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The 5 Key Criteria

These are the five elements that students must demonstrate on an application to be considered for an elite college:

1. Academic Excellence
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While it’s impossible to know exactly who will be the right student for the school in the long term, college admissions committees get a sense of who will be successful via their decades of experience on campus, seeing the students they admit, how those students spend their time on campus, and how they succeed long term. This provides a feedback loop for the admissions officers so that they know what to look for in high school applicants to indicate they found the right student.

Importantly, each of The 5 Key Criteria must be demonstrated in order to be considered for admission. Often, parents, students, and counselors mistakenly believe that lacking any one of these criteria can be compensated for by increasing the weight of another. However, that’s not the case - missing just one of these criteria would be akin to having a car that’s missing a wheel. It is a non-starter for both the car and the application.

1. Academic Excellence

This is one of the biggest misconceptions in college admissions. Being accepted into an elite school is not as simple as getting higher grades. Rather, Academic Excellence is only a baseline requirement to even be considered for admission. This comes as a surprise to many international families from school systems where test scores may actually be the only factor considered.

You may commonly hear two, seemingly contradictory statements: higher test scores increase your chance of acceptance, but elite schools also regularly reject students with perfect test scores in favor of ones with less than perfect scores. This paradox occurs because standardized tests measure the capability of a student, but they do not measure the likelihood of long-term success, nor the likelihood that a student will benefit the campus once an alum. Since non-elite colleges are only focused on getting enough students on campus, they will gladly use test scores to determine which students to admit when they have an overabundance of applications. This is why people equate higher scores with an increased chance of acceptance - this is true for a non-elite school.

However, since elite colleges are instead concerned with their students’ long-term success and ability to benefit the campus in the future, they only need to see from your test scores and grades that you are capable of maintaining the pace and rigor of advanced classes. Scores beyond that point serve little additional purpose, as the admissions office will instead look to the rest of your application to determine your long-term potential and benefit to the campus.

...to be continued...