don't use that as a bellwether uh for all the other schools you apply to so take for instance right you applied to um vanderbilt university and you didn't get it uh but and then you also applied to all the ivy league schools which are technically ranked higher than vanderbilt right according to us news um now you get rejected from vanderbilt and then your ivy league uh decisions come out like next week or something like that don't look too much into that vanderbilt decision you got rejected but that doesn't mean like oh you know since i got rejected from vanderbilt that means i must have gotten rejected from all these other you know even i guess even more um selective schools no that that's just not the case right you can get rejected from vanderbilt and accepted into harvard right you can get rejected from emery accepted into yale okay you can get rejected from dartmouth get accepted into princeton right this happens all the time there's many applicants like this so i guess my point is yes don't look too much into one specific school because there is this random factor in it and you're just gonna i guess kind of have to cross your fingers right and hope that whatever is going on in that admissions office ends up going your way and if it doesn't there's many other schools out there so that's going to wrap it up for today's video hope you guys enjoyed this one i will leave the link to this article down in the description down below definitely once again encourage you guys to read this article um and if you guys enjoy this video go ahead and subscribe to our youtube channel get us to 100 subscribers we are super close to that milestone so please go ahead and subscribe all right until next time i will see you all later peace [Music] you